James Bjork

Inadvertent Allies: Catholicism and Regionalism in a German-Polish Borderland

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church made no secret of their antipathy to nationalism.1 In June 1887, shortly after his appointment as Vatican Secretary of State by Pope Leo XIII, Cardinal Rampolla circulated to papal nuncios an instruction warning of the dangers of the ’so-called nationality right’. ‘If’, he wrote, ‘an attempt were made to apply it [the nationality principle] to existing states it would become the source of universal disturbance. Society would revert again to the era of barbarian invasions accomplished under the exclusive reign of material force.’2 This hostility to ‘bottom-up’ nationalism - the claims of putatively sovereign people - was, of course, especially vociferous in relation to Italian unification, which had dismantled the Papal States and put an end to the temporal power of the popes. But the Church’s legitimist stance was expressed with striking severity even in cases such as the Polish insurrection of 1831, where a majority-Catholic national movement, invoking the memory of an earlier state that had itself been dismantled by force, challenged a non-Catholic monarch.3

A Polish Mitteleuropa? Upper Silesia's Conciliationists and the prospect of German Victory

ISSN 0090-5992 print; ISSN 1465-3923 online/01/030477-16

Piety by the Numbers: Social Science and Polish Debates about Secularization in the 1960s and 1970s

This essay examines the statistics on devotional practice generated by sociological studies in Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as the ways in which church-affiliated and secular, regime-affiliated scholars tried to make sense of those statistics. Jim Bjork argues that these debates involved a surprising degree of underlying consensus about Poland’s susceptibility to forces of secularization driven by economic modernization. Divergent visions of Poland’s religious future ultimately depended on which regional data were seen as typical and which were seen as anomalous. The narration of a particular story of Polish religious exceptionalism did not ensure the path that Poland subsequently followed in the era of John Paul II, but it did help to make it imaginable and explainable.

Church Fights: Nationality, Class, and the Politics of Church-Building in a German-Polish Borderland, 1890-1914

The American humorist Robert Benchley once observed that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think that there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t. The joke has particular poignancy for the student of borderlands. As discussed in the introduction to this volume, borderlands fascinate scholars because they can be viewed in two ways: as showcases for the power of nation-states and empires to sort out territories and populations, thereby establishing exclusive control over those under their jurisdiction; and as liminal zones of cultural contact and mixing, in which local inhabitants can defy and subvert state-driven agendas. The attention given to the latter dimensions of borderland experience in recent scholarship has provided a welcome counterpoint to more teleological stories focused exclusively on the self-reinforcing dynamics of border-drawing. But we should be careful not to imagine this tension as a straightforward conflict between border-makers (agents of state power, ideological entrepreneurs, national activists) and border- subverters (locals, ordinary people, border landers). In practice, individuals, groups, and institutions have played both roles, articulating and policing some boundaries, inscribing others with new meanings, dismissing still others as meaningless or illegitimate. The following micro-level case study is intended to illustrate the complicated and dynamic interplay created by different actors simultaneously engaging a variety of boundaries: those of empires and nation- states; of religious jurisdiction and devotional practice; of linguistic usage and ethnic identification; of class and status.

Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław During the Century of Expulsions

values of the nobility through his sermons. Stolarski argues more broadly that the Dominicans with their long history and experience in the Polish lands in many ways better understood and adapted to the local culture of the nobility than the brasher and more aggressive Jesuits. The book’s greatest strength is arguably its use of sources. From sermons to visitation records, Stolarski has effectively mined a rich trove of primary sources and presents fascinating material on a variety of aspects of early modern Catholicism. More than simply an analysis of Polish Dominicans, Friars on the Frontier is the best available study in English on Catholic Reform in the Commonwealth. At times, though, the book’s apologetic tone can be heavyhanded. The Jesuits wear the black hats in Stolarski’s account, and though many of his observations are on target, he would have benefited from a more explicit engagement with John O’Malley’s work on the Society. Stolarski could also have strengthened his analysis by situating his material in a wider central European context. The attempts of the Jesuits to expand their influence at the university in Cracow, for example, were part of a broader pattern playing out across the Catholic world. At universities in Prague and Vienna, in Mainz and Cologne, Jesuits vied with non-Jesuits for dominance and control of these institutions. In like fashion, he could have anchored his discussion of topics such as homiletics, pilgrimage and confraternities in the larger body of literature on early modern Catholicism. These are, however, minor criticisms of a carefully researched study that sheds such an important light on Catholic Reform in eastern Europe.