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Il Papa Polacco

The Making of Pius XI, 1918–1922

AS THE FIRST WORLD WAR ENTERED its last months in 1918, the Vatican knew only two things for certain regarding the future of the Catholic Church in central and eastern Europe: that the antebellum order would be transformed beyond recognition, and that some sort of sovereign Poland would return to the map after its lengthy absence. Indeed, thanks to the initiative of the German and Habsburg emperors, a Polish kingdom already existed on paper, even if its independence was largely a fiction. Even at that late date, everything else concerning the prospects for the Roman mission in that zone of the continent remained shrouded in confusion. Above all, the widening revolution in Russia and the incipient breakup of the farflung realm of the tsars both freed and threatened several Catholic peoples while holding out the dazzling promise of a historic expansion of the Church into the Orthodox east. Unsure of its best approach to this combination of danger and opportunity, the papal state counted on the new Poland as its natural base of activity in that turbulent region. So when the Polish bishops requested the posting of an apostolic visitor to their theoretically restored country after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk certified the Russian surrender, the Holy See happily obliged: not only was the suggestion a useful idea on its own merits, but the new man could also serve as the eyes and ears of the pope in the European borderlands. The Vatican functionaries took the appointment seriously as an important decision bearing on the development of the Church in Poland and other formerly Russian territories, although few could have suspected just how important it would turn out to be; surely none divined that the choice would identify the eventual successor to Benedict XV and forcefully alter the destiny of Catholicism in the twentieth century.

Because the nominee for the Polish errand reached such exalted and surprising heights, the tale of his selection became the stuff of minor legend, often retold in ecclesiastical circles. According to the story, either Cardinal Gasparri, more likely his sostituto within the Secretariat of State, or even a transient Polish cleric suggested the name of the little-known prefect of the Vatican Library as a suitable candidate. This unconventional recommendation intrigued Pope Benedict, who had occasionally consulted his resident scholar on the historical background of the war and its related issues and had formed a good opinion of his judgment and abilities. In April 1918, the pontiff offered the librarian the embassy to Poland. Startled, the designee asked for time to consider, hesitant to accept an assignment so remote from his experience and expertise. The very next day, Benedict summoned the reluctant bibliophile for a second audience. Well, now you have had a chance to think it over, the pope is supposed to have said—“When do you leave for Poland?”¹ Thus, according to lore, did Monsignor Achille Ambrogio Damiano Ratti, the bookish sixty-year-old son of a Lombard silk factory manager, take the first tentative step down a remarkable path that led him through an eventful three-year Polish nunciature to the see of St. Peter.

Before its unlikely climax, his career had prospered in obscurity, far removed from the fast track toward the upper reaches of Church government. Following ordination, Ratti had settled into the leisurely routine of academics, making methodical advancement until arriving at the prefecture of the Vatican Library in 1914, seemingly having attained the limit of his ambitions. His learned demeanor and duties masked a steely and imperious temperament, qualities that came to the fore only after the subsequent and ultimate promotion that released him forever from the obligation to play the loyal subordinate. That lay in the future; for the time being, the posting to Poland involved more than enough difficulty and complexity to challenge even the most seasoned papal diplomat, let alone a neophyte. At bottom, the Vatican had no idea what to make of the chaotic picture in the European east, or how best to pursue its own interests. Contending factions within and around the Curia advocated a variety of incompatible policies, ranging from open reliance on the Poles as the flagbearers of the Catholic cause in their vicinity to warnings that precisely this was the surest way to hamper the work of the Church in Russia and the kresy by aggravating old antagonisms and resentments toward Poland. In its initial conception, the Ratti mission had no clearer or more urgent mandate than the vague instruction simply to take stock of the situation and sort through the bewildering alternatives.² The mediation of Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, the nuncio in Munich, procured the imprimatur of the German authorities, who still held sway in that theater for the moment, and by the summer of 1918 Ratti had been installed as apostolic visitor to Poland and Lithuania, resident in Warsaw but responsible for all the lands of the crumbling Russian imperium.³

The Ratti sojourn was originally devised as a reconnoitering expedition of a zone in flux possibly lasting only a few months, and the pope had told him to plan on returning home by Christmas.⁴ His task took on a different, less improvisatory character once the war ended, sweeping away the German sphere of conquest and replacing the puppet Poland with the Second Republic—genuinely independent and presumably there to stay—but answering little else Rome wanted to know. To reflect the changed circumstances, after the official papal recognition of the new Polish state in 1919 Ratti assumed the title of full nuncio to Poland, the first since 1796, and an accompanying elevation to the rank of archbishop. In corresponding fashion, he began to focus the bulk of his attention on Polish affairs while yet keeping a watchful eye on developments in the east. This somewhat narrower definition of his job hardly left Ratti with time on his hands, for the task of rehabilitating the Polish Church and placing its relationship with the Warsaw government on acceptable footing more than sufficed to keep him busy. In the eyes of the Vatican, achievement of these goals required a satisfactory concordat above all, and the Secretariat of State instructed Ratti to regard preparing the groundwork for such a treaty as his top priority. At the same time, he was asked to pull off a tricky political balancing act, on the one hand coaxing the Polish bishops to sacrifice some Church properties to the popular demand for land reform, on the other doing all in his power to protect the economic standing of a Church that had been bled of much of its wealth during the past century of persecution and war.⁵

After decades spent keeping company with books, Nuncio Ratti eagerly tackled the challenge of his new responsibilities in stimulating and exotic foreign surroundings. His official dispatches and private letters to friends and family mixed matters official with chatty observations on Polish customs and conditions and a touristic delight in sights and the odd detail. He found the country endearing and maddening at the same time. He never ceased to laud the simple piety of Poles, although he worried that a national weakness for ostentatious public religiosity did the Church there no credit. At first astonished and made uneasy by the multitudes of Jews he encountered in Polish cities, he adjusted soon enough and in later years drew on the experiences of his nunciature to undergird his relatively enlightened views on the Jewish question. Impatient by nature, he fumed regularly over the proverbial Polish inefficiency that combined with the messy aftermath of war to hamper his communications with Rome and multiply the already considerable frustrations of dealing with the curial bureaucracy. However, from first to last the Polish episcopate itself caused the nuncio his worst headaches. Despite his declarations to the Polish bishops that he thought of himself as one of them, holding the interests of their country close to his heart, the fractious and intensely political inclinations of the Catholic hierarchy of Poland took him by unpleasant surprise, complicated his work until the day he returned to Italy, and smoldered in his memory as long as he lived.⁶

The nub of the problem Ratti faced was that a solid majority of the Polish episcopate backed the National Democratic brand of rightist politics, putting them at odds with much of the governing establishment of the country and the preference of the Vatican itself. Shortly after the armistice Benedict XV had urged bishops in the new states of Europe to avoid embroiling the Church in partisan controversies, and to see that their priests followed suit;⁷ undeterred, the Polish clergy had wasted little time confirming the impression that it meant to act as a virtual auxiliary of Endecja. During the parliamentary elections of 1919, much of the Catholic press and priesthood had endorsed the Dmowski party, sometimes directly from the pulpit, and eleven ecclesiastics sat among the Endek delegation in the Sejm, swelling its plurality in the legislature. While technically nonpartisan, the leader of this bloc of rightist cleric-deputies, as well as the loudest, was the fiery Archbishop Teodorowicz, who described politics as a sort of holy war against those he suspected of wishing to turn the Second Republic into a “pagan state.”⁸ He and his close friend Bishop Sapieha pressed these ideas upon Cardinal Dalbor, the likeminded but less forceful primate. Together this trio exercised what the nunciature disapprovingly called a dittatura over the episcopate, converting their own sympathy for National Democracy into all-but-declared policy of the Polish Church—although, to be sure, the “dictatorship” largely amounted to herding the bishops in the direction most of them already wanted to go.⁹ This left Cardinal Kakowski as the odd man out among the ranking hierarchs of Poland, in more ways than one. The archbishop of Warsaw declined invitations to stand for election on the Endecja ticket, and before long observers began to note his tendency to hold the Right at arm’s length and to maintain some distance from the politics of the Teodorowicz-Sapieha-Dalbor triumvirate. In fact, the isolation of Kakowski within the episcopate resulted from more than mere differences in partisan allegiance. During the protracted dispute over the primacy of Poland, most of the clergy sided with Dalbor and Gniezno againstWarsaw and closed ranks against the bishop of the capital. Given a cold shoulder by his colleagues, Kakowski still retained the confidence of the Vatican, which clearly preferred him to Dalbor and treated him as the first dignitary of the Polish Church in all but name.¹⁰

The rightward leanings of the clergy went hand in hand with its collective distaste for the charismatic Józef Piłsudski, both the most popular and the most reviled public figure in the country, who had assumed the rank of chief of state in the provisional government of the young republic. The dignity of high office failed to persuade Polish churchmen that the man they had grown accustomed to condemn as a leftist highwayman of low morals had suddenly become any more acceptable or respectable. When Cardinal Dalbor, speaking for the Church, addressed Piłsudski directly from the pulpit at a ceremonial mass in 1919, stressing that “we entrust to you the heritage we have safeguarded,” few could have missed the cautionary hint that the national fate had passed into unreliable hands.¹¹ In fact, the whole country knew that most of the clergy turned up their noses at Piłsudski, sometimes on grounds of policy, more often on a more visceral level as the embodiment, so they imagined, of all they found intolerable. In keeping with his status as foremost episcopal irreconcilable, Archbishop Teodorowicz above all flaunted his loathing for Piłsudski, who repaid the sentiment with interest and made sure that army intelligence kept the Armenian-rite pastor under close watch.¹² On this count too, Cardinal Kakowski stood out as the exception among Polish archprelates for his ability to find redeeming qualities in the chief of state that remained well hidden from most of his colleagues in holy orders.¹³

For his part, once he got his bearings Nuncio Ratti had little difficulty deciding that he much preferred Piłsudski to Teodorowicz and his Endek coterie among the bishops. In the first place, the papal envoy concluded, somewhat to his surprise, that the Polish strongman did not deserve his reputation for irreligiosity. Piłsudski kept to himself his spiritual and philosophical convictions, such as they were, inviting all manner of speculation, and his grasp of theology and Catholic doctrine lacked sophistication, to put it gently. Once asked by a priest about the persistent rumor that he was a Freemason, he emphatically avowed his refusal on principle to have anything to do with the secret brotherhood, not for the reasons a catechist would have approved, but on the less-than-categorical grounds that he could not belong in good conscience to an international fraternity that might expose the interests of Poland to foreign manipulation—a description that, after all, might just as easily have applied to the Church.¹⁴ Still, some spied within Piłsudski, beneath his wayward and lax exterior, a sort of noble savage of untutored piety. The battle-hardened chief of state had a soft spot for Church spectacle and lore that touched on national themes or his Lithuanian boyhood, and Ratti and his lieutenants took careful note when Piłsudski shed tears at the shrine of Ostrabrama in Vilna, or received the nuncio’s blessing “with a lovely, even devout demeanor,” or attributed the revival of Poland to the intervention of the saints.¹⁵ All in all, the Warsaw nunciature reported to Rome, despite his notoriety, Piłsudski at heart was a religious man whose heterodoxy had been exaggerated by his enemies and magnified by the reflected real sins of his entourage, written off as an unsavory crew of flunkies, atheists, Freemasons, anticlericals, and apostates, for the most part rogues of easy virtue.¹⁶ However, they took an indulgent view of Piłsudski’s own marital peccadilloes, treating them as the indiscretions of an errant but well-meaning soul. Upon the death of his estranged uncanonical wife in 1921, the nunciature did no more than whisper to the Vatican the hope that the chief of state might use the occasion to “mend the condition of his private life,” as Chargé Pellegrinetti delicately phrased it, and when Piłsudski wed his mistress two months later, Cardinal Kakowski was on hand to assist in the nuptials.¹⁷

In addition, Piłsudski satisfied Ratti that he meant no harm to the Church. By this time he had already turned his back on the Left, having ridden the red streetcar of socialism only as far as the independence stop, in the trenchant image attributed to him. Furthermore, he served notice that he lacked enthusiasm for the agenda of the anticlerical wing of his constituency. In March 1919, speaking with an interviewer in his chambers, a reproduction of a Raphael Madonna hanging on the wall, Piłsudski dwelt on the need to respect the power and prestige of Catholicism in his country and declared that “we cannot think in Poland, as yet, of a separation of the State and Church—as in France.”¹⁸ Taking the cue, the Piłsudskiite press echoed the call for good relations with the Vatican and peace with the Church at home. No matter that this policy was largely motivated by a pragmatic concern not to drive the Catholic faithful into the arms of the National Democrats, the practical effect remained the same: Piłsudski wanted a modus vivendi with the Roman confession, and would restrain the militant anticlericals within his camp.¹⁹ Indeed, in certain crucial respects his politics suited Rome far better than those of Endecja and its ecclesiastical claque, above all his more expansive notion of the nature of the Polish state and its mission in the kresy of Belorussia and Ukraine.

Not least, Ratti and Piłsudski simply liked each other. According to Ratti, the improbable friendship between the future pope and the man the Polish clergy loved to hate dated from an official reception in 1919, when he deftly rescued Piłsudski from an awkward interlude prompted by the tactless remark of a foreign diplomat. Touched by the gesture, Piłsudski took the Italian monsignor into his confidence, and over time the cordiality ripened into a lifelong mutual esteem.²⁰ This was a case of like attracting like, for each recognized in the other a kindred spirit, a similar mix of temper, bullheadedness, and autocratic spirit. “Ha un carattere difficile, come il mio,” Ratti said of the Polish strongman, and Piłsudski is supposed to have returned the wry compliment in almost the same words.²¹ When Ratti and his lieutenants looked at Piłsudski, they saw a Polish Garibaldi, a flawed but charismatic man of qualities, capable of broad vision and great deeds.²²

Out of this tangled knot of clashing politics and personalities emerged two distinct factions that vied for control over the direction of the interwar Polish Church in its formative years. On one side stood Ratti and, by extension, Benedict XV, determined to press the agenda of the Holy See. Usually they could count on the support of Cardinal Kakowski, deferential to the papacy, well disposed toward the nuncio and not at all offended by his bet on Piłsudski, and somewhat at odds with the prevailing rightward sentiment within the national episcopate. At every step this alliance ran into stubborn opposition from the circle of Endecja partisans who dominated their fellow bishops, especially the Galician duo of Teodorowicz and Sapieha, who held sway over the primate, Cardinal Dalbor. These balky prelates resisted Ratti as the agent of an unwanted degree of Roman influence over their Church. Apart from a natural concern for turf, they possessed a certain skepticism of the intentions of the Vatican, magnified by lingering suspicions that the Curia nursed a special solicitude for Germany, the most dangerous enemy of Poland in National Democratic eyes. The evident willingness of the nuncio to make common cause with Piłsudski only confirmed their worries that he was up to no good.²³ The fact that this struggle between the Vatican and the nationalist leadership of the Polish hierarchy took place under the obligatory cover of discretion and courtesy—at least until its very public final stages—did not reduce the intensity of the contest that defined and ultimately undid the Ratti mission to Poland.

Among other points, the two contending ecclesiastical parties disagreed on the need for a Polish concordat, the centerpiece of papal policy in the country. Following his instructions from Rome, Ratti lost no time in attempting to prepare the ground for a treaty between Warsaw and the Holy See, prodding the preoccupied ministers of the Second Republic to pay attention to the project and move it higher up their crowded list of priorities. Cardinal Kakowski dutifully went along.²⁴ However, Teodorowicz and Sapieha flatly rejected the line of the nunciature, arguing that any concordat would entail burdensome concessions to the civil power, that the Church stood a good chance of having its essential desiderata written into the forthcoming state constitution free of cost, and that—in so many words—the Vatican should leave these matters to the Polish bishops and mind its own business. In 1919 they prevailed on a number of their episcopal brethren to draft a letter to Pope Benedict in this very spirit, forcing the nuncio to squelch the initiative as directly contrary to the will of the pontiff. This combination of governmental distraction and dissent within the ranks of the hierarchy itself prevented any meaningful progress. By 1920 the pope had accepted the bishops’ advice to await passage of the constitution, and Ratti departed Poland with the concordat still in embryo.²⁵

The nuncio also parted company with the Polish bishops on matters of foreign policy relating to differing visions of the proper role of Poland in the eastern marches. Because Ratti continued to function as the Vatican’s man in all reaches of the former Russia, not just Poland, he retained the Roman tendency to regard the Second Republic as certainly the foundation of east European Catholicism, but by no means the whole edifice. He took seriously his responsibilities as papal legate to the emerging polities of the area, although Lithuania kept him at arm’s length out of fear that he might harbor a bias toward rival Warsaw, while the unfolding revolution in Russia—the most cherished target of Vatican missionary ambition—thwarted his aim of visiting that country and forced him to grapple at long distance with the myriad trials of a church in Bolshevist hands. At the same time, he took care to maintain scrupulous neutrality in the inevitable territorial disputes that erupted between the Poles and the other peoples of the kresy, favoring neither Poland nor Lithuania in their quarrel over Vilna and urging restraint in the Polish-Ukrainian war for title to eastern Galicia. Despite these poor auguries of concord in the borderlands—indeed, more likely in part on their account—and in keeping with his inclination to think of Poland within its broader regional setting, Ratti saw much to recommend in Piłsudski’s vision of a reconstituted Polish republic as a confederation embracing the lands of old Lithuania, a latter-day incarnation of the Jagiellonian Respublica that would shove the Russian frontiers far away from central Europe. While Piłsudski embraced the project for historic and strategic reasons, the papal ambassador hoped that the collection of these expanses under the presumably benign rule of Catholic Poland might facilitate the conversion of Belorussia and Ukraine, quarantine the fever of revolution, and contract the political reach of Orthodoxy once the Bolshevik moment had passed.²⁶ This put him, as usual, on the wrong side of the Teodorowicz wing of the Polish episcopate, which preferred the National Democratic ideal of a more compact, westerly, and homogeneous Poland.²⁷

In the meantime, just as Ratti found himself on unexpectedly tricky political terrain in Warsaw, so did his Polish counterparts in the Eternal City get off to a rocky start in their work at the hub of Church government. First, the habitual prickly insistence of the popes that their diplomatic friends should accord them precedence over the upstart Italian kingdom on the other bank of the Tiber made the task of staying on good terms with both the Vatican and the Quirinale a trying exercise in hairsplitting protocol. Moreover, the appointment of an obscure academic, Józef Wierusz-Kowalski, as the first minister of free Poland to the Holy See disappointed Benedict XV, who had expected the Poles to do him the honor of choosing a nobleman of distinguished pedigree. “What professor are they sending to Us?” snapped the pontiff upon hearing the news. Besides lacking the respect of his hosts, Wierusz-Kowalski won few plaudits for competence or professionalism. Behind his back his legation staff grumbled that their chief tiptoed into the chambers of the Curia as a penitent entered a confessional, overcome with awe, piety, and reverence for the cloth. Worse, they complained, he grossly underestimated the potential for discord between Poland and the Vatican, blandly assuming that religious solidarity guaranteed that nothing could disturb the relationship despite a gathering of warning signs to the contrary.²⁸

In truth, apart from the obvious bond of Catholicism—and even that impressed Polish officialdom less than the pope and his men thought it should—Poland and the Holy See shared little in common in matters of international politics. Before long, grasping for explanations of a growing papal impatience with Polish foreign policies, Wierusz-Kowalski trotted out the theory that the Vatican bureaucracy sheltered a pro-German cabal that had managed to corrode the goodwill of the Holy Father toward the Polish cause.²⁹ The remarkable aspect of this argument was not the thesis itself—just a new twist on a well-worn theme of wartime gossip—but that its adherents should have felt the need to seek answers in shadowy intrigues when more compelling reasons were plain to see. Although the process of peacemaking had not entirely satisfied its territorial and security goals, the Second Republic naturally regarded the European order established by the world war and symbolized by the Treaty of Versailles as the charter and sine qua non of its existence, to be defended at all costs. On the other hand, Rome held the jaundiced conviction that—as a French publicist of the day put it—“the peace of Versailles is not the peace of the Vatican, but rather an Anglosaxon [sic], puritan, and secularist peace,” reflecting the values and interests of a dubious collection of regimes and worldviews. More to the point, in the hardheaded and freely advertised opinion of Cardinal Secretary of State Gasparri, the postwar settlement was simply unworkable and stupidly vengeful, bound to result “not in one but in ten wars.”³⁰ Benedict XV made his disapproval of the Versailles order sharply explicit in his encyclical Pacem Dei munus, issued on May 23, 1920. Trying to soften the blow, the pope went out of his way that same day to assure Warsaw that he was “completely satisfied” with their mutual relations, but in fact the Curia found little to like in Polish foreign policy.³¹ In particular, Gasparri belonged emphatically to the large camp of diplomats who thought freedom had intoxicated the Poles and that they should curb their appetite for territory, particularly in the west, before they got themselves, and Europe, in trouble; Poland could not afford to make enemies of both Russia and Germany, and should not burn its bridges to Berlin by pressing excessive claims against its German neighbor in the vicinity of Danzig and Silesia. Sooner or later, he warned, Warsaw would “pay dearly” for its land greed, and might even bring on its own ruin by provoking a disastrous German-Soviet alliance.³²

Before the year was out, crises erupted on each of Poland’s contested flanks that brought these tensions into the open and led first to the triumph, then rapidly to the inglorious end of the nunciature of Achille Ratti. In the east, where Polish and Soviet military forces had been jockeying for position in the no-man’s-land of the kresy, Piłsudski threw the hostilities into higher gear in spring 1920 by launching an offensive intended to fulfill his goal of securing the borderlands and tilting the regional balance of power decisively toward Poland. The initial success of the drive brought Kiev into Polish hands by May and sparked an outburst of national euphoria. The Polish Church joined in the enthusiasm by celebrating masses to honor these feats of arms, although some prelates could not bear the fact that the accomplishment had made Piłsudski the hero of the hour. When the conquering general received a thunderous welcome in the parliament upon returning to Warsaw, his sworn enemy Archbishop Teodorowicz stood in the hall speechless and visibly agitated, his patriotic pride wrestling with his hatred of Piłsudski.³³ For its part, the Vatican also found itself torn, but for different reasons, pleased by every inch gained by the Poles at Russian expense, but convinced that the Polish advance was a rash venture that was bound to end badly.³⁴

As if to confirm Cardinal Gasparri’s fears of Polish overreach, the tide of battle shifted quickly in the summer, and a Red Army counteroffensive threatened to engulf Poland and, perhaps, to spill out into war-weary central Europe as well. The swift reversal of Polish fortunes that now jeopardized the existence of the state spurred the local Church into action. Rightist clerical foes of Piłsudski who had bitten their tongues while he was winning now turned their fury on him as the instigator of disaster: at one tempestuous meeting, Father Adamski publicly and loudly branded him a traitor to his face.³⁵ On a more dignified level, as the emergency grew more grave, the Catholic leadership of Poland concentrated on rallying the religious sentiments of their people in defense of nation and faith. In July the episcopate called on Poles to maintain unity and brace themselves to resist the invaders, and simultaneously appealed for the prayers and assistance of believers throughout the world to help them shield Europe against the Bolsheviks, “the living negation of Christianity.” At the end of the month the bishops symbolically underscored their petition by asking the pope to canonize Andrzej Bobola, a seventeenth-century Polish Jesuit missionary who had suffered martyrdom by Cossacks while evangelizing the kresy.³⁶

While the Catholic friends of Poland abroad had little aid of their own to give, they freely abetted the cause by invoking the greater powers of the Almighty and lending words of encouragement sometimes chilled with the cold comfort of reproachful advice. Churches throughout Europe raised prayers for the Poles. In Rome, the Jesuit chieftain Ledóchowski ordered hundreds of masses said for his endangered countrymen, and in early August Benedict XV urged moral and material help for Poland, once again the rampart of Christianity.³⁷ Even so, on August 14, as the Reds bore down on Warsaw to deal a possibly mortal blow, the Vatican chided the Poles for having brought misfortune upon themselves in a remarkable commentary in L’Osservatore romano. The article had the fingerprints of Cardinal Gasparri all over it. After making the obligatory tributes to the “noble, devoutly Catholic, chivalrous and brave Polish nation,” it went on to say, in effect, we told you so. Declaring the Russian war a “risky adventure,” it took pains to point out that “the Holy See . . . has never ceased to exhort [Poland] to moderation in seeking or even accepting territories inhabited by majorities of other nationalities. These warnings were repeated several times.” The tone of the piece was grim and valedictory, and readers might well have taken it as an editorial bestowal of last rites upon the Second Republic as a favored but errant son of the Church.

On the front line in Warsaw, Nuncio Ratti also suspected that his host government was doomed, but refused to evacuate his post even as other diplomats fled westward in anticipation of a climactic battle at the gates of the city. In part, he remained out of a sense of pastoral duty, just as Archbishop Kakowski ordered the priests of his diocese not to abandon their flocks, and Rome may too have wanted him on the spot to begin the distasteful but necessary job of making contact with the Bolsheviks in the event of their victory. As the moment of truth neared, the Vatican changed its mind and recommended that Ratti depart, and the Polish foreign ministry made last-minute contingency plans to whisk him to safety, but he chose to stay. On the night of August 14, the eve of the clash, the last train carrying foreign officials pulled out of Warsaw, leaving behind only Ratti and a handful of ministers from other legations. According to his own later account, during these tense hours he conferred with General Maxime Weygand, the French military adviser, and the two conversed about the importance of the coming day for the future of civilization.³⁸

When the battle joined, the Poles unexpectedly prevailed as Piłsudski stopped the Red Army in its tracks and sent it reeling in retreat. The war ended some months later with Poland not only intact, but even having got the better of the fighting. The good news from the east struck a chord throughout the Catholic world, and enhanced the venerable Polish reputation as the shield of Christendom against the barbarian. The episcopates of western Europe raised hosannas of thanksgiving for the delivery of Poland, and the pope spoke for many by congratulating the country for having saved not only itself, but perhaps the whole continent.³⁹ Instantly hailed as an epochal historic event, the decisive clash at Warsaw became known as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” and reports circulated of divine or Marian intervention on behalf of the God-fearing winners. Within Poland these claims took on a partisan edge. Detractors of Piłsudski fostered the accounts of supernatural assistance as a means of denying credit for the triumph to their political foe, much to the displeasure of his admirers.⁴⁰ Among other things, although at the time no one could foretell its full import, the showdown with Communism before the Polish capital made the reputation of Achille Ratti. His decision to stand by Poland in its desperate hour, recalling the defiance of Pope Leo I in the face of Attila, became the signature of his nunciature and, in retrospect, his crucial stepping-stone toward the throne of Peter. For the moment, at least, it also won him the gratitude of Poles and allayed their nagging suspicions that the papacy could not be trusted to uphold the interests of their nation.

Ratti did not have long to bask in Polish affections, however, for within months he landed square in the middle of another frontier dispute to the west that turned him virtually overnight from a friend in the eyes of Warsaw into persona non grata. The peace conference had determined that the disposition of the coveted mining and industrial district of Upper Silesia, formerly part of Germany but plausibly demanded on ethnic and historical grounds by Poland as well, would be settled by plebiscite, which, in the event, did not take place until March 1921. The run-up to the vote was fractious and occasionally violent, with both sides contending for advantage and seeking ways to create a favorable environment for the balloting. Good reason existed to believe that Roman and local Church authorities inclined to the German position in the controversy. In the first place, Silesia was just the sort of nationally ambiguous claim that Cardinal Gasparri had urged Poland to avoid. Furthermore, many took it as axiomatic that the arithmetic of religious realpolitik gave the Vatican a powerful incentive to wish that the heavily Catholic region should remain German: a few Catholics more or fewer in Poland would make no difference, but the same numbers on the other side of the frontier could tilt the confessional balance in the Weimar Republic by cutting into the Protestant majority and bolstering the strength of the Center Party. The Curia also may well have calculated that with Poland menaced by Soviet Russia, Silesian Catholics might be safer in Germany. The Vatican regularly heard, and heeded, such arguments from the German ordinary of Silesia, Adolf Cardinal Bertram, the patriotic archbishop of Breslau, who spared little effort to prevent the loss of this vital slice of his diocese to Poland. As preparation for the plebiscite began in earnest, Poland harbored no illusions concerning the preferences of the Holy See on the matter, but expected to manage to agree to disagree, taking comfort from the fact that the papacy would have little say in the outcome.⁴¹

Cardinal Bertram may have been the first to suggest the appointment of Ratti as ecclesiastical commissioner for the plebiscite to lend the appearance of clerical decorum and integrity to the rowdy contest in Silesia. Ratti did not welcome his nomination to this largely honorific title that combined high visibility with a minimum of true authority. Indeed, the proposal was a bad idea for so many reasons that at first neither Cardinal Gasparri nor the Allied overseers of the vote saw much merit in it, but in the end the Vatican could not resist accepting even so modest an opportunity to escape its galling diplomatic isolation, and so sought and eventually procured the post for its reluctant emissary in March 1920.⁴²

From the start, the Silesian duty caused Ratti nothing but trouble. In the first place, he entered office under the general suspicion that he could not help but be partial to Poland, the country of his nunciature. Warsaw surely hoped so, and lobbied eagerly to see that he got the job, with some clout to go with it. Once he was installed, Poland looked to him as an advocate, while German opinion regarded him as an enemy. Both sides misread their man: in fact, Ratti shared Gasparri’s preference for minimizing German losses in Silesia.⁴³ He observed careful neutrality, and urged evenhanded restraint and civility in his public statements. These policies provoked grumblings of disappointed expectations from the Polish quarter, which he took as a good sign. “When only the Germans were against me, I did not know whether I was on the right track,” he later recalled, “but when also the Poles expressed their feelings against me, I was certain that I was doing the right thing.”⁴⁴

Nuncio Ratti also found himself caught in the middle of a sharp partisan divide among the Catholic churchmen of the plebiscite region with no power to enforce a disinterested via media. The predominantly Polish lesser clergy of Upper Silesia comprised the most articulate, nationally conscious, and influential segment of the Poles of the province. With more or less open encouragement from Warsaw, many of these priests threw themselves into the political arena on behalf of Polish interests, while other itinerant clergy filtered in from Poland proper to lend support to the cause.⁴⁵ This agitation annoyed the German archbishop, Cardinal Bertram, on two counts: not only did he oppose the pretensions of Poland to Silesia, as he often reminded Ratti, but he also resented the widespread electioneering of his own Polish priests as well as the unregulated comings and goings of the carpetbaggers in collars as a challenge to his right to maintain ecclesiastical order within his diocese. In the summer and fall of 1920, as German complaints mounted that the Poles were exploiting Silesian pulpits as nationalist soapboxes, Bertram gradually resolved to put a stop to it. Ratti was helpless to ward off the looming collision. Despite his symbolic stature as commissioner, he possessed no mandate to curb the freelance Polish clerics, and even less to override the legitimate pastoral and disciplinary authority of an angered ordinary much his senior. His only option was to apply moral suasion, but this was hampered by his frequent absence from the scene. After all, his residence and primary responsibilities remained in Warsaw, not Silesia, and the considerable distraction of the Polish-Soviet war also preoccupied his time and attention as the pressure mounted in the plebiscite zone.⁴⁶

Cardinal Bertram dropped the other shoe on November 21, 1920, by issuing a decree pronouncing a ban on various types of politicking by clergy within Upper Silesia. Although it applied equally to both nationalities, Poles and Germans alike instantly grasped that the practical effect of the order, and doubtless its intent, was to damage the Polish chances to prevail in the vote. No ecclesiastics from other jurisdictions would be allowed to enter Upper Silesia for the purpose of influencing the outcome of the plebiscite. As for the mainly Polish priests of the archdiocese, they could comment or take part in political controversies only with permission of their parish pastors, seventy percent of whom happened to be German. To enraged Poles, the Church had cast its ballot for Germany by hamstringing the patriotic Polish clergy, thus arbitrarily nullifying their strongest asset in an uphill struggle to overcome the inherent advantages of the wealthier and better placed Germans in Silesia.

At the time and for years afterward, many wondered whether Ratti and the Vatican knew and approved of the Bertram decree in advance. The answer is both yes and no. The announcement apparently came as a complete and unwelcome surprise to Nuncio-Commissioner Ratti, who politely but firmly remonstrated with the cardinal for having handed down his edict without consultation or warning, as did Gasparri.⁴⁷ On the other hand, Bertram had sent a number of signals to the Secretariat of State that he meant to assert his prerogatives as ordinary to pacify the turmoil in his churches, and Rome had voiced no objection, not realizing that he would act in such high-handed and one-sided fashion. Although Bertram had done the Curia no favor by exposing it to this unexpected embarrassment, the Vatican chose to put the best face on the matter, loath to undercut the archbishop of Breslau in the normal exercise of his valid authority. While privately conveying his reservations to the German prelate, Gasparri defended his right to enact the edict and allowed it to stand, doggedly insisting that Bertram had conducted himself as the “Priest-Pastor of all.”⁴⁸

The Bertram decree stirred a hornet’s nest of protest in Poland, directed above all at the offending German archbishop, but also against Ratti and the Holy See as having been either complicit in the outrage or negligent in failing to prevent it. The incident swiftly reawakened all of the old Polish grievances against the Vatican, and even the pillars of Catholicism in the country gave way to expressions of shock and dismay. The press of all parties raised such a furor that the foreign minister made apologies to Benedict XV.⁴⁹ However, the Warsaw government could barely contain its own wrath and sense of betrayal. Poland implored the pope to countermand Bertram, while official circles buzzed in private with rumors of spies, collusion, payoffs, and Germanophilia in Rome.⁵⁰ The liveliest and most ominous reaction arose in the Sejm, where nationalists and anticlericals joined in denouncing the deed. The chamber echoed with calls to expel Ratti or break off relations with the Holy See before settling for demanding the separation of Upper Silesia from the Archdiocese of Breslau. The temper of the body was such that the highest ranking deputy-cleric, Archbishop Teodorowicz, stood not to defend the Vatican, but to pin the blame for the injustice squarely on Ratti, and to announce that the Polish episcopate had called on Pope Benedict to undo the offending order.⁵¹

From the midst of the storm, Ratti alerted Rome to the urgent need “to calm the Poles and restore their trust in the Holy See and the nuncio,” but already he had lost the ability to do any of those things.⁵² He no longer enjoyed the confidence of the Second Republic or of Polish public opinion, despite his celebrated valor at the Battle of Warsaw only three months earlier. Crowds staged hostile demonstrations outside his residence in the capital, where he went into virtual hiding. Among the prelates of the Polish Church the balance now swung in favor of the nationalist bishops, who, like Teodorowicz, never had much use for Ratti, his policies, or his alignment with Piłsudski. Rome stood by its beleaguered emissary, insisting that he had acted properly, but soon began a diplomatic retreat to extricate him from an impossible situation. Assuring Ratti that he had done no wrong, Gasparri relieved him of his Silesian assignment and quickly sent a substitute, Fr. Giovanni Ogno Serra, to take his place.⁵³ These reverses stunned and wounded the nuncio, who felt illused and misunderstood. The pope tried to console him with words that revealed his own exasperation with Ratti’s newly inhospitable hosts: the Poles, he wrote, were “fickle” and “suspicious to excess,” guilty of ingratitude to the Holy See, “which has done so much for them.” Approached at the time by a Polish spokesman about Silesia, Benedict fixed him with a wintry smile and sighed, “Yes, I know, you want the coal.”⁵⁴

Scrambling to salvage something from the wreckage, Cardinal Gasparri and the Polish minister to the Vatican, Wierusz-Kowalski, tried to repair the damage, but their efforts managed only to compound the predicament. The cardinal secretary of state agreed that Bertram had stepped out of line and that his decree should be tactfully annulled, and suggested a compromise: all Silesian clergy were to refrain from participating in the plebiscite campaign, and churches were to be off limits to political activity of any sort. Out of his depth, Wierusz-Kowalski somehow convinced himself that the deal served his country’s interest.⁵⁵ Accordingly, in late December Fr. Ogno Serra, Ratti’s freshly installed replacement in Silesia, issued the new formula. Of course, from the Polish standpoint, this simply made a bad situation worse. As evidently every Pole besides Wierusz-Kowalski readily grasped, they needed fewer restrictions on priestly political agitation, not more, so the hasty revision merely deepened their dissatisfaction with the Vatican.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Wincenty Witos asked the Polish Church to intercede with the pope, and in early December the bishops dispatched their colleagues Sapieha and Teodorowicz as a delegation to the Vatican to vent the displeasure of the episcopate and, apparently, to seek the recall of Nuncio Ratti. Sapieha was a logical choice, well connected in Rome and seasoned in its ways dating from his youthful service as chamberlain to Pius X. However, sending Teodorowicz on a delicate diplomatic errand was like sending gasoline to put out a fire. His blood up, the Armenian-rite pastor barged through the Vatican like a maddened bull, leaving a trail of disarray and hard feelings that hurt the standing of Poland with the Curia more than helped it.⁵⁶ Granted an audience with Benedict shortly after the new year, the Polish bishops explained their country’s objection to the Ogno-Serra declaration, much to the surprise of the pontiff, who informed his equally startled visitors that Minister Wierusz-Kowalski had happily assented to that very plan. After the confusion was sorted out, the pope relented to the extent of permitting Silesian clergy to take part in public political meetings not on church grounds. Sapieha and Teodorowicz returned to Poland believing they had attained at least some of the goals of their mission, but unsettled by the prevalent mood of sympathy for Germany and skepticism toward Poland they had encountered in Rome. Their qualms deepened a few days later when Cardinal Gasparri, after consulting with Ratti’s replacement in Silesia, instructed them that the new policy would go into effect only insofar as it was consistent with the original Ogno-Serra design, which was to say not at all.⁵⁷ The Sapieha-Teodorowicz embassy had come to nothing, the latest casualty of a series of snafus within the Curia or, as the latter feared, of a deliberate attempt to help Germany win the Silesian plebiscite.

Both bishops shot off letters of protest to Benedict XV, and Teodorowicz’s epistle trespassed outside the bounds of expected courtesy. Furious, he flatly accused Gasparri of dealing in deception and bad faith on the Silesian question, citing as evidence fragments of internal Polish foreign ministry correspondence shown him by Wierusz-Kowalski while in Rome. These charges scarcely endeared Teodorowicz or his case for Silesia to the Vatican, and especially the cardinal secretary of state. After pointed delay, Gasparri delivered a cold response to Sapieha, tersely defending the conduct and good intentions of the Holy See and adding that he would not deign to reply to the Armenian archbishop who had impugned his integrity.⁵⁸

As it happened, fortune or judicious leak provided Gasparri with a measure of revenge that embarrassed Teodorowicz and ended the Roman tenure of Wierusz-Kowalski. Within weeks, the news got out that the Polish envoy to the Vatican had divulged confidential state documents to a private citizen, the archbishop, who in turn had passed on the contents to a foreign power, according to one way of looking at it. These revelations touched off yet another uproar in the Sejm, where both men came under fire for their indiscretions. As a consequence, the hapless Wierusz-Kowalski got the sack and a ticket to a less demanding post, while deputy Teodorowicz had to endure a very public hazing from the benches of the anticlerical Left, a sport encouraged by the Piłsudski camp, which saw a chance to score points at the expense of their adversary. In retort, the excitable Fr. Adamski asked how anyone could expect the Vatican to want to see Upper Silesia “toss[ed] . . . into the jaws of the Jewish-socialist Polish government.” This farcical affair was, as one of Ratti’s staff noted, a tempest in a teapot, for neither Wierusz-Kowalski nor Teodorowicz had meant or done real harm to Polish interests; still, he admitted, he did not grieve unduly to see the turbulent archbishop get a taste of comeuppance, deserved in this instance or not.⁵⁹

When Poland lost the Upper Silesian plebiscite in March 1921, as prelude to a distasteful eventual partition of the province, Ratti made a handy scapegoat for the disappointment, and public opinion and officialdom alike called for his head. Convinced that his scholar-turned-diplomat had performed well in a difficult and sensitive assignment, Pope Benedict at first resisted the demands for his ouster, warning the Poles that if they forced him to bring the embattled nuncio home, he would refuse to appoint a successor. However, the death of the archbishop of Milan, the see of Ratti’s native region, afforded the pontiff the chance to solve his problem and reward his protégé simultaneously. In short order, Ratti received both Milan and a cardinalate, and by June he had exchanged the rigors of Poland for the relative serenity of Lombardy.⁶⁰

Not content with merely sending Ratti packing back to Italy, Poland pelted him with indignities on his way out to make sure nobody missed the message. Plans to award him an honorary degree from the University of Warsaw were scrapped, and the government took the even more drastic step of refusing to present him with the medal of the Order of the White Eagle, normally given to departing diplomats, despite the warnings of Wierusz-Kowalski that the snub would give great offense to the Vatican. By the time Cardinal Gasparri lodged a complaint with the Polish legation about the ferocity of the vindictive campaign against Ratti, Wierusz-Kowalski was gone, and his replacement gave no ground, coolly answering that the attacks were but an accurate gauge of “the disquiet of the majority of Polish society.”⁶¹

The Silesian fiasco took a heavy toll in acrimony and ill will and subjected the relationship between Poland and the papacy to severe, if temporary, strain. On the governmental level, the bruises healed within a few months, with both sides chalking it up to normal diplomatic rough-and-tumble: although they clearly did not see eye to eye on Silesia, other common interests bound them together, and neither could afford to let the partnership dissolve. The Vatican held much keener resentment toward the Polish Church for its behavior in the quarrel. For his part, Achille Ratti never forgot his unhappy last months in Poland and nursed a grudge against his tormentors among the Polish bishops, especially Sapieha and Teodorowicz, until his dying day. In July 1921, in one of his last communications with the Church of Poland, Benedict XV sent the bishops an acerbic, scolding letter that upbraided them for allowing their patriotic sentiments concerning Upper Silesia to lead to words and actions “ill intentioned or . . . disrespectful of the Holy See.” Reminding them of his need to remain impartial, he advised them to show charity toward Catholics of other nationalities and bluntly told them to stay out of politics. Merely bringing up the subject of Poland could make Cardinal Gasparri see red in those days. “Can this be a Catholic episcopate,” he would exclaim, “can this be a Catholic press!”⁶²

A decade later, Cardinal Kakowski wrote that in spite of the bitter unpleasantness of the Silesian affair, the passage of time had shown it to be an act of Providence, for without it the Church would not have gained its “Polish Pope.”⁶³ In January 1922 Benedict XV died in the ninth year of his reign, and the combination of suitable age and prestigious see made plain that the select number of papabili included none other than the freshly minted Cardinal Ratti, not a favorite but a well-positioned dark horse. The prospect of a Ratti papacy unnerved many of the clergy of Poland, but gladdened one of the electors, Kakowski, who had been the main backer of the former nuncio among the Polish episcopate. Much to his agreeable surprise, before his departure for the conclave the new Polish government of Antoni Ponikowski, letting bygones be bygones, informed him that Ratti was its preferred candidate, and upon arriving in Rome he learned that the archbishop of Milan also stood high on the list of France, the principal ally of Warsaw. As the cardinals assembled in the Eternal City and parleyed while awaiting the vote, Kakowski set about lobbying them regarding the sterling qualities of his choice. Countering descriptions of Ratti in the Italian press as a liberal, a term they would have taken as a black mark against him, the Pole assured his colleagues, “Si, he has a liberal heart, but a Catholic head and a holy life.”⁶⁴

The rise of Ratti’s star prompted Poland to offer some quick amends. Sensing that he stood a decent chance of election as the next pope, the Polish legation to the Vatican recalled one slight he had suffered and put in a rush order for belated conferral of the White Eagle decoration denied him at the end of his nunciature out of pique. Warsaw complied, but as a final comic touch to this complicated story that had begun four years earlier when Benedict XV sent his librarian off to the east, the courier bearing the award to Italy stopped off in Vienna for an unauthorized holiday until almost too late. Once the cargo finally arrived, the Polish minister just managed to dash off and make the hurried presentation to Ratti at literally the last minute before he entered his car to be taken to the conclave.⁶⁵

Once the voting began, Ratti emerged as a compromise victor in classic fashion. The two leading contenders, Cardinals Gasparri and Merry del Val, representing differing orientations within the Sacred College, canceled each other out in the early balloting while the Polish and French electors worked discreetly to position the archbishop of Milan as a suitable fallback candidate. The deadlock ended when Gasparri threw his votes to the eventual winner, and on February 6, 1922, Achille Ratti became the 256th Vicar of Christ, taking the name Pius out of respect for two recent predecessors.⁶⁶

The selection of the little-known Ratti as pope startled the world outside the Vatican walls, and much was made of his ties to Poland as observers tried to take his measure. As his identifying feature, they seized on his Polish exposure, exotic by the insular standards of the “captive” papacy of those days, and the Italian press nicknamed him il papa polacco when Karol Wojtyła was but a boy.⁶⁷ Beaming, his sponsor Cardinal Kakowski declared his nation “delighted” at the news from the Sistine Chapel, and much of it was indeed.⁶⁸ By and large, Polish opinion turned in favor of the new Pope Ratti just as quickly as it had turned against him over the Silesian question, taking reflected pride in his election and trusting that the country would benefit from it. Most of the press rejoiced that, at last, the Church had a pope who knew Poland, understood its importance to the Catholic world, and would put an end to hostile intrigues in the Vatican.⁶⁹

Amid the cheers, others were not so sure, and wondered if they were getting more than they bargained for. When a Roman cleric congratulated a Polish colleague on the familiarity of the new pontiff with his country, the Pole answered, “We fear he knows it too well.”⁷⁰ Along the same lines, no doubt many within the national episcopate worried that they had made an unfortunate choice of enemies by their rough treatment of the former nuncio who now wore the papal ring. The socialist paper Naprzód gloated, “the election of Cardinal Ratti is a disaster for our bishops.”⁷¹ As if to ease their fears, two months after his accession to Peter’s throne Pius XI received several Polish hierarchs and demonstratively kissed Archbishop Teodorowicz as a gesture of perdono for the buffets he had suffered at their hands.⁷² Still, time gave clear evidence that if the pope had forgiven, he had not forgotten, and his two chief Polish clerical antagonists paid a price in thwarted ambitions. Teodorowicz never gained the cardinalate he coveted, and Sapieha had to outlive Ratti to win the red hat that normally accompanied the see of Kraków, and no one had to wonder why.⁷³

Biographers of Pius XI routinely assert that his dramatic experiences as nuncio to Poland impressed him profoundly, set the tone for his subsequent pontificate, and may have persuaded the Sacred College that he was the right man to lead the Church at that moment in history.⁷⁴ Certainly all of these claims are true to some degree. After all, Poland was Achille Ratti’s introduction to the world outside the cloistered confines of ecclesiastical scholarship, and to the issues that gripped Europe in the years between the wars. At the same time, Pius never strayed far from the agenda of the papacy that had been carved out by his immediate predecessors, and the Polish influence served to emphasize or confirm particular aspects of his policy, not to inspire or originate new departures. For example, commentators never fail to point out his fascination with the possible conversion of the Orthodox east, or his unyielding conviction of the danger posed by Communism, and to chalk these up to his adventures in Poland. In fact, Ratti was scarcely the first pope to feel the strong tug of Russia, and had been sent to Warsaw in the first place largely owing to the lively interest of Benedict XV in opening the Orient to Rome. As for Communism, any pope during the era of Lenin and Stalin would have decried it as satanic anathema, but it is readily understandable that the menace of Bolshevism would have seemed more viscerally urgent to one who had spent August 1920 in the Polish capital awaiting the onslaught of the Red Army. By the same token, popes before Pius XI had urged bishops and clergy to keep their hands out of politics as not in keeping with the priestly office, but he had seen and felt the consequences of clerical partisanship firsthand in Poland, giving him extra incentive to squelch it during his custody over the Church.⁷⁵

On other counts, the historians seem to have misread the lessons Poland taught Ratti, or to have overlooked them. One common, disapproving claim is that the pope’s admiration and fondness for Józef Piłsudski made him an easy mark for charismatic strongmen, blinded him to the true nature of the Fascist regime, and contributed to his willingness to strike a deal with the Duce to settle the Roman question. The argument, in essence, is that when Ratti looked at Piłsudski, he saw Garibaldi, and that when he looked at Mussolini, he saw Piłsudski. There is less in this proposition than meets the eye. Superficial comparisons of Piłsudski and Mussolini were a staple of European journalism in the 1920s, but beneath their swaggering, uniformed exteriors they had little in common, and there is no good reason to suppose that Pius XI, who knew them both, was not smart enough to tell the difference. For what it is worth, the pope paid countless tributes to Piłsudski, public and private, and comparisons of his Polish friend with Mussolini are notable for their absence. In the end, the decision of Pius to establish a wary working relationship with the Fascisti was the result of hardheaded calculation with a certain logical basis in Italian politics, not the fault of the fatal charm of Józef Piłsudski. At the same time, the standard lives of Ratti tend to ignore the influence of his Polish sojourn on the gradual evolution of Catholic teaching on the Jewish question in the twentieth century. In the course of his papacy, Pius XI made a number of comments expressing sympathy for Jews and acknowledging a spiritual debt owed by Christians to the people of Abraham and Moses. While grudging and incomplete by later standards, in their time these small gestures played a measurable part in nudging the Church away from its traditional condemnation of Jews as deicides and along the path toward Nostra aetate. The pope himself credited his time in Poland with having given a human face to his stereotyped and abstract image of Jewry, and we may safely take him at his word.

To the surprise of those who had not paid attention during the Silesian plebiscite, the Polish credentials of Pius XI did not prevent him from continuing his predecessor’s criticism of the Versailles order and related keenness to shield Germany from excessive loss of land on its eastern frontier. Not for the first time, many presumed that he would favor Poland in any such dispute, but before long he gave notice that his Polish education had bred in him a strong dash of skepticism toward the territorial ambitions of Warsaw. As secretary of state, he retained Cardinal Gasparri, whose low opinion of Polish foreign policy was well known. Speaking to a Polish diplomat about Upper Silesia, the pope warned, as had Benedict before him, “Believe me, you will absorb too many Germans.” The Vatican counted as merely a cipher in the equation of European international power, and could do little more than irk the Poles, but Pius faithfully hewed to the line of Gasparri and Benedict XV that the greater good for Poland was to cooperate with Germany for protection against Soviet Russia, and if need be, pay the price of making concessions to its aggrieved western neighbor.⁷⁶

Pius XI encouraged his reputation as the “Polish pope,” and sincerely cherished the reminiscences of his nunciature that did not cause him pain. Shortly after his election, he sent to his favorite Pole, Józef Piłsudski, a signed portrait inscribed with personal greetings to his friend and his nation.⁷⁷ Settling into his job, he had his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo decorated with scenes from the history of Poland and an icon of the Holy Mother of Częstochowa.⁷⁸ He could be grateful even for his Polish tribulations, he claimed, which had prepared him to be a better pope. “I did not know how to be patient,” he told Cardinal Kakowski, “I learned patience in Poland. . . . I love Poland, as always.”⁷⁹ He meant these words, after his fashion, but his was the stern, paternalistic love of a father convinced he knew what was best for an immature child even though, and especially when, the child might disagree. Two months into his pontificate, he gave an audience to the Polish minister to the Vatican, assuring the diplomat that on matters touching the welfare of his second homeland he thought “not as a foreigner, but as the best Pole.” The envoy reported to his superiors that Pius was obviously fond of Poland, but added the uneasy note that “he has returned . . . with settled ideas concerning . . . [it], and as an expert on that country he is prepared eventually to take very fundamental actions that undoubtedly will be animated by a spirit of good intentions toward us but more than once might present us with an unwelcome surprise.”⁸⁰ For the next seventeen years, the great majority of its free existence as the Second Republic, Catholic Poland would enjoy the benefits and bear the trials of living with a pope who carried intense memories, good and bad, of the days he had spent in the lands of the Vistula.