After decades of neglect, at least outside Poland, Poland and its history are becoming an exciting field of study, resulting in impressively sophisticated works that not only help better understand Polish and east European history, but also help nuance our understanding of European cultural, political, and religious history. Brian Porter-Szücs’s new book, Faith and Fatherland, is a prime example of this new and stimulating trend.

Given the central role the Catholic Church has played in the history of Poland and the recent scholarly embrace of religion as a category of historical analysis, it is no surprise that many recent works on Poland focus on Catholicism and its role in Polish history and culture. Brian Porter-Szücs’s meticulously researched book provides an impressively textured analysis of modern Polish Catholicism, and, more broadly, of the role of religion in fashioning modern national identities. For those interested in the history of religion in the modern world, and in particular in the history of the modern Catholicism, this book will be indispensible.

As recent coverage of Polish membership in the European Union suggest, Poland has been commonly considered a quintessentially Catholic nation. Any Polish history textbook begins with acceptance of western Christianity by Mieszko I, the first ruler of Poland, in 966. The pre-Christian period is relegated to “pre-history.” In his book, Brian Porter-Szűcs methodically peels away some of these commonly accepted myths, and explains how they came about and how they became so readily accepted.

That connection between Polish national identity and the Catholic Church was not always as strong as the identification of Polishness with Catholicism may imply. To be sure the Catholic Church and Catholicism played an important role in Polish history and culture, but it was only very recently that it became tightly intertwined with Polish national identity and that fusion between Polishness and Catholicism did not come naturally. For centuries, the Catholic Church was pragmatic about its own interests and, seeing itself as the universal One Church, was wary of any particularisms, such as modern nationalism, that could fracture the unity of the Church.

Through a meticulously researched discussion of different theological positions within the Catholic Church and the official acceptance or disavowal of them, Porter-Szűcs reveals the tension the Church experienced between two concepts of the Church, one as a universal in its “Mystical Body of Christ” including both the clergy and the laity, and the other as an institution of the clergy, a Church that—in the words of one priest— “receives full authority not from humans, but from Christ himself.” Thus, its teachings and precepts did not “depend upon their acceptance by the faithful” (49). Brian Porter-Szűcs masterfully demonstrates that modern Poland became a battleground as broader debates over Catholic ecclesiology rage, with the Church struggling to remain relevant in modern times, while it claimed to represent the “unchanging” truth.

One of the most consequential contributions of the book is its argument that the Church did not always support Polish political ambitions after Poland lost its independence at the end of the eighteenth century. Instead, the Church, pragmatically seeking to protect its interests, allied with the powers ruling over what used to be the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Opposed to Polish rebellions aiming to regain independence, the Catholic Church called for obedience to the tsar. And except for some small-scale acts of resistance, the Church tended to collaborate with various governments and regimes, be it tsarist or even, most recently, communist.

Porter-Szűcs paints a complex picture of the process though which Polish society embraced the myth of a centuries-old fusion of Polishness and Catholicism. For example, although the early twentieth-century right wing movement, Endecja, has been considered synonymous with Polish-Catholic identity, according to Porter-Szűcs, at the beginning of the twentieth century it was actually opposed by the majority of Polish Catholic hierarchy. Complex were also relations between the Catholic Church and Józef Piłsudski, the legendary Polish interwar leader. Though he may be buried with Polish kings in the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow, “[m]ost members of the clergy were upset by the secular approach to civil rights expressed by the Polish Constitution of 1921, and they greeted the government of Marshal Józef Piłsudski with thinly veiled hostility” (158–9). Faith and Fatherland successfully demonstrates that Polish nationalists began to re-write Polish national history and insert the Catholic Church into the narrative of Polish national struggle only relatively recently.

The book challenges the reader to reexamine also the association of Polish Catholicism with anti-Semitism. The book demonstrates that it was only at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth-century that this association began to surface and take root. Until then “the Polish Church was unambiguous and occasionally outspoken in its opposition to racial anti-Semitism” (emphasis in text, 273). But once this connection was made, Porter-Szűcs argues, “a much more radical agenda began to penetrate the Catholic circles” (304), especially during the interwar period. And even then, explicit violence was often condemned, as Catholic ideologues struggled to change positive daily relationships between Jews and Christians on the ground.

Porter-Szűcs combed through an impressive amount of Polish Catholic printed and archival sources, including materials collected by the communist government as it sought to infiltrate the Catholic Church and keep track on what was taught in churches during the post-war period. The book is able to paint an intricate picture of the Catholic Church and Polish Catholicism, repudiating any simple generalizations. A few examples are in order. Discussing the Church's attitudes toward socialism, Porter-Szűcs reveals the Church's simultaneous opposition to this ideology and its support for workers’ rights and dignity. The author paints a similarly multifaceted picture of Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II, locating the pontiff in the context of Polish history and Polish Catholicism. Anyone wanting to understand John Paul II and some apparent contradictions in his teachings should read Porter-Szücs’s book.

Since Faith and Fatherland is such an impressive, remarkably measured study of the Polish Catholicism, the Catholic Church, and modern nationalism, few criticisms can be voiced. Yet, what is missing is the Vatican side. It is true the Vatican archives only provide access for sources before 1939. But the nineteenth and early twentieth century is the bulk of the book and the reports of papal nuncios have been preserved. It would have been interesting to see what the Vatican Secretary of State had do say about these political and ideological struggles of the Church in Poland. The book also glides over the period of World War II, sometimes quite naturally, but sometimes that “glide” is stark, only underscoring the missing years. Still, this is an extraordinarily important book that will be indispensible for anyone interested modern Polish and, more generally, European history, the history of the Catholic Church and modern Catholicism, and modern nationalism.