Introduction

Abstract

The history of any nation involves a number of existential challenges which figure as turning points in the life of that nation. In the case of Poland, we may plausibly enumerate (at least) five such existential challenges. The first came in the ninth and early tenth centuries, when the spread of Christianity increasingly resulted in still polytheist Poland being encircled by Christian states, especially Germany, which rejected the right of polytheist Poland to exist. Duke Mieszko adopted a pragmatic approach, viz., to accept baptism and convert his nation to Christianity, thereby ending its pariah status. The second challenge was one for the Christian Church, rather than for Poland as such; this was the Reformation of the sixteenth century. But it brought such dissension into Poland that it may also be considered a challenge for Poland. That challenge was met with the Counter-Reformation, which reversed most of the gains of Protestantism and put the Catholic Church, as it is now called, on a firmer foundation. The third challenge for Poland came in the following century, when the Ottoman Turks were pushing into Europe, driven by a religious mission to bring Islam to Europeans. When Vienna was under an Ottoman siege for the second time and in dire peril, the Polish King, Jan III Sobieski, rushed to Poland with 25,000 men and led an international force, which defeated the Ottoman soldiers at the Battle of Kahlenberg, remembered as one of Europe’s most decisive battles.

The era of the partitions, through which Poland lost its independence between 1795 and 1918, may be counted as the fourth existential challenge faced by Poland. There were, to be sure, brief periods during which Poland was resurrected in truncated, autonomous form – as the Duchy of Warsaw as a French satellite, as the Congress Kingdom of Poland with the Russian tsar ruling also as King of Poland, and as the Duchy of Posen as an autonomous unit with Prussia – but independence as such was lost for the 123 years of the partitions. Moreover, these years also involved pressure and, at times, also persecution of the Church in the Prussian and Russian partition zones, and even in the Habsburg Empire, a Catholic country, there were pressures brought to bear by Emperor Joseph II, whose commitment to Enlightenment thinking resulted in various restrictions being imposed on the Church.

The fifth existential challenge began with the genocidal occupation of Poland by the Nazis during the years 1939–1945, in which Poles were used as slave labor and Jews were either turned into slaves or exterminated. But no sooner did World War Two end than the Polish nation found itself sliding into a communist dictatorship, which was fully established by 1947. The communists restricted what might be said or written, imposing a censorship which only finally eased somewhat in the 1980s, repressed political pluralism, and, in the early years, put away thousands of Polish citizens for “crimes against the state.” The communists also confiscated much Church property, arrested and imprisoned some of its leading bishops, including Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland, who remained incarcerated from 1953 to 1956, and took over the Church’s chief news organ. During the years 1939–1956, the Church had to fight just to survive, and conditions remained difficult even after that. It was only with the emergence of the independent trade union “Solidarity” in summer 1980 that, as already mentioned, the Church’s role was considerably transformed.