Reconquest, Reconstruction, Resumption: Churching Poland after the Second World War

Abstract

This article’s point of departure is a simple but remarkable statistic. During the 1940s—the darkest period in the history of Poland’s Roman Catholic Church and a time when thousands of churches across Europe were reduced to ruins—the total number of Roman Catholic churches in Poland rose dramatically. In 1937, there were 7,257 Latin-rite Catholic churches in Poland; by 1950, there were 10,652, an increase of almost 50 per cent.¹ The main source of this growth was the expropriation of several thousand ‘post-German’ churches, most of them also ‘post-Protestant’, in the Recovered Lands (Ziemie Odzyskane), which were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. These acquisitions, constituting a third of all church buildings in postwar Poland, dwarfed the loss of Catholic churches in Poland’s former eastern territories, now incorporated into the Soviet Union. An additional factor in the expansion of the Catholic Church’s physical infrastructure was the vigorous pace of postwar reconstruction. Although Poland’s Communist regime lacked the enthusiasm for repairing and erecting churches that was demonstrated by Christian Democratic governments in western Europe, it nonetheless facilitated the rebuilding of the vast majority of Catholic houses of worship that had been destroyed during the war.² As Michael Meng has observed, Catholic churches were an integral part of the historic reconstruction of cities such as Warsaw, in sharp contrast to the omission from Warsaw’s postwar landscape of Jewish prewar synagogues, none of which were rebuilt until the 1980s.³ A significant number of new Catholic churches were also built in the first years after the war, though the rate was well below interwar levels.⁴ This stream of restoration and new construction continued through the peak years of Stalinism. In 1955, the Cathedral of Christ the King in Stalinogród (Katowice), the largest cathedral in Poland, was completed and consecrated, three decades after construction had started.

The spectacular expansion of the Polish church’s physical infrastructure after 1945 did not mean that all Catholics enjoyed a surplus of usable worship space. In areas that had witnessed especially severe wartime destruction as well as those where the postwar population grew especially rapidly, parishioners struggled for years with unmet needs. But even for the many Polish Catholics who had access to more churches closer to home in the Stalinist era than in the interwar period, the sudden availability of thousands of newly acquired, newly rebuilt or newly completed churches generated its own set of challenges.

Perhaps the greatest of these challenges, and the one that will be the focus of this article, was the need to absorb the prewar and wartime German past into a postwar Polish future. German legacies were most obvious in the case of the post-German churches, Protestant as well as Catholic, in which Polish Catholics in the Recovered Lands re-created communal religious practices. How would parish communities composed of recent migrants establish a sense of connection to and ownership of sacred spaces that were completely unfamiliar, which often had never witnessed Polish-language devotional practice or even the celebration of a Roman Catholic mass? But the German past also intruded, in even more contentious and difficult ways, in processes of church construction and reconstruction. Some of the areas that witnessed the most vigorous church building activity were regions in which the overwhelming majority of native inhabitants had ‘passed’ as German during the war but were ‘rehabilitated’ or ‘verified’ as Poles after 1945.⁵ How could these collective experiences, which provided a sense of solidarity at regional level, be reconciled with normative Polish-national memories of the war?

This article will draw on a combination of church and state archival sources, diocesan publications and the church-affiliated press, and published memoirs to explore how Catholic clerics and laypeople navigated these challenges, generating an ostensibly homogeneous religious community out of populations who were in the aftermath of the Second War often encountering their sacred spaces as well as their neighbours for the first time.

I. Reconquest

Comparing side-by-side two religious maps of Europe, one showing the religion of the majority of inhabitants of various regions in 1600, the other showing the religion of the majority of inhabitants in 2000, an observer would be impressed by how little changed over those four centuries. To be sure, such maps are deceptive in that they fail to illustrate what were sometimes quite dramatic eradications of religious minorities, which often formed local-level majorities in areas too small to be visible on continental maps (the Holocaust being the most extreme and lethal of such transformations). These maps also fail to show new local-level majorities created by twentieth-century migration, in particular local Muslim majorities in urban areas. But the overall stability of Europe’s religious map—and in particular the demographic distribution of Protestants and Catholics—is nonetheless striking.

There is only one large-scale, immediately visible exception to this image of confessional continuity: the lands that constituted the eastern quarter of Germany before 1945 and the western and northern third of Poland after 1945. In the final months of the Second World War and the months following its conclusion, across an area roughly the size of Ireland, the largely Protestant population of these lands fled or was expelled and an almost exclusively Roman Catholic population took its place. This massive demographic upheaval was primarily driven by ethnonational rather than purely confessional considerations: almost half of the ethnic Germans forced to emigrate from current-day Poland, the Czech Republic and south-eastern Europe were Roman Catholic.⁶ But the mass forced migrations at the end of the Second World War nonetheless resulted in a dramatic enlargement of the territory in which Catholicism was the dominant religion. Not surprisingly, leaders of the Catholic Church in postwar Poland often spoke of the change in providential terms. In the mid-1950s, Zygmunt Szelążek, the apostolic administrator of Gorzów, a sprawling jurisdiction covering what is now north-western Poland, referred to the ‘Polish waves’ that swept over the Recovered Lands after 1945 as having been animated by ‘the will of God’.⁷ Bolesław Kominek, the apostolic administrator of Opole (Upper Silesia) and later Wrocław (Lower Silesia), also looked back with awe on the results of this confessional demographic upheaval. In a memoir penned twenty years after the end of the war, he described how ‘the gigantic Protestant wave that had moved eastwards over whole centuries was, in a single moment, thrown back to the west […] It unfolded before our eyes like some kind of historical nemesis.’⁸

The mass transfer of Protestant churches to the Roman Catholic Church was neither instantaneous nor uncontested. The first step in this process was the appropriation of these buildings by the state.⁹ The previous owner of most Protestant churches, the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union, was deemed an inherently German institution that ceased to have any further legitimate claims after the country’s Germans were expelled. Another Protestant denomination, the Polish-speaking Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, presented itself as the natural heir of previously German Protestant churches in areas such as Upper Silesia and Masuria, where Polish Protestants lived in sufficient numbers to make plausible a local revival of Polish-language Protestant worship. State authorities sometimes responded favourably to these claims. What had been a flagship German-speaking Protestant church in central Katowice, for example, was turned over to Polish-speaking Protestants in 1947, after briefly being used for Roman Catholic worship at the end of the war.¹⁰ But such victories were exceptional. On the whole, the Church of the Augsburg Confession struggled to maintain control of even its pre-existing infrastructure. Several churches with a history of Polish-language worship ended up being transferred to Roman Catholic control in the immediate aftermath of the war.¹¹

The pattern was similar for other Christian denominations that sought to compete with the Roman Catholic Church in laying claim to post-Protestant church buildings. In the city of Wrocław (formerly Breslau), for example, the Polish National Catholic Church, a small Old Catholic denomination that rejected the authority of the pope, was given control of the prominent Church of St Mary Magdalene. The state turned over several other houses of worship in the city to the Orthodox or Greek Catholic (Uniate) churches to address the needs of migrants from those communities displaced from south-eastern Poland.¹² But like the Church of the Augsburg Confession, these other denominations not only lost out to the Catholic Church the overwhelming majority of the time in the competition for former German Protestant church buildings, but also sometimes saw their own church buildings transferred to the Catholic Church. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland gained control of a total of eleven Mariavite churches, thirty-six Orthodox churches and ninety-two Greek Catholic churches.¹³

This significant transfer of property by a Communist regime to the Roman Catholic Church might seem surprising. But as Michael Fleming has persuasively argued, a shared interest in Poland’s ethnonational homogenization made state and church natural allies in many respects, especially in the newly acquired western and northern territories.¹⁴ While Communist officials were certainly not eager to enhance the independent power of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, they saw formal adherence to Catholicism as a useful marker of Polishness and suspected religious minorities of being inherent threats to the nation. Clerical lobbyists knew how to press this button. One Roman Catholic priest who had migrated to Masuria told a local state official that the Catholic Church should take over all post-Protestant churches. ‘Every Protestant church’, he argued, ‘is a former testing ground of Germandom.’¹⁵ Smaller religious groups, such as the Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, were the object of even more intense suspicion from both church and state. A pastoral letter issued by the Polish bishops in August 1947 condemned ‘the destruction of the unity of the nation by sects’.¹⁶ Polish state security services closely monitored activity by Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom they described as manifesting ‘hatred against the government’ and receiving financial support from America.¹⁷ They noted approvingly the ‘strong struggle of the Catholic clergy with this sect’.¹⁸

Such rhetoric reveals not only a substantial overlap in the nationalizing aims of the Communist regime and the leadership of Poland’s Roman Catholic Church but also shared anxieties about the unpredictable preferences and behaviour of lay Catholics uprooted from their previous communities and from the customs and habits associated with those communities. It was one thing to secure sufficient buildings to house Roman Catholic parishes in the newly settled western and northern territories. It was quite another to ensure that in-migrants adopted these houses of worship as their own. Might they not instead be drawn to alternatives, perhaps especially novel religious groups that were not (unlike historic denominations) associated with hostile nations or states? As implausible as such a scenario might seem in retrospect, the spectre of mass conversions by the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh-Day Adventists reflected the multifaceted fears of social disintegration that engulfed postwar Polish society.¹⁹ Indeed, one of the supplemental arguments used by Catholic prelates in Pomerania in demanding that they be permitted to quickly take possession of all post-Protestant churches was that houses of worship that were left vacant for too long might become unsanctioned gathering places for sects, which could then rapidly gain a significant local following.²⁰

There were a number of ways in which incoming Catholics might be made to feel at home in newly acquired post-Protestant churches. One approach was to address directly the sense of acute, traumatic loss that many migrants felt with regard to their old parishes, especially those who had left at short notice and under duress in fleeing Poland’s lost eastern territories. As Bolesław Kominek rhetorically asked in a pastoral letter to parishioners newly arrived in Opole Silesia,

Do the faithful who recently left their homelands in the East not remember tenderly, as they departed for the West, reverently kissing the walls of their parish churches, where they received baptism, where they received the sacrament of marriage and other sacraments, saying farewell to the graves of their ancestors in the parish cemetery?²¹

While converted Protestant churches in the western and northern territories could not offer refugees replicas of their old parish churches, it was possible to cultivate a sense of continuity by keeping previous communities more or less intact, including their original parish priests. The apostolic administrator of Opole assured his parishioners that the church ‘welcomes the opportunity to settle repatriate priests [those migrating from the eastern territories] with their former parishioners, to the extent that local conditions permit’ and that groups of repatriates should be allowed to maintain their ‘customs, songs and traditions’ wherever they settled together in significant numbers.²² But Kominek and other church officials believed that encouraging repatriates to treat parish churches in the west as parishes-in-exile serving specific communities from the east was a dangerous strategy in the long run. Only two months after his original expression of sympathy for refugees seeking the maintenance of particularist traditions, Kominek issued a rather sterner message on the need for ‘unified pastoral care’, reflecting recent discussions in the episcopate’s pastoral commission. It declared ‘inadmissible’ the ‘creation of parishes made up of different parishioners on the same territory’ and insisted, ‘Even tendencies in this direction, whether from the side of the clergy or from the side of the faithful, must be condemned.’²³ In addition to dividing the faithful into quasi-ethnic groups based on their geographic origins, treating new parishes in the west as re-creations of specific old parishes in the east could only address the needs of the minority of migrants who relocated as intact groups. It was not a viable approach for the substantial majority of in-migrants who moved into these territories as individuals or families from communities scattered across prewar Poland.

Forging a sense of local community among individuals of such widely heterogeneous origin seemed to require a more generically confessional and national integration strategy. In-migrants would not find new churches that evoked the exact look and feel of their previous home communities. But they should recognize their new parishes as unmistakably Roman Catholic and Polish and thus ‘theirs’. Even this level of familiarization, however, was a daunting task. As Bishop Szelążek noted, post-Protestant churches lacked many of the elements needed for ‘normal Catholic life’, such as vestments, liturgical vessels, images, banners, reliquaries or stations of the cross.²⁴ These could be acquired and deployed over time, and special dispensations from the primate ensured that sacramental activity could carry on in the meantime.²⁵ But this involved an awkward balancing act in the church’s messaging to parishioners. On the one hand, laypeople were warned that many of those preaching what seemed to be Christianity but in somewhat unfamiliar ways were actually heretics intent on destroying both church and nation. On the other hand, they were assured that it was perfectly fine, for now, to worship in recently Protestant church buildings without some of the familiar trappings of the Latin-rite liturgy.

While Polish Catholic in-migrants were most often concerned with how post-German and post-Protestant churches and their contents could be adapted to their own devotional needs, another approach was also evident in these encounters. Rather than insisting on instant familiarization with and appropriation of local material culture, clerics and laypeople could express curiosity about and appreciation for aspects that might be culturally unfamiliar. In a circular written in the spring of 1946, Teodor Bensch, the apostolic administrator of the diocese of Warmia (former German East Prussia), instructed incoming Polish priests to take care to preserve any church-related artifacts (zabytki) ‘regardless of the confession that these relics previously served’. He emphasized that ‘these objects, to the extent that they are of no meaning for [current Catholic] worship, may still have enormous scholarly and artistic value’.²⁶

Bensch’s top-down preservationist steer might suggest an assumption that Polish in-migrants would otherwise not take pains to preserve local religious artifacts. But unprompted interest in and respect for newly discovered churches and their contents were certainly evident among newcomers to the region. An interesting example can be found in the autobiographic account of Stanisław Dulewicz, a former teacher from Galicia who assumed the role of mayor of the town of Darłowo (Rügenwalde) in western Pomerania at the end of the war. Dulewicz devoted several paragraphs of his account to an inspection that he, along with an in-migrant Polish priest, conducted of the town’s prominent St Mary’s Church.²⁷ The church’s history, including its role as the burial place of Eric the Pomeranian, an early fifteenth-century ruler of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, offered some plausible opportunities for a Polish-national narrative of continuity and reclamation: early rulers, including Eric, were of largely Slavic-speaking origin. But Dulewicz’s description was not polemical or an exercise in making national claims. It instead involved a painstaking inquiry into the unique physical aspects of the church and their artistic qualities: the altar, the organ, the pews. He noted matter-of-factly that the source for this detailed local knowledge was conversation with the previous German Protestant pastor.²⁸ Such accounts of collegial torch-passing should not overshadow the trauma and sense of radical rupture that accompanied the forced migrations of 1944 to 1947. But they are a salutary reminder that the strangeness of the buildings and landscapes of Poland’s western and northern territories was not just an impediment to the establishment of new religious communities. It could also spur and shape a dynamic, interactive process of re-rooting.

Was the extraordinary attempt to resettle millions of Catholic in-migrants across a vast, previously almost exclusively Protestant landscape a success? If the goal was the cultivation of a relatively stable and homogeneous society and the avoidance of sectarian fragmentation—a goal broadly shared by Poland’s Catholic episcopate and Poland’s Communist regime—then the project was undoubtedly successful, one might even say spectacularly so. But if one imagined that the Recovered Lands might provide the perfect forge for the generation of an especially vigorous and militant form of Polish Catholicism, then the second half of the twentieth century offered disappointing results. In the dioceses that had been inhabited almost exclusively by Protestants before the war, both the breadth and the depth of Catholic religious practice have consistently lagged behind the national average and often even behind far more urbanized and industrialized parts of the country.²⁹ However intoxicating the Catholic advance from the Vistula to the Odra had been, the replanting of Catholic religious life in these regions was a complex and daunting endeavour.

II. Reconstruction

One of the best-known photographic images of Warsaw at the end of the Second World War depicts the desolate landscape of the Jewish ghetto following its obliteration by the Nazi regime. The image powerfully conveys the utter destruction of the built environment of the Jewish community and, by implication, the annihilation of Warsaw’s Jews. But the fate of the single intact building that looms in the background—the Church of St Augustine—is also worth noting. While the building had been confiscated by German authorities, ending its use as a centre of Polish-language religious activity, the structure itself survived and would return to use as a Catholic house of worship after the war. The fate of the Church of St Augustine reflected a more general pattern in German-occupied Poland, notwithstanding significant regional and local variation. Even as the Nazi regime sought to cripple the activities of the Polish Catholic Church, imprisoning or executing hundreds of priests and nuns, its general approach to church buildings was to appropriate and ‘Germanize’ rather than destroy.

This contrast between treatment of church personnel and treatment of physical church structures was most dramatic in the Wartheland, a province composed of territory annexed directly to the Reich where the persecution of the Catholic Church was especially ferocious. Four out of every ten diocesan priests in the Wartheland were shot or perished in concentration camps, and Polish-language devotional life was almost completely suppressed.³⁰ And yet church buildings themselves were treated with considerable deference. For example, the cathedral in Gniezno, built in the fourteenth century and historically the seat of the primate of Poland, was declared in 1942 to be ‘a German architectural monument and site of German art’ that had been ‘freed of all Polish defacement’.³¹ At the end of the war, when the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art published an account of the damage that the Nazi occupation had caused, it emphasized the ‘annihilation of human beings’ resulting from the targeting of the Polish intelligentsia as well as ‘acts of confiscation and of robbery’ of movable works of art. There was only a brief mention of several church buildings that had been destroyed by the occupiers.³²

While deliberate demolition of Catholic churches by Nazi authorities was relatively rare, the church’s physical infrastructure did sustain considerable damage from bombardment during the campaigns of 1939 and 1944/45. Of the roughly 6,000 Catholic churches in prewar Poland situated on territory that remained in postwar Poland, 559 were destroyed during the war. But, as noted earlier, rapid reconstruction of most of these churches combined with a wave of new construction had erased any net loss by 1950. The pace and prioritization of church reconstruction were clearly influenced by symbolic/aesthetic considerations as well as by pragmatic concerns about minimal provision of worship space for a given population. The interplay of these two factors fuelled major regional differences. At one extreme were the parts of the Recovered Lands that had been overwhelmingly Protestant. As discussed in the previous section, the Catholic Church in these areas actually encountered a glut of post-Protestant church buildings. Not surprisingly, given the availability of existing houses of worship, only a minority (about 30 per cent) of churches in these areas that had been destroyed during the war were rebuilt in the immediate postwar era, between 1945 and 1950.³³ At the other extreme was the diocese of Warsaw, with Poland’s largely demolished capital city at its centre. Of the eighty churches in the diocese that had been destroyed during the war, fifty-nine were rebuilt by 1950.³⁴

The symbolic impetus to prioritize church reconstruction in the capital was clear. Destruction of churches in Warsaw was more often the result of deliberate action by the Nazi occupiers, and their reappearance in the city’s landscape therefore functioned as a gesture of national defiance and reassertion. Just as state authorities exhorted the entire Polish nation to contribute to the overall reconstruction of Warsaw, so the Catholic episcopate issued parallel calls to the faithful across Poland to donate to rebuilding the capital’s churches. These appeals were most often framed as an abstract national obligation, though they sometimes invoked more personal connections stemming from origins (Warsaw’s destruction had resulted in a substantial diaspora) or previous sojourns in the city. The apostolic administrator of Warmia, for example, reminded the region’s Catholic inhabitants that ‘many of us are children of Warsaw. Many of us were educated and spiritually suckled in the well-known churches of the capital. We cannot allow that those churches should remain forever walls of tears and memories.’³⁵

And yet the region of postwar Poland that actually witnessed both the most extensive destruction of churches and the greatest number of church reconstruction projects was not the capital city. It was Opole Silesia, the one part of the western and northern territories that was already overwhelmingly (90 per cent) Catholic before the war.³⁶ The majority of this prewar population remained in the region after undergoing ethnic ‘verification’, even as hundreds of thousands of Catholic in-migrants moved into the region. As a result, the loss of so many church buildings during the Soviet offensive in the late winter/early spring of 1945 was experienced as a genuine shortage, threatening serious disruption of the rhythms of local religious life. The challenge of church reconstruction thus became a regular topic in the pastoral circulars of the apostolic administration as well as on the pages of Gość Niedzielny, the organ of the diocese of Katowice, which served as the primary Catholic periodical circulating in both Upper and Lower Silesia.

The essential quality that reconstructed churches were meant to possess was a sense of permanence, the antidote to the widely lamented ‘temporariness’ (tymczasowość) that permeated life in the Recovered Lands. In his pastoral letter of August 1946, Bishop Kominek had emphasized this urgent need for embedding ritual in permanent spaces: ‘Is a community supposed to hold services for years wandering through cramped restaurant halls or other places that are inappropriate for Holy Offerings?’³⁷ Coverage in the Catholic press of specific building projects tended to focus on the raw practicalities, describing in detail the process of procuring scarce building materials—glass, concrete, paint and, above all, bricks.³⁸ There was also sometimes reference to achieving a minimal degree of interior physical comfort through, for example, the planned installation of pews and heating mechanisms.³⁹ By contrast, little attention was devoted to architectural design or the exterior visual impression that would be made by new churches. While the frequent mention of brick as a building material suggested that most reconstruction was in the brick neo-Gothic style ubiquitous in Upper Silesia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was not much discussion of stylistic choices, of the benefits or drawbacks of faithful reconstruction of previous buildings versus embracing new designs. Occasional references to national heritage tended to be vague. One article in Gość Niedzielny, for example, noted somewhat cryptically that there were ‘valuable Polish monuments’ among the ruined churches of Silesia. The author’s point was that such identification of national heritage facilitated material assistance for reconstruction from the provincial government.⁴⁰

The most emotive accounts of church reconstruction tended to concentrate less on the details of what was being rebuilt and more on who was providing the money and the physical labour for the project. Funding for church reconstruction drew on a wide range of sources. There were donations from Polish émigrés, duly noted in the Catholic press.⁴¹ Church authorities also looked to the state for financial support, which responded with limited but significant funding.⁴² On the whole, however, church reconstruction was understood and narrated as a story of voluntary communal solidarity, of local Catholics coming together behind a common project. Rebuilt churches were frequently described as ‘the pride of the whole parish’.⁴³ In the working-class settlement of Giszowiec, it was noted that ‘men, women and youth worked together on construction […] selflessly and spontaneously’.⁴⁴ In the more rural community of Piotrowice, it was emphasized that inhabitants exhibited ‘a very great social spirit’.⁴⁵ Bishop Kominek, in a letter to the minister of public administration thanking him for a state subsidy, emphasized that

The donation granted to the damaged parishes [by the state] was in every case an incentive for the parishioners’ generosity, which meant that the value of the reconstruction work in each case effectively exceeded several times or even tenfold the amount of the donation received.⁴⁶

It might be tempting to discount such references as a predictable romanticization of organic local communities. But as contemporary commentators were keenly aware, the local ‘communities’ being invoked here were themselves incipient and fragile projects. Many parishes in Opole Silesia—and the vast majority of parishes across the western and northern territories as a whole—were composed entirely of in-migrants with no previous connection to the locality or to their fellow parishioners. And those parishioners who were locally rooted and had existing ties to a parish and to fellow parishioners had highly precarious standing in the national community: almost all such native inhabitants had spent the war classified as Germans (Reichsdeutsche, or German citizens, to the west of the prewar German–Polish frontier; Volksdeutsche, or ‘ethnic’ Germans, to the east) and were often still enmeshed in suspenseful processes of national verification or rehabilitation (respectively). To the extent that these varied groups of parishioners donated time and money to a common local construction project, their actions were understandably seen not as an expression of pre-existing local solidarity but as laying the groundwork for such sentiment among hitherto mutually suspicious constituencies. The account of church building in Piotrowice, for example, emphasized the shared efforts of ‘people of the most varied personal and political convictions’ and the equal contributions made by refugees from Wolyń (Wolyniacy) and settlers from central Poland.⁴⁷

Inter-parochial contributions—donations from parishes that escaped heavy wartime damage to those that experienced the worst destruction—highlighted even more explicitly the theme of different pre-existing communities coming together to forge an aspirational postwar community. Such solidaristic collections were generally made at a diocesan/regional rather than national level; the national-level appeals made for Warsaw were a conspicuous exception. In the early 1950s, for example, the diocesan curia in Warmia distributed circulars noting that although many parishes had been able to repair wartime damage due to the ‘initiative of pastors and the extraordinary generosity of faithful Catholics’, there remained a number of ‘poor parishes on our [diocesan] territory’ for which ‘the securing of ruined or damaged churches through their own means is simply impossible’.⁴⁸

In the apostolic administration of Opole, Bishop Kominek assumed the role of matchmaker between donors and recipients, explaining to relatively well-off parishes why other localities required particular assistance. The latter parishes were generally not only those that had experienced the most physical damage during the war but also those with ‘an immigrant population’ described as ‘mixed, from various parts of Poland’.⁴⁹ The parishes asked to make donations—both financial and in the form of ritual objects such as chalices, vestments and reliquaries—were, in turn, generally the larger parishes of the industrial region, which both suffered less wartime damage and had more demographic continuity.⁵⁰ As Kominek would have been well aware, these transfers would thus have been viewed by many contemporary residents as donations from (former) ‘Germans’ to ‘Poles’.⁵¹ The aim was precisely to overcome such wartime labels and confirm mutual recognition as members of the same postwar national community.

As with the mass transfer of Protestant churches to the Roman Catholic Church, the enlistment of both in-migrants and verified/rehabilitated wartime Germans in common church-reconstruction projects could be seen in many ways as a success. Over the following two generations, a stable and reasonably well-integrated Polish society was consolidated in the Recovered Lands and in neighbouring areas in which wartime Germans now cohabited with wartime Poles. Indeed, verified Reichsdeutsche and rehabilitated Volksdeutsche would be cited in the 1960s and 1970s as the models for a Polish devotional exceptionalism that could resist the corrosive effects of industrialization and urbanization.⁵² And yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, many of the children and grandchildren of those who had just been promoted as exemplars of a modern Polish Catholicism reclaimed German ethnicity and emigrated. Cultivating a certain sense of shared community among a diverse population of natives and in-migrants had proved, at least in many cases and to a certain degree, achievable. The aspiration of permanence was more elusive.

III. Resumption

Having discussed the massive impact that the Second World War had on Poland’s Catholic churches, it might seem perverse to revert to bracketing the war years as a pause in a story of incremental continuity spanning the interwar and postwar years. But to do justice to the range of experiences across the Polish lands, it is important to consider cases in which the late 1940s did involve a certain resumption of trajectories from the 1930s put on hold by the German occupation. Some of those cases—for example, in pockets of the General Government that escaped significant destruction of the built environment—could involve a sense of long-term continuity, even of timeless stasis, within the boundaries of the confessional community. But my focus here will be on a case that did involve significant changes, but changes that were conceived as a resumption of prewar transformations-in-progress rather than rupture generated by the war itself. The single largest church-building initiative in Poland during the immediate postwar era was the erection of the Cathedral of Christ the King in Katowice, a project begun in 1927 and completed in 1955. The story of the construction of the largest cathedral in Poland, situated at the heart of the country’s most urban and industrial region and consecrated at the height of the Stalinist era, might seem to have offered a natural focus for the broader narrative of Polish-Catholic resilience in the face of the Communist regime’s consolidation of power. The cathedral’s history has instead remained relatively obscure, a matter of, at best, regional significance. But this obscurity and this regional orientation are themselves revealing of important dynamics in postwar Poland.

The diocese of Katowice resulted from the redrawing of frontiers following the Upper Silesian plebiscite of 1922. With the award of a significant part of the plebiscite zone to Poland, the Roman Catholic Church followed the standard practice of harmonizing diocesan boundaries with state boundaries, severing what was now Polish Upper Silesia from the vast diocese of Breslau and creating a new bishopric centred on Katowice. The design for a new cathedral, chosen by a committee of university professors and church officials from several dozen submissions, was austerely neoclassical with a sandstone facade.⁵³ It was not the most daring choice, especially in a city that witnessed a flowering of modernist architecture in the 1920s and featured interwar Poland’s tallest skyscraper. But the design was nonetheless a clear departure from the ubiquitous brick neo-Gothic churches that defined Upper Silesia’s ecclesial landscape. It was also in harmony with other neoclassical buildings going up in the same neighbourhood in the 1920s, such as the massive building housing the Silesian Sejm, the regional parliament. The cathedral—named, like so many church buildings during the pontificate of Pius XI, after Christ the King—was only partially completed by the outbreak of the war.

It was hardly surprising that the diocesan curia was keen to finish the half-built structure after the end of the war. But with much of Poland lying in ruins and hundreds of prewar parish churches needing reconstruction, devoting massive resources to a new church was also a bold and, arguably, an imprudently ambitious move. During the interwar period, the Silesian provincial government and various civil-society groups had provided significant funding for the early stages of construction.⁵⁴ Postwar state authorities also provided some support but were predictably less forthcoming, owing not only to the regime’s ideological mistrust of the church but also to genuine limitations in resources.⁵⁵ Completing the cathedral would therefore require a massive grassroots fundraising drive, one coming on top of existing appeals to the faithful to donate money to the reconstruction of parish churches as well as to the care of refugees, orphans and the homeless.

In the autumn of 1947, the leadership of the diocese nonetheless initiated just such a campaign, under the direction of Father Rudolf Adamczyk.⁵⁶ Exhibiting a zeal that might raise the eyebrows of seasoned fundraising professionals today, Adamyczk and his colleagues threw down the gauntlet to the Catholic inhabitants of the diocese, challenging them to view completion of the cathedral as ‘their personal cause’ and make ‘a modest sacrifice to that goal’. If 100,000 out of the diocese’s 1.2 million parishioners committed one hundred, fifty, or even twenty złoty per month, Adamczyk proposed, the cathedral could easily be completed.⁵⁷ Another exhortation in Gość Niedzielny pointedly noted that the fifty złoty that parishioners were being asked to donate each month was the cost of a large beer.⁵⁸ Yet another article, published a year later, chided Silesians for letting the completion of their cathedral lag even as Catholics in Congo were forging ahead with their own cathedral. Not so subtly exploiting a sense of racial hierarchy, the author asked, ‘It will be interesting who builds their cathedral faster: Africa in Brazaville or Silesia in Katowice?’⁵⁹ This spirit of competitiveness was further cultivated by the publication in the diocesan newspaper of parish-by-parish donation figures.⁶⁰ And if straightforward offerings were not sufficient, the diocesan leadership was happy to deploy supplementary fundraising methods. A raffle held in the building of the diocesan publishing house in the autumn of 1947 gave away prizes such a sewing machine, a typewriter, a radio, a camera and an accordion.⁶¹

It was an impressive and in many respects successful drive. By the end of May 1948, more than 4 million złoty had already been raised from parishioners, suggesting that tens of thousands of them had duly denied themselves a large beer for the sake of the cause.⁶² Construction forged ahead, and the cathedral was consecrated in 1955, with the bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Częstochowa presiding due to the recent banishment of the bishop and auxiliary bishops of Katowice. But the diocese had taken on considerable additional debt to cover the cost of completing the cathedral. Paying off that debt required further rounds of fundraising from parishioners and the parish clergy even in the years after the cathedral’s consecration. The leading historian of the diocese, Jerzy Myszor, has plausibly blamed much of this financial shortfall on the Communist regime, which promised funding (in return for a lowering of the profile of the cathedral’s planned dome) but never provided it, as well as on pro-regime diocesan officials who were allegedly guilty of mismanagement and outright corruption during the exile of the bishops.⁶³ It is less plausible, however, to think of the saga of the Cathedral of Christ the King as exclusively a story about Communist obstruction of grassroots religious enthusiasm. Its trajectory, after all, bears some resemblance to the fate of another Cathedral of Christ the King—the first iteration of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool, designed by Edwin Lutyens. That project, even more massive and ambitious than the cathedral in Katowice, had been launched in 1933, also fuelled by the contributions of working-class parishioners, and had been making slow but steady progress until the Second World War. But postwar privation and rising costs were sufficient, even in the absence of a hostile authoritarian regime, to lead diocesan authorities in Liverpool to delay the resumption of construction for a further decade, then abandon it altogether in favour an alternative, more modest and much cheaper design.

While the Cathedral of Christ the King in Katowice did, by contrast, achieve postwar completion, it provided a very low-profile victory for the church. The erection of the cathedral is rarely if ever cited as an example of Polish Catholicism’s resilience in the face of the consolidation of Communist power. A number of reasons could be offered for this obscurity. The awkward circumstances of the cathedral’s final consecration certainly played a role. If the opening had happened a year later, presided over by Bishop Stanisław Adamski after returning from his banishment, it might have crystallized into a symbolic moment of defiance by Poland’s Catholic Church. The cathedral’s neoclassical design also could be said to have placed it in something of an aesthetic no man’s land: it represented neither a comforting recreation of a historic landscape, like the reconstruction of Warsaw’s eighteenth-century Old Town or Wrocław’s Gothic Cathedral Island, nor an exciting modernist experiment, like the Le Corbusier-inspired Ark of the Lord in Nowa Huta or the Church of the Divine Mercy in Kalisz.⁶⁴

But another, perhaps even more decisive reason for the failure of the cathedral of Katowice to become a symbol of postwar Polish Catholicism was the fact that its construction was clearly and consistently promoted as a regional rather than a national cause. Cathedrals are inherently regional projects since they are centres for a regional (diocesan) unit of ecclesiastical administration. And, as we have seen, the broader agenda of church reconstruction was also generally framed in terms of regional rather than national solidarity. But the rhetoric employed in appeals for donations to the Cathedral of Christ the King was nonetheless striking in its exclusive invocations of regional identity and pride. Father Adamczyk announced the resumption of construction as ‘a question of the prestige of the Silesian people’. Should not ‘the richest region in Poland’ have ‘the most beautiful cathedral’?⁶⁵ His further exhortations reiterated the status of the cathedral as ‘a monument to the religiosity and gratitude of the Silesian people and at the same time the pride of the Silesian diocese’.⁶⁶ The theme of ‘gratitude’—specifically gratitude for divine protection during the war—would likely also have been read by contemporaries as a subtle reference to the regional particularism of the project. The distinctive wartime experience shared by almost all inhabitants of the diocese of Katowice, after all, was being classified as German on the Deutsche Volksliste, the ‘nationality list’ on which the Nazi occupation authorities required residents of the region to register. Bishop Adamski had encouraged local clergy and parishioners to accept classification as German as a form of ‘camouflage’, and after the war he argued that this brilliant ‘stratagem of war’ had ensured the survival in place of the native population and minimized disruption of local industry as well as local society.⁶⁷ Father Adamczyk, the leader of the cathedral-building campaign, had also made a blistering public defence of mass Volksliste registration, dismissing as ‘childish and pointless’ the notion that Silesians should ‘atone’ for not having suffered more during the war.⁶⁸ In short, references to the war were not in this context an invocation of shared history of Polish-national suffering. They instead awkwardly highlighted the wildly divergent wartime experiences of those now called together to build a common Polish-national future.

IV. Conclusion

Sociologist Maryjane Osa observed that Poland’s Roman Catholic Church is usually imagined as ‘something monolithic, almost a phenomenon of nature—like Mount Everest’. She suggested that it should instead be seen as akin to Mount Rushmore: ‘solid and imposing, but carefully crafted from the materials at hand’.⁶⁹ Her argument was that the experiences of the Second World War radically transformed the Polish Catholic Church, changing a rigid state church, similar to interwar Hungary’s, into a flexible ‘activist church’ which could ‘support local causes and garner legitimacy for the organization as a whole’.⁷⁰ It is a highly productive insight. But Osa’s initial elaboration on how the postwar institution functioned tended to focus on the vertical relationship between the episcopal hierarchy on the one hand and ‘local causes’ on the other. The implication was that ‘the local’ had distinctive but ultimately compatible and harmonious incarnations. Each version of ‘the local’ could be readily slotted into the whole of ‘Polish society’.

As we have seen in this brief survey, however, it was not always clear how or even whether the ‘materials at hand’ were suitable for fashioning a cohesive postwar Polish Catholicism. Local devotional life across much of western and northern Poland had to be re-created in sacred spaces in which Polish-language sermons and hymns, and often any form of Catholic mass, were being heard for the first time. Making newly arrived parishioners feel at home in these post-German churches raised a host of thorny questions. Transforming them into replicas of parishes in Poland’s lost eastern territories, to be populated by refugee parishioners and administered by refugee clergy, might help ease those communities’ sense of specific loss. But it offered no solution to the even larger population of in-migrants from central Poland, arriving as individuals or family units in equally unfamiliar new destinations. And keeping parishioners segregated by area of origin only made more daunting the aim of local, regional and national integration. Engagement with the histories and physical particularities of former German churches could provide a more subtle and dynamic form of rerooting. But this approach also involved initial recognition of the alienness of parishioners’ new sacred spaces, potentially exacerbating feelings of temporariness. Church repair or reconstruction projects in ‘mixed’ parishes, populated by both indigenous and in-migrant Catholics, offered opportunities for forging a sense of common purpose, though they also provided occasions for conflict over ownership of new spaces and determination of local practice. Finally, in areas such as the diocese of Katowice that had a high rate of residential persistence and thus a much stronger existing sense of local identity, the near-universal experience of ‘passing’ as German during the war provided a powerful sense of a shared regional fate but was difficult to reconcile with Polish-national narratives of defiant resistance.

If the refounding of Catholic religious life after 1945 constituted, on the whole, a success story, it was not due to a religious-national symbiosis seamlessly reconciling the apparently contradictory expectations of varying constituencies. This was, rather, a story of trial and error, of balancing acts and trade-offs, of alternately attracting and alienating various potential members of a postwar Catholic community. And while the church certainly did not shy away from invoking the blood of wartime martyrs, its institutional flexibility was not simply defined by navigation of serial adversity and catastrophic loss. It also involved the rather different challenges of sudden, dramatic expansion and unprecedented infrastructural windfalls.

Footnotes