7. KOSCIOL: The Roman Catholic Church in Poland
The prime concern of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, as in any other
country, has always lain with the cure of souls. The first duty of the clergy has
been to propagate the Faith, to administer the sacraments, and to tend the quick
and the dead. Their main energies across the centuries have been directed more
to the individual lives of the faithful than to the public life of the state and
nation. Seen from the Catholic point of view, the Polish Millennium has wit-
nessed an unrelenting struggle against ignorance and sin - a struggle in which
the eternal values of religion had always to take precedence over the temporary
considerations of the prevailing social order. To this way of thinking, where the
salvation of one soul is thought to cause greater rejoicing in Heaven than the
survival on this earth of the entire Polish nation, the Church has traditionally
claimed to stand aloof from mere politics. It is a point of view that must be
appreciated even by those historians who might claim to understand the
Catholics' purposes more profoundly than the Catholics do themselves.
Yet it would be idle to suppose that the affairs of the Church could ever be
satisfactorily abstracted from the secular world in which they exist. Even the
most idealist Catholic would concede that the progress of the soul is achieved
through the' tribulations of the body; whilst materialist commentators find lit-
tle difficulty in explaining the spiritual preoccupations of the Church in terms of
its power, wealth, and status. The Roman Catholic Church has always been
part of the world of Polish politics, whether it likes it or not. Not only in its cor-
porate existence as a wealthy, ancient, and respected institution, but also
through the actions and attitudes of its priests and people, it has exerted a pow-
erful influence on all political developments. What is more, the history of the
Roman Catholic Church provides one of the very few threads of continuity in
Poland's past. Kingdoms, dynasties, republics, parties, and regimes have come
and gone; but the Church seems to go on for ever.^1
As a result of the Partitions, the ancient ecclesiastical Province of Poland was
rent in pieces. The six dioceses of Galicia were subordinated to the
Metropolitan Archbishop of Lwow. Six dioceses incorporated into Russia were
subordinated to the Archbishop of Mogilev, who thereupon acted as
Metropolitan to all Roman Catholics in the Empire. Five dioceses were trans-
ferred into Prussia. The metropolitan role of the See of Gniezno which in 1795
found itself in Prussia, in 1807 in the Duchy of Warsaw, and in 1815 back in