Brian Porter-Szücs
Faith and Fatherland Intermingled
Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński once observed that “nowhere else is the union of Church and nation as strong as in Poland.” This would certainly seem to be the case: 99 percent of all children in Poland are baptized, 92.8 percent of all marriages are accompanied by a church wedding, and between 90 and 98 percent of the population will answer “Roman Catholic” when asked about their religion. The rituals of the Church have punctuated the calendars of the Polish peasantry for centuries, the clergy have long enjoyed respect and authority, and Catholic iconography has provided an aesthetic vocabulary for art, music, and popular culture. While language may tie Poles to other Slavs, religion gives them a mark of distinction that they are quick to cite whenever lumped together with “Eastern Europe.” Poland’s Catholicity gives meaning to its past by making the nation dependent upon the Church (as the receptacle for true national identity) and by making the Church dependent upon the nation (as the Eastern bastion of the faith). This mutual entanglement of faith and fatherland gives specific meaning to the past and helps determine what is remembered and what is forgotten.
Unfortunately, some versions of history silence as much as they reveal. There has been a great deal of religious diversity in Poland over the centuries, and advocates of a distinctly Catholic narrative of Polish history must perform some delicate maneuvers to hold up their story against alternative ways of ascribing meaning to the past. The Church is deeply rooted in Poland, but the linkage between Catholicism and an ethnic identity – not to mention a politicized understanding of national belonging – is more tenuous than is usually assumed. The equation of Pole with Catholic is supported by a deeply ingrained but highly selective telling of national history.
Past Religious Diversity
The Republic of Poland-Lithuania (as the country was known until it was destroyed at the end of the eighteenth century) contained a hodgepodge of Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Armenian Catholics, and even some Muslims, making it one of the most religiously diverse countries in Europe. For a period in the mid-sixteenth century Protestants enjoyed a majority in the Polish Senate, and at the high point of the Reformation there were about 1,000 Protestant parishes in the Republic compared to about 3,000 Roman Catholic parishes. In 1573, during the so-called Warsaw Confederation, the assembled nobles of the Republic even issued a declaration promising, “We who are divided by faith will keep peace among ourselves, and not shed blood on account of differences in faith or church.” In passages like this, “we” were the nobility of the entire republic, with Protestants and Catholics alike considered compatriots. In other words, this is not an example of tolerance for a confessional minority, but an unusual affirmation of a religiously heterogeneous community.
Catholics today tend to believe that the Polish nation is and always has been fundamentally loyal to the Catholic Church, mostly by defining non-Catholics as tolerated foreigners living in a Polish Catholic country. For example, the historian Bohdan Cywiński recognizes the importance of the Reformation in Poland, but still insists that the national past was “almost entirely Catholic” and that the Catholic Church was “the element supporting the entire Polish edifice.” Cywiński emphasizes that Protestantism was limited to the nobility and the townsmen, while “both society and the state remained Catholic.” By implication, those who joined the Protestant movement did not belong to (or by converting had renounced) Polish “society.”
The Counter-Reformation
During the Counter-Reformation Catholics tried to take control of Poland’s past as well as its present to both minimize religious diversity within the PolishLithuanian Republic and to write Protestantism out of the country’s history. In 1658 we see this first expulsion of non-Catholics (the members of the Polish Brethren denomination), and a decade later it became a crime for Catholics to convert to other faiths. In 1673 the Sejm (the Polish Parliament) made it impossible for non-Catholics to be ennobled; in 1716 a decree banned the construction of non-Catholic houses of worship and three decrees in 1718, 1736, and 1764 specified that only Catholics could be deputies to the Sejm and employees of the state administration. The real focal point of the Catholic narrative of Polish history, however, is the nineteenth century, in which Poland was partitioned and occupied by Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire. Michael Bernhard writes, “The Church was often the only institution that had a Polish character. Thus Polish national consciousness came to be strongly tied to a Catholic religious identity.” ]
The Nineteenth Century—A Mixed Picture of Faith and Fatherland Links
To be sure, at key moments, defending the Catholic Church and defending the nation seemed synonymous. But the bond between faith and fatherland in Poland was more complicated than it might appear at first glance. In general, religion was far less important to “national survival” in the nineteenth century than is usually assumed. Even during the worst years of denationalization, the Catholic Church was never the only space within which Poles could express and cultivate their ethnicity. Newspapers, magazines, and books in Polish continued to appear, and many of them (particularly during the 1860s and 1870s) were liberal and anti-clerical. Plays and operas in the Polish language were available to both urban and rural residents, and the stage both propagated and defined national identity. Even a Polish-language commercial life remained vibrant. In other words, the Catholic Church was just one of the many sites for cultivating Polishness during the period when there was no Polish state.
Moreover, official Catholic institutions tended to oppose the patriotic cause throughout the nineteenth century. In his inaugural sermon as archbishop of Warsaw in 1815, Jan Pawel Woronicz affirmed the legitimacy of Alexander I by characterizing the Russian tsar’s authority as an emanation of divine providence. Meanwhile, secular authorities in the Russian-controlled Polish Kingdom (the grandiloquent name for the nominally autonomous territories around Warsaw and Lublin) were far more problematic from the Catholic Church’s perspective. Stanislaw Potocki, the minister of religious denominations and public enlightenment for the Polish Kingdom from 1815 to 1820, was famous (or infamous) for his book, Journey to the City of Darkness, a biting anticlerical satire that portrayed priests as ignorant and backward. With people like Potocki governing in Warsaw, the Catholic hierarchy often found Petersburg a more reliable source of support. For example, when the government of the Polish Kingdom tried to institute civil marriages, the bishops successfully appealed to the tsar to scuttle the plan. The situation was similar in the Prussian partition, where a conservative monarch provided security for Catholics who, in the 1830s and 1840s, confronted liberal Polish nationalists on one side and liberal German nationalists on the other. And in Austria few members of the Galician clergy could see a reason to oppose the Catholic Habsburg emperor in favor of a revolutionary national movement.
Only a handful of priests supported the uprising against Russian rule in 1830, and they acted in defiance of the Catholic hierarchy’s strong condemnation of the rebellion. In 1863, when Polish nationalists once again revolted, Catholic Church authorities were only somewhat more supportive. Perhaps as many as 15 percent of the parish clergy acknowledged the rebels as the legitimate national government, but the bishops remained unanimous in urging the rebels to lay down their arms and consent to Russian rule.
The Twentieth Century—Consolidation of the Faith and Fatherland Link
The strong ideological link between faith and fatherland emerged in full force only at the start of the twentieth century, and it would be many decades before it became unquestioned common sense that Poles were necessarily Catholic. Any remaining uncertainty regarding the equation between Pole and Catholic was made irrelevant by the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The postwar boundaries were drawn so as to exclude almost all Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians; the Germans and most of the remaining Ukrainians were forcibly expelled; and nearly all the Jews perished in the Holocaust. After 1945 Poland did indeed appear monolithic – for the first time in its history. It seemed only natural, therefore, that the anti-Communist opposition began to draw upon religious imagery in the late 1970s and that several bishops were called upon to participate in the roundtable negotiations that brought an end to Communism in 1989. Thus, in the minds of many Poles today, their nation has always been religiously and ethnically homogeneous, even though a great number of “foreigners” (Jews, Protestant Germans, Greek Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians, etc.) once lived within the boundaries of the Polish state. After World War II those aliens were gone, and it became easier than ever to promote an exclusivist version of Poland’s past.
The Twenty-First Century—Erosion in the Faith and Fatherland Link
For many Catholics the indissoluble bond between faith and nation represents an ideal that is all too far removed from the actually existing Poland. Nearly two-thirds of Poles support the death penalty, despite the Church’s oft-stated opposition to this form of punishment. On the touchstone issue of abortion, again despite Catholic opposition, overwhelming majorities (from 75 to 82 percent) are willing to approve of the practice if the mother’s health is in danger, if the child would be born severely handicapped, or if the pregnancy was the result of rape. In general, Polish attitudes toward sexuality hardly fit the image of a devout Catholic population. In a survey from 2007, 63 percent agreed that “it is entirely normal that people in love have sexual relations; marriage is not necessary for this.” Although religious practice is notoriously hard to measure (insofar as Poles, like Americans, routinely overstate the frequency with which they go to church), it seems clear that well under half of the population attend mass regularly. A figure of 40 percent church attendance in 2008 would be extraordinary in any other European country, but it is far from the stereotype of universal piety.
The idea of Poland as a homogeneous Catholic nation, then, is simultaneously a claim about Poland’s past and a demand that a particular model of national Catholicism be maintained in the present. A Polish catechism from 1999 lamented, “About 90 percent of the people in our country, if asked whether they believe in God, will say yes. Beneath these words, however, hide various meanings.”
Father Tadeusz Rydzyk and Radio Maryja
Among those committed to upholding an image of Poland as homogenously Catholic is Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, founder and director of the Radio Maryja network, who often repeats the slogan, “In the Gospels the word ‘tolerance’ does not appear.” He describes liberal parliamentary democracy as “a monstrous totalitarianism, probably worse than the last one, worse than Communism,” because it forces on the nation a set of alien, cosmopolitan values. Rydzyk’s world view could be summed up in a proclamation from 2002: “To adjust to the world is to collaborate with evil.” His Catholicism is one that eschews moderation, accommodation, and dialogue, because he occupies a world where the Church is under constant attack by enemies (both open and concealed) and where the faithful must hold to a firm, uncompromising faith in order to survive. Rydzyk perceives an ongoing battle with evil in which the forces of Satan have gained control of virtually all social and political institutions, infiltrating even the Catholic Church itself in the form of liberal priests and theologians. Rydzyk is hardly marginal; he enjoys the support of several bishops and a sizable minority of Poland’s Catholic laity. Radio Maryja, which includes a mixture of devotional material and extremist right-wing political commentary, is heard by 5.9 million people a week (including 1.4 million who listen on a daily basis), and his newspaper, Nasz Dziennik, has a daily print run of 250,000.
Among those affiliated with Father Tadeusz Rydzyk’s Radio Maryja network, the mythology of Christian victimization at the hands of Jews continues to thrive. In his circles, Archbishop Jósef Życiński of Lublin (the most outspoken critic of Radio Maryja in the Polish Episcopate) is nicknamed “Żydciński” (Jew-ciński). For his part, the Archbishop considers Rydzyk’s particular form of national Catholicism a “theological pathology” because it “treats God and the nation as two equal components of Catholicism.” Elsewhere he issued a call to his compatriots to “get away from the provincial mentality whose representatives are prone to almost believe that the Lord God is a Pole.”
Critics of Radio Maryja
When confronted with Rydzyk’s rants about anti-Polish, anti-Catholic plots, most Poles today (particularly most younger Poles) see nothing but laughable paranoia. The six million or so people who occasionally listen to Radio Maryja constitute a small minority of the approximately 35 million Catholics in Poland. Among young Catholics the station’s popularity is even lower: 42 percent of Radio Maryja listeners are over 65, and another 19 percent are between 52 and 64. Almost half have only an elementary education. Perhaps more important, most members of the Catholic hierarchy now realize (thanks to regular run-ins with the international media) that they should avoid spouting conspiratorial views in public. On several occasions the bishops have even spoken out against anti-Semitism.
Writing in Tygodnik Powszechny in 2003, Sebastian Duda complained that Radio Maryja’s prominence made it very hard to spread the Gospels because too many people assumed that Rydzyk represented the true face of the Church. This was absolutely not the case, Duda insisted; in fact, he considered Radio Maryja’s views to diverge from mainstream Catholicism on many key points. Not least of these was the us/ them mind-set that the station propagated. Of course Catholicism had enemies, Duda acknowledged, but “the answer of the Christian should not be struggle, but circumspect and courageous dialogue from which no one should be excluded….The basic task of the Church is not the ruthless condemnation of persecutors, but the proclamation of Christ to all people.” Along the same lines, Father Maciej Zięba wrote in 2003, “The simple scheme of us/them, friend/enemy, good/evil is theologically false, for each of us is a sinner.”
The Marian Cult
It is no coincidence that Tadeusz Rydzyk calls his station Radio Maryja. When Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978 he announced that the slogan for his papacy would be Totus Tuus (Totally Yours). The “you” to whom he was addressing this commitment was the Virgin Mary, Blessed Mother, Queen of Heaven, Handmaiden of the Lord, Mater Dolorosa, Woman of Valor, Paragon of Chastity, Supreme Mediatrix, and (certainly not least) Queen of Poland. For many, the Marian cult virtually defines Catholic spirituality. Since at least 1656, when she was crowned Queen of Poland by King Jan Kazimierz, the Virgin has stood at the very center of the Polish homiletic tradition and has served as an object of deeply felt devotion for countless ordinary believers. Few Catholic homes in Poland lack a reproduction of the Virgin of Częstochowa.
It was the siege of Jasna Góra near the town of Częstochowa in 1655 that propelled Mary to the very center of Catholic devotion in Poland. During a time of domestic chaos and foreign invasion that came to be called “the Deluge,” a Swedish army laid siege to the fortified monastery of Jasna Góra, which possessed an ancient icon of the Virgin that was reputed to work miracles. The battle of Częstochowa, as a victory by Catholic Poles over Protestant Swedes at a Marian shrine, had obvious symbolic power. Publicists loyal to King Jan Kazimierz took full advantage of this victory, and it became the war’s turning point. After peace was restored, and against the backdrop of the Counter-Reformation Church’s effort to entrench orthodox Catholicism in what had been a notoriously pluralistic and heterodox country, the king staged an elaborate ceremony (attended by 150,000 people) at which the icon of Częstochowa was crowned “Queen of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Prussia, Mazovia, Samogitia, Livonia, Smolensk, and Chernigov.” From this point Jasna Góra became the country’s leading site of Catholic pilgrimage and devotion, and the Virgin of Częstochowa would remain the most familiar image in the repertoire of national symbolism. From this story comes one of the central elements of the Polish Marian cult: the Virgin as the military protector of the Polish nation.
Even a casual traveler to Poland will notice the pervasive Marian cult: today there are more than 800 Catholic shrines in the country, and 700 of these are devoted to the Virgin. (Sixty are devoted to Jesus and 56 to assorted other saints.) The most important of these shrines, the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa, was visited during the interwar years by about 1.5 million pilgrims annually, a figure that increased to 2.4 million by the early 1980s and 3.5 million by the start of the 21st century. Thus, Marian worship is almost invariably perceived in Poland as a national devotion. With her emphasis on service, selflessness, sacrifice, and suffering, Mary is deployed to encourage conservative forms of femininity, and conversely, challenges to those norms are seen as attacks on the nation. Even today Mary is called upon to save Poland from its foes, be they Swedes, Turks, Russians, or the temptations of modernity.
Conclusion
In early 2002 the mass-market weekly Wprost ran an article entitled “A Schism in the Church,” in which the author described a growing gap separating the Roman Catholic Church from what the author called “the Toruń Catholic Church,” referring to the city where Radio Maryja is based. The magazine’s cover captured the tone of the piece with an illustration showing Father Tadeusz Rydzyk strangling Primate Józef Glemp with a microphone cable. Archbishop Tadeusz Goclowski called the article “brutal” and said, “It is not permitted to behave in that way. It is not permitted to write that the Church is divided into the Toruń Church and some other sort of Church.” Goclowski defended this stance, however, by arguing that Rydzyk’s group was merely a “pathological phenomenon on the organism of the Church,” and not a breakaway sect. No matter how much Church leaders talk about unity, the animosity between supporters and opponents of Radio Maryja has grown stronger and stronger.
If there are indeed two branches of Polish Catholicism today, which better exemplifies the traditions of the Church, and which is in a better position to determine the Church’s future? There is no doubt that Radio Maryja represents a minority of Poland’s practicing Catholics, and an even smaller minority of the overall population. Only 17 percent of Poles surveyed in mid-2008 said that they ever listened to Radio Maryja, and of these, 33 percent said that they did not like what they heard. Of all Poles, 46 percent had a negative opinion of the station, and only 18 percent praised it. In another poll only 14 percent considered Father Rydzyk trustworthy and 66 percent said he was untrustworthy—figures suggesting that he is the most unpopular public figure in post-Communist Poland.
On the other hand, as one moves away from the fringes of the Catholic population (those who identify as Catholic but attend mass sporadically) and toward the most devout, support for the “Toruń Church” increases steadily. Among priests, about 50 percent listen to Radio Maryja and read Nasz Dziennik regularly. The Catholic Episcopate is also divided: there are enough bishops in Rydzyk’s corner to ensure that he is not effectively restrained, but also enough opponents to generate occasional official rebukes of his extremism.
If we move from survey data to history, it is hard to deny that Rydzyk embodies several trends with deep roots in Polish Catholicism. His emphatic Marianism is probably more in line with the Polish homiletic tradition than is the Christological approach of the Catholic intelligentsia. On the devotional level Rydzyk promotes frequent recitation of the rosary, just as the Virgin herself commanded during her 19th-century apparitions. The conspiracy theories and conflict-centered worldview propagated on Radio Maryja would have been standard fare for any interwar Catholic periodical, and the anti-Semitic commentators on the station would have found a reasonably large audience among Polish Catholics throughout most of the 20th century (though perhaps not in the 19th or 21st). So we are left with a dilemma: a large majority of Polish Catholics find Radio Maryja distasteful or even repugnant, yet it has at least as much claim on the Catholic tradition as its opponents.
Some might wish for a Catholicism that would, once postulated, generate one and only one set of predictable beliefs among all believers, but that will never be. At the same time, though homogeneity is unattainable, it is possible to close off some options, to push some ideas and actions outside the bounds of acceptable belief and behavior. For example, a mere century ago one could still find many Catholics in Poland who would insist that democracy was incompatible with their faith; now almost two-thirds of the Polish clergy identify democracy as the best of all possible political systems, a figure that is actually higher than among the general population. Among those who remain skeptical about democratic politics, few indeed would openly argue that it is irreconcilable with Catholicism. This form of cultural realignment is usually glacially slow, but it is nonetheless omnipresent and inexorable.
Those Catholics in Poland today who argue that xenophobia should be recognized as a violation of the commandment to love one’s neighbor are attempting to generate just such a reconfiguration of the limits of the acceptable. That a significant minority of Catholics still find it quite easy to state that the Bolshevik-Masonic-Jewish-Liberal conspiracy is plotting Poland’s demise indicates that this reconfiguration has not yet been completed. That a solid majority considers such claims outrageous indicates that the process is well under way.
Edited excerpts reprinted with permission from Brian Porter- Szücs, Faith and Fatherland; Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Brian Porter-Szücs is professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.