8 - A Quasi-Reformation: The Catholic Church in the Western Territories, 1945–1956

Summary

The story of the Polish Catholic Church in the Western Territories after World War II has never been properly told. It is difficult to know what happened. The postwar times were chaotic not only in the frontier period but, when it came to the inner workings of the Church, for much longer. Many key par-ticipants left no paper trail. Direct participants are, with very few exceptions, no longer alive. A further difficulty comes from the sensitive nature of the subject. As we will see in this chapter, the story of the western Church in the 1945–1956 period is principally that of the local clergy's rebellion against the traditional Polish Church ethos and hierarchy, combined with a serious effort to recapture the “true spirit” of Christianity. The Catholic Church functionar-ies and historians are famously reluctant to publicly reveal dissention within their institution, past or present, as they fear such knowledge does disservice to the Church's unity and empowers its enemies. That makes the task of the historian of a Catholic thought and practice, especially in times of conflict and division (such as experienced by the Church in the west after the war) all the more difficult. Consequently, the work that has gone into the writing this chapter was akin to piecing together a puzzle out of disparate and incomplete elements.

Based on the available evidence, between 1945 and 1956, the region witnessed the emergence of a form of Catholicism that departed sharply from the historical Polish norm. Among the local priests, traditional authoritarian practices gave way to the growing stress on dialogue and persuasion in the spirit of free inquiry; the time-honored emphasis on group-maintaining rituals gave way to the stress on personal ethics; and a collectivistic interpretation of Christianity was rejected and replaced by spiritual individualism. These doctrinal and practical transformations (which together, in the ways explained below, amounted to a veritable quasi-Reformation) made the Church potentially capable of retaining the allegiances of the self-reliant settlers and of educating them in the Christian ethic, even if this potentiality was realized only later, in the 1960s and 1970s, when propitious conditions for new religious proselytizing appeared.