Rome's Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939 (review)

Despite the centrality of the Church in Poland's troubled past and the fact that Poland is the only European country where Catholicism retains a prominent position in public life, there is surprisingly little scholarship dealing with the history of Catholicism along the Vistula. Neal Pease's new book is the first to explore the relationship between the Holy See and Poland during the first half of the twentieth century, but it would sell the book short to praise it just because it filled an empty spot in the historiography. Rome's Most Faithful Daughter is elegantly written, scrupulously researched, and persuasively argued. Above all, it manages to strike a rare balance while dealing with a topic that is replete with polemical landmines.

The title of the book is ironic, because Pease's primary contention is that interwar Poland and the Holy See had a far more troubled relationship than is usually assumed. Contrary to the image of Poland as a homogeneously Catholic country that could be counted on to support the Holy See's goals and ideals, the position of the Church in pre-World War II Poland was actually quite ambiguous. As Pease points out, the educated elites of Poland were subjected to the same secularizing trends seen elsewhere in Europe, so by the time the country was restored to the map of Europe in 1918, a large segment of the political leadership was ambivalent about Catholicism, if not downright anticlerical. Józef Piłsudski, a cofounder of the Polish Socialist Party and by the 1920s a leading advocate for what would be called multiculturalism today, dominated the state. When Piłsudski led a military coup to prevent the right from taking power in 1926, the regime and the Church seemed headed for a showdown. The stage was therefore set for a great deal of church-state tension, particularly when the country's new constitution enshrined a range of liberal civil rights rather than setting up Catholicism as the official state religion. Given the ethnic and religious diversity of pre-World War II Poland, argues Pease,"the vision of a Catholic Poland could not serve as the unifying principle of the Second Republic, as widely assumed; on the contrary, perhaps no other theme held such power to polarize the country or set its various peoples and constituencies at odds" (p. 5).

But a full-blown confrontation never surfaced, and Pease helps us understand why. Based on both Vatican and Polish sources, he demonstrates that the interventions of Pipe Pius XI succeeded in moderating the Polish clergy's tendency to slide toward the far right. Monsignor Achille Ratti spent 1918–19 as nuncio in Poland, and during this time he befriended and grew to trust Piłsudski. When Ratti was elevated to the papacy, he used his authority to push aside the most politicized and ideologically extreme bishops, while establishing good official relations with the Polish government. This did not eliminate tensions on the ground in Warsaw, but it ensured that they would never get out of hand.

Pease offers little comfort to those who would deny the political extremism of many in the interwar Church, but neither does he support the arguments of those who see the Holy See as a mere auxiliary for the radical right. He is both frank and thorough in examining the antisemitism that pervaded the interwar Church, and he shows how prejudice against Eastern Rite Catholics scuttled Vatican efforts to strengthen the Church among Ukrainians and Belarusians. On the other hand, he approaches his topic with sympathy rather than demonization, leaving us with a picture that is both nuanced and insightful. This book will offer revelations even for specialists in Polish history, but its audience should extend far beyond that subfield to encompass anyone interested in the history...