Church, nation, and state in Poland: Catholicism and national identity formation in the Lublin region, 1918-1939.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the position of Catholicism as a component of Polish national identity changed between 1918 and 1939 and, more broadly, between 1863 and 1939. I focus on the borderland Lublin region, an area where the changing role of religion in nation and state building in early twentieth century Poland and Eastern Europe was especially visible. I argue that in the late nineteenth century the Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Poland began to progressively and consciously use the Polish nation (construed as a community of shared language and culture) as a vehicle to maintain its authority in a society increasingly exposed to European liberalism, socialism and secularism. In independent Poland after 1918, the Church even more fervently attempted to couple Catholicism with Polish culture. In this effort, the Church inserted into the rhetoric of Polish-Catholic cultural identity political messages about the alleged negative impact of non-Poles and non-Catholics on the Polish nation and state. In the Lublin region after 1918, the Church also attempted to maintain social authority by coupling Catholicism with the Polish nation. Here, Church authority was resisted by the impoverished peasantry who saw the clergy as allied with the landowners; however, the association of Catholicism with Polishness on a strictly cultural level did increase. By the mid-1930s the long-constructed Polish-Catholic cultural identity was given political focus by the Sanacja regime. The pacification of radical peasants in the Zamosc area in 1936, a sharp rise in anti-Semitism, and the liquidation of superfluous Orthodox churches in 1938 were expressions of the penetration of this politicized Polish-Catholic cultural identity from the national level to the Lublin region by the end of the 1930s. By cooperating with these actions, Bishop Fulman and the clergy in the Lublin region showed that they welcomed this politicization. Local society was increasingly pressured to give up its autonomy for an imposed state culture. The dissertation is based on documents from the Lublin State Archive, the Archive of the Lublin Archdiocese and the Central Military Archive. A key source was heretofore unutilized minutes of interwar Lublin diocese deanery conferences.