THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN POLAND 161bishops possessed little room for political manoeuvre. In conditions prevailing
from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, it was most unlikely that any church-
man of independent mind would ever have been promoted to the episcopate. In
the last decades of the old Republic, most of the bishops were in the pay of
Catherine II. In the nineteenth century, the hierarchy was closely bound by ties
of class and family to the ruling elite of the Empires. They were congenitally
biased against radical politics of any sort. In addition, they were well aware that
open expressions of dissent could swiftly deprive them of all influence. The fate
of Bishops Zaluski and Sottyk, deported to Russia by Repnin in 1767, stood as
a constant reminder for would-be martyrs; whilst the sight of their vacant sees,
handed over to civilian administrators, made anyone who valued his position
think twice. The See of Cracow was kept vacant in this way by the Austrians for
thirty-eight years, in consequence of the expulsion in 1831 of Bishop Karol
Saryusz Skorkowski (1766—1851). The See of Warsaw was occupied for only
eight years between 1829 and 1883, the See of Wilno for only seventeen years
between 1815 and 1918. Only one of fifteen suffragan bishops envisaged by the
Russian Concordat of 1847 was actually installed during its currency. Still more
humiliating was the Tsarist practice of inserting blatentely disreputable political
appointees, unapproved by Rome, into the highest positions on the episcopal
Bench. Catherine II's imposition of Gabriel Podoski as Primate of Poland was
matched by her elevation of Stanislaw Bohusz-Siestrericewicz (1731-1826), an
ex-Lutheran chaplain of the Russian army, to the metropolitan Archbishopric
of Mogilev, or by Nicholas I's installation of one Jozef Siemiaszko (died 1868),
an unbridled careerist, as Uniate Bishop of Wilno and chief administrator of the
Uniate College. Appointments of this sort were clearly designed to destroy the
integrity of the Church. Most Polish bishops, therefore, lived in an atmosphere
of thinly veiled intimidation. Many succumbed. Some, especially in Prussia,
were able to reach a working compromise with their political masters. Ignacy
Krasicki (1735—1801), Bishop of Warmia and eventually Primate of Poland, con-
trived to divide his time between the Court of Stanistaw-August, where he was
a prominent literary figure of the Polish Enlightenment, and the Court of Berlin,
where he was a frequent house guest of the Prussian Kings. In a later age,
Archbishop, and later Cardinal, Aleksander Kakowski (1862-1939), served dur-
ing the First World War as a willing figure-head of the Germans' Regency
Council. The number of Polish prelates who chose the path of defiance was not
exorbitant.
Yet the episcopate did make its contributions to the roll of patriots and mar-
tyrs. In the repressions that accompanied the January Rising, the least expres-
sion of dissent could provoke the direst consequences. In 1863, Bishop Adam
Krasinski (1810-91) of Wilno was summarily abducted to twenty years' exile in
the depths of Russia for daring to make an offer of mediation between the Tsar
and the insurrectionists. Archbishop Zygmunt Felinski (1822-95) of Warsaw,
the personal nominee of Alexander II, suffered a similar fate for raising the ques-
tion of Polish autonomy in a private letter to the Tsar that was leaked to the