Читать книгу Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter - Neal Pease - Страница 17

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From Constitution to Concordat, 1921–1925

THE BEGINNINGS OF NORMAL POLITICAL CONDITIONS in interwar Poland, or at least their approximation, had to await the end of the chaotic formative phase of independence, and so it was with the relationship of the Second Republic with the Roman Catholic Church at home and abroad. Not until the restored Rzeczpospolita had ensured its survival and more or less fixed its boundaries could it afford the luxury of attempting to decide the chief issues of church and state: the status of Catholicism within Poland, and of Poland within the Catholic world. Resolution of the first question required a constitution, while the second implied a concordat. These projects were separate but linked to a considerable degree. The constitution would fix the place of the Church in the country, define the state as confessional or secular or something in between, and provide the basis for subsequent legislation. While the constitution was, in theory, solely a Polish domestic matter, the concordat would consist of a treaty between the Holy See and the civil government of Poland devoted to religious affairs and policies of mutual concern.¹ Strictly speaking, the concordat was dispensable, but the Vatican coveted such agreements in that era. For one thing, signing a concordat amounted to a de facto recognition of the sovereignty of the papacy—no small matter in those days before the Lateran Accords—and Rome much preferred the bond of an international compact as a guarantee of Catholic interests in a given land to the unilateral laws of a government that might be changed on a whim. Upon the conclusion of these two documents, the constitution in 1921 and the concordat in 1925, the legal and diplomatic foundations of the relations of church and state in the Second Republic came into being.

Tentative, previous efforts had been made to speed the process or settle the debate at a stroke, but these had failed. In the dawn of independence, the Polish episcopate called for the establishment of the Church as the official national religion in keeping with the precedent of the Constitution of 1791, but this proposal elicited such spirited opposition from the Left and the sizable non-Catholic minority that Nuncio Ratti predicted that the famous motto Polonia semper fidelis soon might become “merely a historical memory.”² Feelers for a Polish concordat had gone out as early as 1918, but had come to nothing owing to the resistance of an unlikely tacit coalition of anticlerical politicians and a faction among the bishops of Poland. Both camps disliked the idea on principle out of hostility toward each other, fearing that any deal would mean intolerable concessions to their foes. The unfinished business of the constitution also contributed to the postponement of a concordat. The dissident bishops hoped that a favorable constitution could take the place of the concordat, granting the Church benefits without strings attached. In any event, no matter what one thought of a concordat on its own merits, common sense suggested that it should follow, not precede, a constitution that would determine the nature of the state and its fundamental stance toward Catholicism, and before long the Vatican and the Polish episcopate agreed to that order of priority.

The regulation of the ties of church and state in interwar Poland depended on the interplay of three entities: the Holy See, the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the government of the Second Republic. This was largely a dialogue of elites, as only the Warsaw regime was answerable to public opinion in any meaningful way. None of these parties saw the other members of the trio as enemies. To the contrary, all of them understood that Polish tradition and religious sentiment, and pragmatic calculations of shared interests, dictated that they maintain at least a decent working relationship. Still, each partner wanted different things out of the association, and these variations of outlook and goals made their collaboration bumpy and tense, perhaps all the more so since none could afford to let it break down. The Vatican expected the new Poland to serve the mission of Catholicism in central and eastern Europe, and expected the sometimes refractory Polish episcopate to fall into line with the agenda of the papacy. For their part, to the extent that they had a unified policy, the bishops demanded that their reborn republic grant honored status to the Church and enshrine its precepts in law, while hoping that Rome would leave management of Polish affairs to those who knew what they were doing, namely themselves. Meanwhile, the government, as governments will, sought to stay on good terms with the Church without paying too high a price in obligations or inconvenience, trying to strike the balance of mollifying the faithful without alienating the various constituencies that saw clericalism as a menace.

In fact, the Polish political order contained a surprisingly abundant number of adversaries of the Church, and the highly segmented multiparty systemadopted by the republic accentuated their importance by giving them representation and making them eligible for membership in a series of shaky, revolving-door ruling coalitions. Broadly speaking, the Left and the national minorities combated the country’s predominant religious body, and the Center and Right supported it in roughly equal proportions, with the peasant clubs occupying the middle and acting as makeweights. If, as the saying went, the government of Poland in those days was less Catholic than the Polish nation as a whole, the explanations were that the Polish political class was less pious than other Poles, and that Poland consisted of more than just the Poles. The third of the population made up of peoples not Polish and, for the most part, not Catholic had their own parties that normally voted against the interests of the Church, although for reasons of discretion they tended to let the Polish anticlericals take the lead in such debates. The hostility of the Polish Left toward Catholicism was neither unanimous nor unrestrained. All but the most extreme factions included at least nominal Catholics within their ranks and leadership, or felt the need to mute their attacks on the Church to some degree out of deference to a national institution and reluctance to offend potential Catholic supporters. The main home of political anticlericalism was the benches of the Polish Socialist Party and its breakaway wing that rallied around Józef Piłsudski. Generally suspicious of the Church, these groups favored its separation from the state and the reduction of its influence in society and education, in accord with the standard European Left and liberal agenda. A goodly share of peasant legislators ended up on the same side of the argument as the socialists, usually for different reasons. Subdivided along ideological lines, the peasants gave top priority to land reform and looked hungrily at the ecclesiastical domains. Many of them saw the Church as a villain in this litmus-test issue, and the radical Wyzwolenie (Emancipation) faction produced much of the shrillest clergybaiting of the era. The larger and more moderate Piast Party, the customary bellwether of Polish politics, furnished the key swing votes in disputes over church and state. This scarcely comforted Catholics, for the Piast outlook contained a strong streak of mistrust of the clergy as potential manipulators of the common folk. It favored lay control over education and marriage law, and many of its leading personalities qualified as unbelievers or disgruntled Catholics. Even the devout Wincenty Witos, the Piast chieftain, drew his share of attacks from Church spokesmen over the course of his career.

This left a near-majority Center-Right bloc of reliable political allies of Catholicism in Poland, anchored by the National Democrats. A declared confessional party, the Christian Democracy (Chadecja), which drew inspiration from the landmark encyclical Rerum novarum, never amounted to much in size or mass appeal. Founded only in 1919, the Chadecja struggled to pry adherents away from their habitual affiliation with more established rivals. Furthermore, the Christian Democrats encountered the same obstacles that frustrated their Italian counterparts, the Popolari. In a country where Catholicism was the norm and had at least a foothold in most political camps, the point of an avowedly Catholic party was unclear. Partly for that reason, the Church in Poland, as in Italy, saw no reason to put its eggs in one partisan basket and gave no special blessing to the Chadeks, who were relegated to the status of junior partners of the National Democrats, already identified in the public mind as the main defenders of the Polish faith.³ By default, then, the rightist Endecja of Dmowski assumed the role of standardbearer of the Catholic cause in the early years of the Second Republic despite its heritage of dubious attachment to Christian beliefs and principle. Whatever their other differences, this assortment of conservatives, nationalists, and social Catholics agreed that the Church played an essential role in Polish life and deserved a privileged place within the state.

Just as the Center and Right backed the Church, so the Church backed the Center and Right, out of both philosophical sympathy and the realistic understanding that it would find political friends in those quarters or not at all. Simultaneously flushed by liberation and unnerved by the complexion of a provisional government dominated by Piłsudskiites and socialist anticlericals, the Polish bishops urged voters in the first parliamentary elections of 1919 to elect candidates committed to defense of Christian values, a recommendation that needed no spelling out. The results were only partly successful: the Right gained a plurality, but not sufficient to form a stable cabinet. After that episode, the episcopate reverted to a stance of official non-partisanship, but there was no mistaking the political leanings of the Church and its clergy. The unicameral Constituent Assembly included thirty-two clerics, headed by Archbishop Teodorowicz, nearly all of them dependable supporters of the Right. Outside the confines of the legislature, Bishop Sapieha and Cardinal Dalbor, among other hierarchs, were well known for their inclinations toward the National Democrats, while parish priests tended, if anything, to exceed their superiors in outspoken fealty to the Dmowski party.

The belligerently rightist posture of the interwar Polish Church in the early stages of independence stemmed from a deep sense of embattled vulnerability, in sharp contrast to the imposing national reputation for Catholicity. In part, this reflected the defensiveness in the face of an increasingly secular modern culture that was common to European political Catholicism in those days, but it was also a response to conditions specific to the newly reassembled Poland. From the vantage point of the Church, its legal standing in the country at the dawn of statehood presented a dilemma of unpalatable alternatives. If the laws left over from the partitioning empires remained in force, then they preserved a network of statutes and regulations largely inimical to Catholic teachings and interests. For example, the districts of Poland formerly ruled by Protestant Germany had permitted civil marriage and divorce, and as late as 1922 the Polish bishops felt compelled to issue a pastoral letter condemning the admission of these practices in a Catholic land. On the other hand, if the law of the ancien régime did not apply, then there was no law at all, and the Church forced to depend on the goodwill of the government of the moment. At best, this meant a lack of continuity in official policy toward the Church, as each successive short-lived coalition reinvented the wheel and improvised its own ad hoc approach, in practice leaving much authority in the hands of lackluster, capricious, or corruptible local bureaucrats. At worst, the precariousness of the political balance in Poland lent credence to the fear that the anticlerical Left might gain the upper hand and that its loose talk of a secular state and confiscation of ecclesiastical lands might become reality. The Church was naturally eager to settle the fundamental questions regarding its status on the best terms possible, and as quickly as possible, before the window of opportunity afforded by a Center-Right parliament might close. These anxieties were magnified by a prevalent mentality of persecution, a habit of mistrust of state power carried over from the days of foreign rule. As a result, the political voice of Polish Catholicism and its sympathizers in this interlude was noisy, impatient, unyielding in defense of the rights and prerogatives of the Church, and caustic toward its enemies.⁴

The first serious test of strength and will concerning the Catholic Church in the civic affairs of the Second Republic arose out of the contentious agrarian question, in the course of horse trading and voting that produced a modest land reform in 1920, during the tenure of a Piast ministry. The peasant deputies who sponsored the measure naturally sought access to a fraction of Church properties for parceling out by the state, but when they pleaded their case to their colleague Archbishop Teodorowicz, they went away empty-handed. Responding for the clerical delegation, Teodorowicz expressed approval of reform in principle, but reminded his petitioners that Church holdings had been diminished sharply over the past century through expropriation and war damage and now made up less than 1 percent of the total area of the country. These professions of poverty failed to impress the peasant politicians, but they reflected the genuine concerns of an institution responsible for the support of forty thousand clergy and lay employees and sensitive to its own economic straits. So far as the Church was concerned, it was entitled to recover a share of the properties and wealth lost during the era of captivity, not to have them depleted further now that the day of liberation had dawned. In the end, the parliament put off the issue to a later day: no ecclesiastical lands would be made available for reform until an international agreement had been reached with the Holy See as part of a comprehensive settlement of church-state matters, a concordat, in so many words. In effect, round one had gone to the Church, as most of the rounds would.⁵

In the meantime, the Constituent Assembly spent two years carrying out its primary responsibility, the drafting and approving of a republican constitution, which was passed in March 1921. By its nature, the debate over the religious clauses to be written into the document opened the parliamentary floor to expression of the most fundamental and emotional opinions, pro and con, regarding the role and legacy of Catholicism in Poland. For all the spirited give-and-take of the exchanges, the outcome was predictable. The Center-Right bloc in the chamber was sufficient to have its way and fend off the impassioned calls of the anticlerical Left for the separation of church and state. In an era when separation smacked of irreligion and war against the Church, such a prospect struck the majority as contrary to national tradition and unthinkable.⁶ With the option of the secular state removed from the table, the meaningful discussion focused on working out the nuances of the inevitable official recognition of the Roman confession. The Church opened the bidding with hopes for establishment or, barring that, for acknowledgment as the “predominant religion” of Poland, but ended by having to settle for a compromise formula borrowed from the Napoleonic concordat of 1801.⁷ In its final wording, the key Article 114 declared that the Catholic faith, “being the religion of the overwhelming majority of the nation, occupies in the state a leading position among religions endowed with equal rights.” This first-among-equals language disappointed some within the clerical camp, but the fine print of the measure secured several crucial privileges for the Church that made plain that if all religions in Poland were equal, then one was more equal than the others. In the first place, by singling out Catholicism for specific mention, the document automatically set it apart from other creeds. Second, the state conceded that the Church, and the Church alone, “govern[ed] itself by its own laws” (własnymi prawami), whereas all other churches would be subject to the dictates of civil law. This provision was meant to safeguard the autonomy of the Church and to limit the scope of governmental interference in its activity. Finally, the constitution obliged the republic to reach a concordat with the Holy See to provide the basis of the coexistence of church and state. While the concordat might well have turned out much as it did in any event, by thus committing itself in advance to conclude a treaty, Warsaw yielded a certain edge in the haggling of negotiation to the Vatican, which could afford to drive a hard bargain in the knowledge that at some point Poland would have to make a deal.⁸ In sum, although the Church had not gained all it sought from the “March constitution,” it still had done well for itself. While necessarily vague, the basic law of the Second Republic treated the Church with dignity and respect, did nothing to foreclose or impede any of its aspirations to prominence in the country, and encouraged it to press forward to put flesh on the constitutional bones by completing the legal and political agenda that had been successfully begun.

Since the constitution had been regarded as the necessary precondition of a concordat, its adoption temporarily revived the topic of the treaty that would represent the next, and presumably final, stage of the normalization of church-state relations. Out of different motives, both Warsaw and the Vatican were impatient for the speedy and definitive resolution of these matters that only a concordat could provide. So far as the republic was concerned, the constitution had raised more questions than it had answered by continuing a pattern that had emerged of putting off hard decisions on ecclesiastical issues until a concordat settled them for good, and the time had come to pin down the Church on its rights and obligations. For its part, Rome would stay nervous so long as Poland stayed theoretically free to deal with the Church as it pleased, so the bond of a treaty could come none too soon for its liking. In 1921 the Polish Ministry of Religious Confessions and Public Education began a series of meetings and consultations aimed at resuming talks toward a concordat, but the project made little progress over the next three years, stalled by frequent cabinet changes and, perhaps, intermittent pique with this or that element of Vatican policy.⁹ The delays and snags made both the Polish bishops and the government testy. On several occasions in 1922, Primate Dalbor and the episcopate peppered Warsaw with sharp protests against its handling of the Church, accusing it of dragging its feet in undoing the inherited discriminatory legislation that left the status of Catholicism the “worst of all confessions” in the land.¹⁰ Cardinal Dalbor went so far as to complain improbably that so long as these statutes remained on the books, the legal standing of the Church in Poland was worse than in any other country save Soviet Russia. These hyperbolic tactics tried the patience of the Polish Foreign Ministry, which laid blame for the lack of headway toward a concordat on the demanding and contrary stance of the episcopate itself.¹¹