THE BULWARK OF CHRISTENDOM 131The Catholic Reformation was bound to take these circumstances into con-
sideration. Although the Vatican entertained high hopes of using the Republic
as a strategic base for its counter-offensive both against Protestantism and
Orthodoxy, the Roman hierarchy in Poland was obliged to act with great
discretion. In the critical period, in the sixth, seventh, and eighth decades of the
sixteenth century, the militant Bishops did not possess the support of either King
or Sejm, and could not use state institutions to enforce their wishes. The
Tridentine spirit was first observable in Poland in 1551 at the Synod of
Piotrkow, where Stanislaw Hozjusz (Hosius, 1504-79), Bishop of Warmia, pre-
sented the celebrated Confessio Fidei Catholicae Christiana (A Christian
Confession of the Catholic Faith), which was to propel him towards his
Cardinal's hat and to the presidency of the Council of Trent itself. Yet in that
same year, when the Bishop of Cracow tried to take action in the ecclesiastical
courts against a Calvinist nobleman, it was found that the provincial dietine
took to arms in the defendant's defence. In 1552, when the Bishop of Przemysl
tried to prosecute one of his canons, Stanislaw Orzechowski (1513-66), who
had taken a wife in defiance of the rule of celibacy, it was found that the Sejm of
the kingdom sprang to protest. Thus from the outset, inquisitorial methods
were avoided. From 1573, when the Confederation of Warsaw was instituted,
the principle of toleration was inviolate, and even in the Vasa period when both
Court and Sejm were actively Catholic, could only be defied in isolated
instances. After 1603, the Index was regularly circumvented, and the prosecu-
tion of noblemen who protected condemned heretics made little headway
against the prevailing ethos of the noble democracy. Ineluctably, the accent was
on persuasion, not coercion, and in particular on education. To this end,
Cardinal Hosius introduced the Society of Jesus to Poland in 1565, with their
first college at Braunsberg.^10 In the following years, Jesuit colleges were opened
at Pultusk (1566), Wilno (1569) and Poznan (1573), and in the east as far afield
as Polock, Dorpat, Orsza, Kiev, Perejasiaw, and Witebsk. The construction of
scores of churches, schools, and monasteries in the Baroque period bore witness
to their lasting success. Conflict with the Protestants was, at the most, sporadic,
and rarely violent. Attacks by Catholic students on a Lutheran funeral or on a
Calvinist pastor, or in 1640 the demolition of the Protestant college in Wilno in
a Catholic riot, belong to the exceptions. The Concors discordia (The
Agreement to Disagree) lasted at least till the mid-seventeenth century, and was
undermined more by the tensions of wartime than by any deliberate change in
policy. Although to the Jesuits' way of thinking, tolerance was generally
regarded as a vice, there were loyal Catholics who thought otherwise. Mikolaj
Leczyca (Nicolaus Lancicius, 1574-1653), the provincial of the Jesuits in
Lithuania in the reign of Wladyslaw IV, was the son of a Calvinist printer, a con-
vert to Catholicism, and a noted moderate. Mikolaj Lawrynowicz, a
Benedictine author, wrote in 1639 that 'beautiful harmony is born from con-
trary things, as on a lute made with different strings. ..; the minds of Catholics
are actually sharpened and tempered by them, like iron against stone.'