Acta Nuntiaturae Polonae, Tomus LVII: Achilles Ratti (1918-1921), volume 1 (25 IV-31 VII 1918), ed. by Stanislaus Wilk, S.D.B. (review)

278 BOOK REVIEWS Possessed, in the words of so keen an observer as Ronald Knox, of "the hypnotic gaze of a mystic," Carlyle gathered around him a community of monks who settled inYorkshire in 1902, in quarters supplied by the Anglo-Catholic enthusiast Charles Lindley Wood, Second Viscount Halifax. In 1906 the community moved to the Welsh island of Caldey, Carlyle himself having managed meanwhile to get himself ordained deacon and priest by the Episcopalian Bishop of Fond du Lac,Wisconsin, during a flamboyant American tour in 1904. Ronald Knox, who as the brilliant son of an Anglican bishop had intellectual gifts and establishment connections never enjoyed by Carlyle, wrote later that "there was a faint air ofmake-believe about Caldey's Anglicanism . . . something of fairyland about it." Given the abbot's mediocre intellectual gifts and lack of theological training, combined with his flagrant disregard for sound business practices and his propensity to borrow and build without capital, it is remarkable that the enterprise which he erected on the slenderest of foundations, and maintained with a breath-taking combination of fantasy and bravado, lasted as long as it did. In 1913 Carlyle and twenty of his monks entered the Roman Catholic Church. Six who remained Anglicans formed the nucleus of the Benedictine community later established at Nashdom Abbey, with a subsequent foundation at Three Rivers, Michigan. Whether Carlyle was driven out of the Church of England by the rigidity of the Anglican prelates to whom he appealed, or whether he himself provoked expulsion, is shrouded in the self-cultivated ambiguity which surrounded him throughout his career. Kollar's account concludes with Carlyle's exclaustration in 1921 . An epilogue briefly recounts his fruitful ministry as a diocesan priest in British Columbia, retirement to his old community as an oblate, and burial in 1955 as their Abbot Founder in their new and current home in Prinknash. Kollar has done an enormous amount of original research in unpublished sources, obscure journals and newspapers. He tells the bizarre and fascinating story with an understanding rare in those who have never experienced Anglicanism from within. John Jay Hughes Archdiocese ofSt. Louis Acta Nuntiaturae Polonae,Tomus LVII:Achilles Ratti (1918-1921), volume 1 (25 IV-31 VII 1918). Edited by Stanislaus WiIk, S.D.B. (Rome: Institutum Historicum Polonicum. 1995. Pp. xxxviii, 454.) At the age of sixty, Monsignor Achille Ratti labored in contented obscurity as prefect of the Vatican Library, seemingly having reached the pinnacle of a quietly distinguished career of churchly scholarship; four years later he was pope, and as the formidable Pius XI he would occupy the throne of St. Peter for the better part of the perilous two decades between the world wars. The trans- BOOK REVIEWS 279 forming interlude in his life was an eventful three-year stint as nuncio to Poland, restored to statehood after more than a century of subjection to foreign rule, and this assignment so defined him that the Italian press called him ilpapapolacco long before the world ever heard of Karol Wojtyia. This latest installment in a useful series devoted to publication of the papers of the Polish nunciature offers a fascinating glimpse into the origins of one of the more historically significant modern papacies. Of course, the Polish mission involved bigger stakes than a notch on Achille Ratti's résumé, no matter how impressive. At the time of his posting in the spring of 1918 to a puppet Poland cobbled up by the momentarily ascendant Central Powers, the great war had just entered its convulsive final stage that toppled ancient dynasties and unleashed Bolshevism. The ultimate defeat and collapse of all three of the great empires of Central and Eastern Europe—Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary—produced chaos and upheaval, gave rise to a jumble of successor states including a genuinely independent Polish republic, and compelled a thorough reorganization of the Church in those regions. The Vatican made Ratti its point man in the daunting task of rehabilitating Catholicism in Poland and its environs after many decades of oppression, an assignment complicated by politics, national rivalries, and—not least—the unfolding revolution in Russia, a danger made bluntly manifest to the erstwhile librarian in...