Piotr Kosicki has created a narrative arc that spans the Social Catholicism of the fin de siècle through the Catholic Socialism of the mid-1950s. In its telling he identifies the intellectual contributions of Thomism, personalist thought, theological renewal and innovative pastoral practices. This is a story, however, not primarily about intellectual Catholicism, a not unfamiliar one of Catholicism's attempts over the period to come to terms with modernity philosophically and theologically, but of Catholic intellectuals. It expresses another side of that struggle with modernity, privileging the social and political aspects of the narrative, and the institutionalised means through which Catholic intellectuals attempted to address those dimensions of modernity.

French Catholicism proved to be an epicentre of innovative initiatives, from Modernism to the Nouvelle théologie, from Marc Sangnier's Sillon to the worker priest movement. France was also the site of movements resistant to such initiatives, with its contributions to integralism with Action Française. Kosicki's narrative arc encompasses ways in which Polish Catholic intellectuals encountered the Catholic Church in the first half of the twentieth century in terms of what they had learned from generations of French Catholics. It also explores the other side of that story: what Polish Catholic intellectuals taught the French in return.

The story takes the form of a collective intellectual biography (a helpful cast of characters is provided for the reader at pp. xxi–xxviii). It has its beginnings in the rise of nationalism and Socialism at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Social Catholicism propagated by Rerum Novarum providing a serious alternative to integral nationalism. The Thomist concept of the ‘human person’ was regarded by both French and Polish thinkers as an important component of their quest for a just political and economic order. Personalism, in its varied guises, runs like a thread through the narrative, and the contributions of Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier are given prominence.

The core of the book deals with the establishment of Communist regimes in postwar Central and Eastern Europe, the rise and fall of Stalinism in the Soviet bloc and the diversity of responses of French and Polish Catholics to those events. In Poland especially, responses were significantly led by lay activists, a lay activism fed by resistance efforts during the Second World War, and at times in tension with the Polish hierarchy during the period of Stalinisation (1953–6) and with the Vatican over the status of the Polish ‘recovered territories’ – not resolved until the 1970s.

In the immediate postwar period lay Catholic activists sought to accomplish a revolution in society, not by violence, but by pen and typewriter. Correlative with changes in society they advocated changes in the Catholic Church. Accordingly, this phase of their story is one centring on journals, French and Polish, which took a variety of stances. Kosicki guides the reader through the personalities and policies of these groups, tracing a path ‘from Thomism to “revolution” – from Aquinas through Marx, from a simple message of charity to the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (p. 118). An emergent goal was the Christianisation of Communism from within, and Poland's position vis-à-vis Catholicism and Marxism made it a laboratory for social justice. Developments in Polish Catholicism cannot be understood apart from those in France over the 1940s and 1950s, while French engagement with Marxist thought was naturally drawn to the Polish situation. Anti-capitalism, fear of a rearmed Germany and the threat of a nuclear war drew French and Polish Catholics together and set the stage for (failed) initiatives to internationalise Catholic Socialism. In the end, the movement of Catholic Socialists toward the Communist regime in Poland set them at odds with the Vatican and stretched their appeal to a Catholic personalism to the breaking point. With Vatican II suppressed strands of personalism and Catholic social doctrine would reemerge. Here Karol Wojtyla is accorded a pivotal role.

In setting Poland in a transnational framework and in examining the interaction over time of ideas, politics and faith, and the ways in which those played out in the everyday lives of individuals, the author has set himself an ambitious task. The changing fortunes of Thomism and personalism and their French and Polish representatives, as well as the movements and their journalistic representations make for a complex history, especially in its Polish setting. For those who have greater familiarity with the French side of the story, Kosicki serves as an able guide through the shifting fortunes of Polish Catholic intellectual life, keeping the main lines of the exposition clear while still providing detail and nuance. The result is an illuminating look into a broad sweep of Polish Catholic history that at the same time reveals aspects of French Catholicism that otherwise might go unnoticed. This book is strongly recommended for those seeking enlightenment on pre-Vatican II Catholicism, the multifaceted relations between Catholicism and Marxism, and greater understanding of the matrix out of which the Solidarity movement emerged.