Among Anglophone political scientists, few have devoted as much sustained attention to the interplay of religion and politics in eastern Europe as Sabrina Ramet. While Yugoslavia has been her most frequent subject, she has also written extensively on Poland in the communist and post-communist eras. This most recent book tackles a much broader time span, taking into view the Catholic Church's entire 1050-year history in Poland. It would be a daunting task for any scholar, but it poses special challenges for one without reading proficiency in Polish. Ramet has tried to overcome this obstacle by drawing on English and German-language secondary literature as well as employing the assistance of colleagues in translating some relevant Polish-language historiography.
The book runs through the first 1000 years of the 1050-year history of the Catholic Church in Poland at a rather breathless pace, with the first 800 years covered in just twenty pages of text (not including notes). Discussions of the long nineteenth century and the short twentieth century, while a bit more extensive, are still brisk at about sixty and sixty-five pages, respectively. Ramet's account is at times lively, and her curiosity about various historical controversies is appealing. But considering how much is meant to be covered within a very limited word count, the narrative is often quite meandering and idiosyncratic. Details of dubious relevance are included, such as Alexander II selling Alaska to the US (59), or the number of French soldiers at the battle of Sedan (74). In the meantime, some of the most important and frequently-invoked points of reference in the history of Polish Catholicism, such as the Battle of Grunwald (1410) and the Poznanian school strikes (1901 and 1906/7), are oddly never mentioned at all.
The final two chapters of the book deal with the end of communism and the first quarter-century of the post-communist era. Based on some primary material—translations of press accounts and interviews—as well as secondary sources, these chapters delve in more detail into the debates and controversies that have embroiled the church in recent years, including EU membership, restitution of church property, abortion, gay rights, sex abuse scandals, and charges of collaboration with the communist regime. Ramet's discussion of these issues highlights the diversity of views within the post-communist Catholic Church on how it should define its agenda and what its priorities should be. Her account also illustrates the ambiguous response of Polish society to the church's pubic engagement. While still demonstrating considerable mobilizational power, the church has also aroused considerable opposition when it has seemed to be grasping for worldly power or engaging in hypocrisy.
Among the themes of this final section of the book, the one with the clearest and most frequent connections to discussion of earlier historical episodes is collaboration. From expressions of dynastic loyalism during the partition era to various forms of accommodation of the Nazi occupiers and of the communist regime, these examples usefully complicate the mythology of a monolithically and militantly Polish-patriotic Catholic Church. Unfortunately, Ramet's treatment of these episodes often tends to replicate the black-and-white thinking of post-communist lustration, bluntly categorizing individuals as either collaborators or resisters rather than critically examining the spectrum of policies and behaviors in question or the complex motivations behind them. This leads to some unfair characterizations and lost opportunities for deeper analysis. For example, Bishop of Częstochowa Teodor Kubina (misspelled here as “Teodoro”) is listed as someone “who chose to collaborate” with the Nazi regime (145–46); a tendentious summary of a wartime record that included some ambiguous forms of partial accommodation but hardly involved endorsement of the Nazi agenda. A more judicious evaluation of Kubina, and of the ambiguities of “collaboration,” would reference the fact that he was the only Polish bishop to speak out forcefully against the Kielce pogrom of 1946 and that his cooperation with state officials in condemning anti-Semitic violence was viewed by some as itself a form of “collaboration” with the post-war communist regime.
Despite its title, then, Ramet's most recent book is not best utilized as a historical resource. Its historical coverage is patchy, especially in earlier periods but even in the twentieth century, and limited familiarity with relevant sources means that those events and developments that do get mentioned often lack context. Readers primarily interested in a concise but authoritative and erudite synthesis of the first thousand years of Catholicism in Poland would be better served by Robert Alvis's White Eagle, Black Madonna: One Thousand Years of the Polish Catholic Tradition (New York, 2016). But The Catholic Church in Polish History from 966 to the Present does, nonetheless, draw some general takeaway points from its survey of earlier centuries that prove productive in considering the complex present and uncertain future of Catholicism in Poland. As Ramet notes, the Catholic Church has defined its agenda against a range of enemies, external and internal, with a mix of successes and failures over the centuries. How its agenda will evolve and whether it will resonate among a broader Polish public remain open questions.
