Stalinist Catholics of Europe, Unite!

This chapter returns to Dziś i Jutro, exploring the movement’s attempt—successful, for a time—to build a transnational, cross-Iron Curtain network of pro-Marxist Catholics. After 1948, the ideology that the movement’s members had been formulating since the war finally crystallized in Catholic socialism. Inspired by both Mounier and the Cominform, devoted to both the “human person” and “revolution,” Dziś i Jutro ideologue Wojciech Kętrzyński launched a project that he called the Catholic-socialist international. Finding enthusiastic partners across the Iron Curtain in France’s Esprit and La Quinzaine journals and in the Paris-based Pax Christi peace movement, Kętrzyński’s cohort bequeathed to the next generation the responsibility of working out the ideology of Catholic socialism. This postwar generation of young radicals—led by Poland’s future prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki—terrified by the onset of the Korean War, prioritized a universalist “concern for the victory of the revolution” over institution-building in Communist Poland. Working to square Marxism with Catholic personalism, these young Catholic socialists remained captive to an understanding of personhood that excluded not only the unbaptized, but also (West) Germans, Americans, and whole other swathes of humanity.

Epilogue

The book’s epilogue sketches the afterlife of the anti-political alternative to Catholic socialism: dialogue, solidarity, and a pastorally driven, pluralistic “ethical life” (the answer to G.W.F. Hegel’s search for Sittlichkeit). When the Stalinist bubble ultimately burst in the years 1955–1956, Catholic Poland’s non-Stalinist “revolutionaries” joined forces with the dispossessed young radicals from PAX. Together, they looked to reform not only Communist Poland, but Catholicism, too. Poland’s Solidarity movement of 1980–1981 was born in the space of encounter between Catholic socialists and pastoral radicals. Karol Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II, while Tadeusz Mazowiecki co-founded Solidarity and went on to become the Soviet Bloc’s first non-Communist head of state. Yet the lessons of Catholics’ twentieth-century quest for “revolution” dwarf matters of Church and state. The ultimate revolutionary answer to the ethical life was to seek genuine encounters with other “persons” on a similar quest for social justice, human dignity, and solidarity in the world—whatever the Judgment of Heaven to come.

The Limits of Catholic “Revolution”

This chapter reconstructs the demise of the Catholic utopia of “revolution” that dated back to Europe’s fin-de-siècle. This is a story of how Stalinism teased out and laid bare the exclusionary, integralist elements that had been part and parcel of Catholic “revolution” from the start. For the Catholic socialists of Dziś i Jutro (renamed PAX in 1952), the Stalinist years were, paradoxically, a moment of unparalleled possibility. While their countrymen languished in prisons or hid in forests, Poland’s Catholic socialists had the opportunity—with the support of Western European allies like Esprit’s Jean-Marie Domenach—to propose new avenues for engagement in public life. In the end, however, the 1954 publication of Bolesław Piasecki’s magnum opus Essential Questions met with condemnation from the Holy Office; his movement’s allies abroad, too, were on the defensive against Rome. At the same time, PAX’s postwar generation, led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, broke dramatically with Stalinism. Integralism’s avatars—anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism—had guided transnational Catholic “revolution” away from Aquinas and toward Marx. In the end, PAX’s run as the definitive laboratory of Catholic “revolution” had ended, leaving integralism and heresy.

Pastors and Catechumens

This chapter focuses on Catholic intellectuals of the 1940s who, while committed to “revolution,” and in some cases even supportive of nascent Communist regimes, categorically refused to follow the path of Stalinism. The journal Tygodnik Powszechny shared its French counterparts’ commitments to personhood, peace, social justice—and even anti-German ethnonationalism. But its writers refused to proceed in lockstep with every whim of the Communist regime. As a result, they looked past Mounier, formulating their own revolutionary visions. In Mounier’s stead, they drew on both interwar Polish Thomists and postwar French pastoral reformers—especially the Dominican “new theologians,” the French Mission, and the worker-priest movement. This chapter focuses on one priest and one layman, both of whom found an alternative to Stalinism in Tygodnik Powszechny: a Catholic playwright named Jerzy Zawieyski, and the young Rev. Karol Wojtyła—the future Pope John Paul II. Their example illuminated an alternative path for Catholic “revolution” that remained loyal to Thomism and social Catholicism, while still bucking the Holy See. Its watchwords were pastorship and a new approach to ministry to the poorest of the poor—Europe’s industrial workers.

The Roots of Catholic “Revolution”

This chapter explores the origins of Catholic discourses of “revolution” in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interpreters. Leo XIII (1878–1903) launched his papacy with a promise of “Thomist renewal.” In response, a generation of Catholic thinkers from across Europe developed their own visions of a just society. French philosopher Jacques Maritain and his Polish counterparts, the priests Władysław Korniłowicz and Antoni Szymański, made a passionate case for the “human person” as a concept rooted in their study of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Their generation confronted powerful currents of integral nationalism in French Action (France) and National Democracy (Poland). Responding to Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, they attempted to break with the integralist currents—with, at best, limited success. These early Catholic “revolutionaries” included Thomists, social Catholics, and Europe’s first Christian Democrats. In the 1930s, as republics collapsed across Europe and both fascist regimes and the nascent Soviet Union grew in power, the generation of laymen who had studied under Korniłowicz, Maritain, and Szymański began looking for more radical solutions. First and foremost among these budding radicals was Emmanuel Mounier, and it was principally to him that subsequent generations turned.

Personalism at War

This chapter tells the story of France and Poland’s wartime generation, born in the 1910s and 1920s, which drew inspiration during World War II from the young, upstart icon of Catholic “revolution”: Emmanuel Mounier. Jacques Maritain’s wartime exile to North America afforded him the freedom to produce copious writings that were then clandestinely dropped not only into France, but Poland as well. Yet his absence from the continent diminished Thomism’s relevance for the emerging anti-Nazi resistance. The resulting partnership between anti-fascism and Catholic “revolution” elevated Mounier in stature (despite his brief collaboration with Vichy France) and assured him canonical status for the generation of Catholic resisters who helped to achieve their respective homelands’ liberation from Nazism. At the same time, a strong alternative—also Catholic, also anti-fascist—emerged to Mounier: Christian Democracy.

Introduction

To defend oneself from totalitarianism, one does not have to return to individualism. —Tadeusz Mazowiecki 1 IN 1944, the Red Army was advancing westward across Eastern Europe, chasing the retreating forces of Nazi Germany. By the fall, Soviet authorities had a secure hold over much of the territory of prewar Poland. Having announced the formation of a Soviet-backed Polish Communist government in July, the Red Army waited out the Warsaw Uprising on the eastern banks of the Vistula, until Germans had crushed the resistance and set the Polish capital ablaze....

World Peace on Nationalist Terms

This chapter focuses on the first major test of Catholic “revolution” in the postwar world: the cause of world peace. This cause created a political space for Catholic-Marxist collaboration, first in Poland, then across the emerging Iron Curtain. In August 1948, the movement that eventually became known as the Partisans of Peace held its first meeting in Wrocław, the largest city of postwar Poland’s formerly German “Recovered Territories.” For four days, Poland welcomed a cast of global cultural and intellectual icons, from Aimé Césaire to Pablo Picasso. At that congress, Catholic socialism found its political footing. This peace activism was not only anti-nuclear, but also anti-colonial, anti-American, and anti-German. It went beyond French Catholic activist André Mandouze’s politics of “progressive Christianity,” cultivating fear of a revanchist Germany. Ethnonational hatred brought together a coalition of intellectuals who guaranteed integralism a postwar career, all while providing political cover for the Soviet Bloc’s transition to Stalinism.

The Twilight of Social Catholicism?

This chapter examines the emerging Catholic press of Communist Poland in the years 1945–1948 (prior to the onset of Stalinism). Their debates transformed Catholic “revolution” from a program of charity and corporatism to direct collaboration in Marxists’ pursuit of a dictatorship of the proletariat. As the Moscow-inspired “Polish Revolution” unfolded, the Catholic writers of Dziś i Jutro developed a distinct edge over their counterparts at two other nascent postwar weeklies: Christian Democrats’ Tygodnik Warszawski (Warsaw Weekly) and the self-styled neo-positivist Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly), led by Jerzy Turowicz. Dziś i Jutro and Tygodnik Powszechny shared an affinity for Mounier’s writings, but the French philosopher’s three-week 1946 sojourn in Poland ended with privileges for Warsaw’s Catholic socialists and disappointment for Kraków’s neo-positivists. And still, in the face of Catholic socialism’s ascendancy, integralism survived within Bolesław Piasecki’s new movement—a fateful holdover that sowed the seeds of Catholic socialism’s eventual undoing.

Catholicism in a Newly Communist World

This chapter tells the story of how the Red Army’s liberation of Poland from German occupation in 1944–1945 circumscribed the postwar choices of Catholic activists. In a nascent Communist Poland, social Catholicism emerged as a hotly contested badge of honor—all while Catholic projects of “revolution” began to converge with their secular, Marxist counterpart. As a result, Thomism was driven to the margins of Communist Poland, and Christian Democracy eliminated outright. One strain of Catholic intellectuals proved both intellectually vibrant and, thanks to Communist support, politically viable. This was the ex-fascist Bolesław Piasecki’s Dziś i Jutro (Today and Tomorrow) movement, which wrapped itself in the banner of social Catholicism as it supplanted the Christian Democrats of Poland’s Christian Labor Party, led by Karol Popiel. All the while, Dziś i Jutro drew on both personalism and “revolution” to chart an alternative Catholic course in public life: Catholic socialism.