But the unique element in the situation of Poland, and the one that made its long-sought death impossible to achieve, was the radical distinction between the Poles as a nation and Poland as a sovereign state.
From the time of the Piast Pact of 990 with the Holy See, the Polish identity—polonicitas, or Polishness—was something more than “Frenchness” or “Italianness” or “Americanness” or “Germanness.” For Polishness was anchored not so much in the ever-shifting borders and fortunes of its territory but in that vertical configuration of the faith of the people, entwined with and expressed on the horizontal plane of their daily lives as Poles.
The orientation of Poles was to Rome. It was the same romanitas that had for so long been the means of the ascent of the Polish mind and soul to God: the joining of their practical lives and fortunes as a people to that Roman Christian ideal. That remained the central reality for the Polish nation. And that reality remained rooted in the Three Pacts—their Pact with the Vicar of Christ as overlord of Poland, their Pact with Mary as Queen of Poland, and their Pact with the Primate Bishop as Interrex of Poland.
Truth to tell, in the persons of Pius VII and Gregory XVI—which is to say from 1829 to 1846—the papacy lived up poorly at best to its responsibilities in the Piast Pact with the Holy See. Gregory in particular—who was elected through Austrian influence and was protected by Austrian arms—had such a clumsy hand and so little knowledge or understanding of what was going on that in June of 1832 he actually issued a formal encyclical roundly condemning the Polish uprising in Russian-held Warsaw.
Such papal collaboration in the partition of Poland cost the Poles dearly. But even that factor made no deep or lasting difference in their survival. For one thing, of course, Gregory XVI did not have the last word in the matter of Poland’s Pact with Christ’s Vicar in Rome. From the time that Pius IX succeeded Gregory, in 1846, each Roman Pope has become more aware than the last of the profound issues at stake in Poland.
Aside from policy changes in Rome, however—in fact, well before 1846—there had already begun what Polish historians have described as the “organic labor” of self-preservation, the silent constructive work of preserving Polishness. Poland and Polish culture lived on, because Poles as Poles lived on.
A whole new and cohesive literature came into being that celebrated Polishness and Polish romanitas. Writers who remain as unknown in other Western nations as do the Polish roots of their own democracies were among the men and women who fueled the fires of perseverance among their compatriots. Henryk Sienkiewicz was to Poles in that terrible time what playwright-cum-president Vaclav Havel came to be for Czechoslovakia in 1990. There is a long honor roll of such Polish writers—Maria Konopnicka, J. I. Kraszewski, Boleslaw Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa, among many more—who became part of the passionate refusal of Poles to give their consent to their enslavement or to see their enslavement as the extinction of Poland.
Nor was Poland’s Pact with Mary ever in doubt or in danger among the people. Never in their “organic labor” to preserve their Polishness did they neglect on special Holy Days to gather in their tens of thousands, as they have done for over two hundred years, at the Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, near Krakow, with its basilica dedicated to Mary. Never did they fail in their mass pilgrimages to Czȩstochowa monastery on their “Bright Mountain” of Jasna Góra, where the scarred icon of Mary and her infant Son remained housed. Always the queenship of Mary that such icons represented shed beams of light through the darkness of this first Polish night.
Still, without leadership and organization, it is doubtful that either fealty to Rome or the most intimate piety toward God and his holy family would alone have preserved the identity or cohesion of Poland in any practical sense as a nation. And that was where the Interrex Pact—by which the Primate Bishop of Poland was obliged to head the nation when constitutional government was suspended and political leadership failed—proved itelf as the essential element for survival.
Around the Bishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, and around what he stood for, Poles successfully erected the paradigm of Polish culture, Pacts and all. From the time of Pius IX in the mid-nineteenth century—and particularly since the turn of the twentieth century—the Polish Catholic hierarchy has been filled with Churchmen who were all Rome-oriented in their deepest core, all utterly devoted to Mary as the Queen of Poland, all furnished with a faith untouched by the wildfire storm of Protestantism or the deluge of Masonic humanism. Over the decades, tens upon tens of thousands of bishops, priests, nuns and faithful laity suffered torture, deportation, execution, enslavement and constant serfdom on their own soil. But none of that, nor all of it together, could eliminate or diminish the function of the Interrex as a primary force uniting the people in a way that seemed beyond the power of their adversaries to comprehend.
There was just one point in time when the Catholicity of Poland was almost led onto a fatal path. That moment reached its paroxysm around 1848—the year of revolution in Europe, the Springtime of the Nations—when the deep Polish night was subjected to the torture of the false and meretricious light of an illusory dawn.
Among the expatriate Polish leaders and intellegentsia, mainly in France, there arose a deep and moving conviction that Poland, in imitation of Christ himself, would be resurrected from the tomb of territorial dismemberment. It was nothing less than a national Messianism; and it developed into a fierce belief among the Polish émigrés in Paris.
The comparison they made between Poland and Christ was full-blown. Poland, they said, had died a violent death at the hands of enemies, as Christ had. Poland’s sufferings and death were redemptive, as Christ’s were. As Christ was resurrected from the dead, so would Poland be. As the Risen Christ set all men free from sin, so the Risen Poland would set all nations free from oppression. So far did the Messianists go in their febrile enthusiasm that they believed the dead Polish heroes of the past would be reincarnated, and would even develop angelic powers of moral persuasion.
The range for this Risen Poland envisioned by the Messianists would not be geopolitical in the sense that had become normal by now in Polish thinking; it would be supergeopolitical. They felt Poland would provide in microcosm a model for the new world order. And in the dreams of these enthusiasts, that world order would forever exclude the old divisive internationalism still so deeply embedded in the contemporary empire-builders of the nineteenth century—the French, the Dutch, the English, the Germans, the Russians and the Chinese.
This new Polish identity was prophesied principally by three Polish poets, each of whom was born and died within the time of Poland’s official nonexistence: Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855); Zygmunt Krasinski (1812-1859); and Julius Slowacki (1809-1849), whose verses were used to express the deep bond between Pope John Paul II and the Polish people in 1979, as they cheered him and sang with him and wept to see him when he went to Poland to issue his first direct, geopolitical challenge as Pope to Moscow. For he was theirs in a most special sense, their Interrex in Rome itself. “We need strength / To lift this world of God’s,” Slowacki’s words rang out in the sudden hush of the crowds on the eve of John Paul’s departure. “Thus here comes a Slavic Pope, / A brother of the people!”
Each of these poets insisted on the Christ figure of Poland; and each took Poland—the center of the cross formed by romanitas and polonicitas—as the point of salvation for Poles and for all human beings.
In the awful circumstances in which the Messianists found themselves, their dream is understandable as an errant offshoot of the “organic labor” of self-preservation. But at base, their Catholicism was erroneous—a fact that was pointed out to them by their countryman and archcritic the great poet, philosopher and patriot, Cyprian Norwid. There was one and only one Christ in human history; there cannot be another. There was only one cross on which a redeeming crucifixion could take place. There was only one human death and divine resurrection—Christ’s—that could have universal redemptive value. No other individual—and no nation at al
l—could be described accurately in these same terms.
In time, most of these Polish Messianists came to recognize the error of confusing Poland with Christ. Further, in reaction to their own mistake—and in a move that would have deep and long-lasting repercussions for Poland, for Polishness, for the nearly unbelievable strength Interrex would provide for Poland’s survival, and for the direct formation of Karol Wojtyla as priest and Pope—some of the Messianists formed a new religious order, the Resurrectionist Fathers.
Founded with papal approval, the vocation of the Resurrectionists was to reinterpret Polish history in an orthodox way; to preach accurately the one and only divine resurrection—Christ’s; and to prepare for that eventual day when Polonia Sacra would be called upon to play a special role in the society of free nations.
In 1866, the Resurrectionist Fathers founded the Polish College in Rome, where Polish priests could be trained. “This college,” Pope Pius IX declared, “will be mine, and I will be the ruler for these poor Poles here in Rome, since they have no ruler of their own.”
With their Catholicism screwed on straight again, and with their geopolitics firmly rooted in that bent of mind, the Resurrectionists established their Polish College fairly quickly as an indispensable place for the orthodox ecclesiastical formation of the Polish Catholic hierarchy. At a time when all of life in Central Europe was based on imperium—on the power and the dazzle of imperial majesty and glory—and at a time when not only Poland but Rome itself was stripped of its former status as a temporal power and seemed at the mercy of the imperium, the Polish College purified itself, and the many priests who served or studied or stayed there, of all the retrograde instincts that had led the Messianists so far astray.
All in all, it may well be true that without the Polish College in Rome, there would have been no Interrex. And it is true almost beyond question that without Interrex, there would have been no Second Polish Republic; and there would have been no survival possible against the cruel and bloody tides of Nazi genocide and Stalinist enslavement. There would have been no Poland.
What happened instead was that the Polish College in Rome influenced and helped to form the generations of Polish bishops and priests who themselves could be broken neither in spirit nor in will by the vilest brutality of their oppressors. Nor would they allow the will of Poles or their spirit of Polishness to be broken.
The twentieth century that dawned upon Poland would prove to be a new crucible of suffering and hope for her people. By then, the Church in Poland was peopled with priests and bishops who were to become the fashioners, the teachers and the exemplars of twentieth-century polonicitas, of an untainted Polish romanitas, and of a georeligious and geopolitical mentality that was as unparalleled in their world as the First Polish Republic had been in the world of the sixteenth century.
These were the men who were the direct ecclesiastical and religious ancestors of Karol Wojtyla.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Poland’s Bishop Primate and Interrex, Edmund Cardinal Dalbor, saw fully two million of his people forcibly conscripted to fight the war of their Russian, Austrian and Prussian oppressors. By war’s end, 220,000 Poles serving in the armies of Austria had been killed, as well as 110,000 in the German Army, and 55,000 in the Russian Army. In the territories that had been Poland before the partitions, two million buildings and two thirds of all railroad yards and stations were destroyed. In all, $10 billion in Polish property was sacrificed in somebody else’s war.
Finally, in the teeth of all that destruction, the Austrian forces were in retreat from Polish lands by the beginning of 1918, and a German-Austrian defeat was at last on the horizon. Even before the November 11 armistice, Cardinal Dalbor set in motion a whole series of political events, and a cascade of new hope for Poland.
Early in 1918, in his mandated role as Interrex, Dalbor assembled a Regency Council composed of Archbishop Alexander Kakowski, Prince Zdzislaw Lubomirsk, and Dr. Jozef Ostrowski. The Polish delegates to the Austrian parliament took advantage of the fast-developing situation to declare their independence from Austria as citizens of a freed Poland.
Though Poles had not been permitted to govern themselves for over a century, they had by no means forgotten how. On November 7, 1918, a provisional Polish government was formed in Lublin. On Armistice Day itself, November 11, the Regency Council dissolved itself and transferred power to the commander of the Polish Legions, Jozef Pilsudski. Pilsudski in turn issued a decree declaring Poland a republic—the Second Polish Republic—with himself as provisional head of state. Within barely two months more, a general election for a constitutional Polish parliament was conducted.
Hardly had this cascade of hope poured out, however, when a shadow of what lay in store cast itself over Poland. In February of 1919, with the new Polish Sejm barely elected, Lenin’s Bolshevik government in Russia made a bid to annihilate the Second Polish Republic before it could consolidate itself. Lenin flung an army of 800,000 men into the effort. With a three-to-one superiority in artillery over the defending Poles, Bolshevik Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was soon advancing to the very gates of Warsaw.
Even in the face of certain disaster, Cardinal Primate Dalbor would not allow Poland to be denied again. He did the one thing the Pacts of Polishness dictated. Before the decisive battle was engaged, in August 1920, he led his bishops in a formal rededication of the Polish nation to Mary as its Queen. He made for the Second Polish Republic the very same pact of trust that had been made by King Jan Kazimierz for the First Republic just before the Swedes were unexpectedly driven out of Poland in the seventeenth century.
Sure enough, it had the same results. Despite all the odds, the Poles routed Lenin’s superior army and pursued its remnants well beyond the Vistula River and the eastern borders of Poland. The date of Tukhachevsky’s unexpected rout and defeat was August 15—the Feast of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven. And, as any Pole will declare to this day, that victory was a miracle—the “Miracle of the Vistula.” That miracle was the effect of Mary’s protective intercession with God, who finally decrees the outcome of all human battles. Military strategists certainly had no better explanation. And, in the eyes of the faith that has always been Poland’s privilege, there was no doubt about it.
Lenin’s army or no, the Poles never had paused in their efforts to put their Second Republic into working order. On February 20, 1920, with the Russians still pounding at them, the newly elected Sejm adopted a constitution and proceeded to erect an orderly system of government for Poland.
On the international front, meanwhile, Poles hadn’t lost any of their ideals or their ability to see the consequences and benefits of international alliances freely formed. Jozef Pilsudski proposed a federation of nations led by Poland and to include Finland, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. It was a brilliant proposal, designed to block all advances of Lenin’s Bolshevik state, and to stabilize Central Europe. Had Pilsudski’s plan been carried out, in fact, there would have been no World War II.
That was not to be, however. The ideological animus against Poland as an integral Catholic power in Central Europe was still vibrant and would prove to be as costly to the world as ever. The devilment of English and French Masonry raised its head again—personified now in David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of wartime Britain and ardent Freemason, and in France’s Georges Clemenceau. Lloyd George went so far as to falsify the line of demarcation between Poland and the new Russian state—the so-called Curzon line—agreed upon in December of 1919 by the Allied ministers. Lloyd George illegally and dishonestly shifted that line to include the Lwów region of Poland in Soviet territory.
In the early months of all this anticipation and activity, as World War I was clearly in its last phase and Cardinal Primate Dalbor was working toward the establishment of the Second Polish Republic, Polish quartermaster Karol Wojtyla retired from the Austrian Army Headquarters in Krakow. With his wife, Emilia, and their young son, he took up residence in the industrial town of Wadowice, some
fifty kilometers southwest of Krakow. There on May 18, 1920, just three months before Poland’s reconsecration to Mary and the “Miracle of the Vistula,” a second son, Karol, was born to the Wojtylas. He would grow into young manhood in the brief twenty-one-year springtime of Polish independence, and under the influence of some of the most extraordinary Churchmen ever to be assembled at the same moment in a single nation.
The men who set the tone for Poland and Polishness during Karol Wojtyla’s boyhood and youth following Cardinal Dalbor’s death were led by Cardinal Primate August Hlond, whose policies were clear, concise and of a piece with Poland’s geopolitical ideal rooted in the Three Pacts. It doesn’t take much to see that those policies are of a piece, as well, with the exhortations of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in the eighties and nineties.
Poles as a nation, said Hlond, were not merely to believe in some passive fashion what the Church teaches, but were “to go into action with the Church … with a mighty Catholic offensive on all fronts…. We want parochialism to die, and what is the truth of the spirit and the substance of the supernatural life to live.”
Like the influential Resurrectionist Fathers at the Polish College in Rome, Hlond consistently and energetically voiced the modern ideal of Polishness, and of Polish romanitas, purified of any retrogressive tendencies or longing for imperial glories, and certainly purged of any messianic errors. But he was firm, as well, in the conviction that temporal life and spiritual life cannot be walled off from one another without grave consequences.
With an eye cocked toward the Masonic humanism that had been so costly for Poland, and toward the seemingly everlasting effort to malign and isolate both Poland and Rome, Hlond insisted that the Church is not “a hothouse plant,” or “a museum filled with people retarded because they practice holiness” or “a great fortress surrounded by barbed wire … occupied solely with staving off attacks.”
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