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and harsh repression of Poles in the tsarist domain. Craving international support for its disputed sovereignty after the liquidation of the Papal State by Italy in 1870, and beset by recurrent waves of governmental attacks against the Church throughout Europe, Rome took care to keep its customary rapport with the Habsburg kingdom in good repair and attempted to restrain German and Russian hostility toward Catholic interests by conciliation, and part of the price was to mute its complaints about the oppression of Poland. Furthermore, the Vatican feared that pressing the Polish matter might only make a bad situation worse, especially in Russia, provoking the standardbearer of Orthodoxy to impose still harsher measures on Ukrainian or Polish Catholics, or even to mandate a schism. As a result, the pontiffs of the day confined themselves to offering comfort to the Poles in affliction and urging their rulers to show magnanimity, persuaded that any more assertive course would only invite retribution and endanger higher priorities to no purpose.

      For their part, the Polish bishops as a body gradually fell into line with this strategy over the decades, both out of duty and inclination. Following the lead of Rome, the predominantly aristocratic and conservative hierarchs of the later nineteenth century by and large kept their distance from the national movement, having been systematically vetted for caution and acceptability to Vienna, Berlin, or Petersburg. Drawn from lower social strata, more attuned to the mood of their parishioners, and less burdened by visibility, the weight of responsibility, and pressure to conform, lesser clergy participated in political action far more frequently, but often in opposition to the recommendations of their superiors. It was both characteristic and ironic that the most celebrated Polish clerical martyr of the day, Archbishop Mieczysław Halka Ledóchowski of Gniezno-Poznań, had been a loyal subject of the German Kaiser who had discouraged his priests against identification with the Polish cause only to run afoul of the persecutions of the Kulturkampf.

      While shying away from dabbling overtly in politics or endorsing separatist aspirations, the Polish Church in no way meant to default its obligation to the nation, according to its lights. Indeed, ecclesiastical life in the former Poland was so saturated in the Polish question in all its various forms that it scarcely had any capacity to absorb the debates over modernism and the social issue that gripped the Church elsewhere in Europe. In many ways, the approach of the Polish Church matched that of the advocates of “Organic Work”: to better the lot of Poles by quotidian, legal efforts within the given political framework, assigning greater value to the defense of culture than the dream of liberation. At bottom, the Church best contributed to resistance against the foreign yoke not by any bold or conscious action, but simply by being itself, its very existence underscoring and reinforcing the traits of Polish identity that the German and Russian assimilationists had tried to obliterate. In so doing, the Church indeed donated vital service to the eventual restoration of an independent Poland, but did so almost by accident and even in spite of the counsel of its most prominent and authoritative spokesmen to the contrary, so that it might be extolled as a national paragon or censured as a collaborationist element with equal ease, according to taste.

      At any rate, the rising generation of Polish political activists that came to the fore at the turn of the century, espousing novel doctrines and bolder agendas, came to regard the Church with attitudes ranging from reserve to outright disdain. The Polish intelligentsia, the traditional custodians of national values who supplied the ideas and leaders of the new movements, had drunk deeply from the same wells of skepticism and anticlericalism then fashionable among their counterparts in other Catholic lands. To the Left, the Roman Church signified reaction, obscurantism, and bigotry, the synthesis of all they despised and wished to change, although the moderate socialists who sought self-rule as well as social transformation tempered their hostility toward the cloth out of respect for the centrality of Catholicism in Polish life. While the peasantry constituted the bedrock of the Catholic following among Poles, the chieftains of the budding agrarian parties had learned their catechisms instead from the age-old undercurrent of rustic grumbling about the village priest as the freeloading martinet of the countryside.

      Of the modern orientations, the National Democracy, the standard bearer of the patriotic right, maintained the most complex and ambivalent relationship with the Church. Taking its cue from its preeminent theorist and spokesman, Roman Dmowski, the Endecja offered a program of integral nationalism, social conservatism, and lack of sympathy for Jews and other minorities residing in Polish territories. Much of the National Democratic platform appealed to Catholic sentiment. The party recognized the Church as a pillar of the social order and by its nature tended to advocate the supremacy of Catholic Poles over peoples of other faiths, and its opposition to socialism nicely coincided with the views of the clergy and many of the faithful. However, much about the philosophical underpinnings of National Democracy contradicted Church teaching, and neither the movement nor its champion made a comfortable fit with Roman belief and ethos. As a disciple of positivist materialism, Dmowski denied the supernatural essence of the Church and remained outside its fold until late in life. Above all, his enshrinement of the nation as the highest good and paramount object of devotion, and his insistence that national issues lay “outside the realm of Christian ethics,” baldly flouted fundamental tenets of Catholic dogma.¹⁰ Although Endecja had gradually toned down the blatant anticlericalism of its formative days, it still took a purely instrumental approach to Catholicism, embracing it as a useful political ally rather than for any intrinsic value. In the eyes of the Church, then, National Democracy posed a dilemma: it was often right, but for all the wrong reasons, a virtual Polish twin of the Action Française of Charles Maurras, which for decades walked a thin line between papal applause and condemnation. Despite these ambiguities, many clergy and laymen joined or promoted National Democracy as the most promising political haven for Polish Catholics, and more than a few hierarchs looked upon Endecja with a kindly eye.

      When the First World War erupted in Europe in 1914, splitting the ranks of the partitioning emperors, the separate branches of the Polish Church responded according to established form, attempting to carry off the difficult trick of balancing respect for the existing political order with the call of duty to the divided nation. As the guns commenced firing, few Poles foresaw independence as an outcome of the fighting, and of those, fewer wore the collar. In addition, at the time the situation of the Church in all three zones of former Poland seemed more satisfactory than ever in long memory: Austria was Austria, Catholic and unexacting; the severity of German administration had eased perceptibly of late; and even in Russia the ukase of toleration of 1905 had permitted the resumption of something resembling normal ecclesiastical operation. Just as clerics in all lands rallied to the flag at the opening of hostilities, Polish Catholic leaders warily followed suit, issuing proclamations of loyalty to respective king and country in exchange for the vague promises of their rulers that the Poles would share the fruits of victory. Loyalism appeared most plausible in Austria-Hungary, where Polish ecclesiastics could embrace it with honest conviction; in August 1914 the archbishop of Lwów, and future saint, Józef Bilczewski, pronounced a blessing on the arms of the Dual Monarchy, a Catholic realm that had “allowed us to be Poles.”¹¹ Already in the opening phase of the conflict, some Galician clergy thought in terms of an Austrian triumph that might reunify the Polish lands under the mild Habsburg scepter. In the German and Russian districts, on the other hand, unhappy experience had taught Polish churchmen to expect little from their monarchs and to lie low, and for the most part they restricted their commentaries on the war at this early date to safe, bromidic prayers for its speedy and successful conclusion.

      In reacting to the outbreak of the European conflict in a tentative and equivocal manner, the Polish clergy matched the example set by their superiors at the seat of Church government. Few topics in the modern history of the papacy have generated so much heat as the wartime policy of Benedict XV, the former cardinal-archbishop Giacomo Della Chiesa of Bologna who took the tiara in September 1914, on the same day Russian troops captured Galician Lwów and three days before the Battle of the Marne. Throughout the next four years the pope issued urgent appeals for an immediate end to the fighting as a savage and pointless folly—a “horrible butchery,” he called it, the “suicide of civilized Europe”—and assured the world of the fatherly disinterest of the vicar of Christ. This stance made worldly as well as moral sense for a church that preached nonviolence, claimed universal jurisdiction, and harbored profoundly cautious political instincts; content with the antebellum European balance, the Vatican feared the consequences of its overthrow by the

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