THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN POLAND 163anti-Jewish utterances of the chauvinists. Christian charity and loyalty to Rome
both combined to raise them above the petty concerns of national politics, and
yet to provide them with a distinct moral viewpoint on all the important issues.
In the course of the twentieth century, as the stock of Polish Nationalism and
Polish Socialism has been steadily discredited, they and their successors have
gradually emerged as the strongest and most independent element of the Polish
intelligentsia. Without them, the Roman Catholic Church could never have
aspired to its present role as the bastion of non-communist culture, and the
focus of the loyal opposition.
In some ways, however, extreme forms of Polish nationalism did impinge on
religious life. There had always been a strong temptation to make Catholicism
the exclusive touchstone of national identity, and there were many clerics, as
well as popular demagogues, who gave way to it. The dangers were obvious.
When a Catholic apologist proclaimed that 'there are only as many good Poles
as there are good Catholics', he probably thought that he was making a contri-
bution to public morality.^13 In effect, he was gratuitously insulting all the non-
Catholic Poles, and all the non-Polish minorities of Poland. In a country where
Roman Catholics formed only two-thirds of the population, it was quite
unprofitable to talk in this way. Even so, there was always a section of public
opinion for whom the Roman Catholic Church was not sufficiently patriotic.
The use of the Latin mass, and the obedience of the Polish See to the Roman
Curia, were both points which gave rise to demands for a breakaway erastian
Church. In Poland, itself, these demands never generated widespread support.
But it is curious to note how the schismatic Polish National Church, founded in
1875 in the USA (in reaction to the English language policies of the Irish clergy
in America), has been adopted and encouraged by the political authorities of
People's Poland. For a time after the Second World War, the communists hoped
that official support for the Polish National Church might cause a serious rift in
the ranks of Polish Catholics. But the split did not materialize on any significant
scale, and the propagation of the vernacular liturgy by the Second Vatican
Council has removed any chance of serious disruption.^14
Another curious and persistent schism was instanced by an excess not of
nationalism, but of traditional devotionalism. The Order of the Perpetual
Adoration of the Virgin Mary, known as Mariawici (Mariavites), was founded
secretly in Ptock in 1893 by the followers, male and female, of Felicja Kozlowska
(1862-1921), a former Clarissite nun. Curiosity about Mother Felicja's visions
quickly turned to scandal when the Order unilaterally elected its own Bishop.
Rumours of orgiastic practices, and of the Mother Superior's quasi-hypnotic
control over her fanatical 'slaves of Mary', led to open conflict. In 1906, twelve
people were killed at Leszno near Warsaw, when the local peasants recaptured
a Mariavite church by storm. In Rome, the Mariavites' miracles were dismissed
as hallucinations, and the Sect was formally excommunicated. But it survived.
For most of the founder's lifetime, it was protected by the Tsarist authorities.
Thereafter, it inherited a considerable fortune in property, and split into two