Faith and Fatherland

Brian Porter-Szücs has not written an institutional history of the Catholic Church in Poland but a systematic analysis of how Catholic clerics and writers provided many Poles with an ideological and theological frame of reference during the period beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when the Church’s concerns about the corrupting effects of ‘modernity’ began to have a powerful effect on its outlook. Though recognising the Church’s belief that it is embarked on an ‘unfinished normative project’, Porter-Szücs’ history of its shifting discourses is predicated on his sense of the ‘mutually recursive ways’ in which Catholicism—and any ideological construct—can ‘structure perceptions of the world, while recognising that experiences provide material from which ideologies are in turn elaborated’. This is not, however, a work of lengthy theoretical reflection; instead, Porter-Szücs’ remarkable achievement lies in the broadly chronological discussion it offers on a number of important themes, viz. ‘The Church’, ‘Sin’, ‘Modernity’, ‘The Person and Society’, ‘Politics’, ‘The Nation Penitent’, ‘Ecclesia Militans’, ‘The Jew’, ‘Polak-Katolik’, and ‘Mary, Militant and Maternal’. Each chapter traces a pathway through a wide range of Catholic press sources, periodicals, devotional texts and sermons, taking the analysis from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the early years of the twenty-first century. The pattern established reveals the Church to have experienced a period of relative passivity in the middle of the nineteenth century when it preached a providential message that promised salvation through devotion and strongly condemned the nationalist rebellions of 1830–31 and 1863–4. Increasing anxiety about ‘modern’ threats to the Church’s mission on earth—particularly Freemasonry—saw a gradual coalescence of church and nationalist discourses from the 1890s, which generated a new rhetoric of action and struggle that was evident during the 1920s and 1930s in its fiercely anti-Semitic attitudes and collectivist understanding of sin. In the post-war period, the Church relinquished its most violent attitudes and embraced modern political notions of democracy and a cautious form of social reform. Porter-Szücs makes clear that the relatively homogenous ethnic and confessional complexion of post-war Poland made this recessional relatively straightforward, not least because opposition to the Communist state allowed a narrowly Catholic conception of the Polish nation to be equated with liberty and freedom. Paradoxically, when Communism was overthrown, Catholic political activists, confident in their belief that to be Polish was to be Catholic, ‘had at their disposal an antiliberal vision ... securely buttressed by the terminological scaffolding of democracy’. Several chapters thus end with a consideration of Father Rydzyk and Radio Maryja, which for its minority of listeners, has made some of the old fears and prejudices respectable again

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Faith · Fatherland · Ideology · Militant · Modernity · Nationalism · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · History · Law · Philosophy · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies · Religious studies · Theology and Canon Law Studies · Religious Studies