Abstract

In 1918, after over 120 years of captivity, Poland appeared once again on the map of Europe. Great changes also affected the Orthodox Church in Poland at the time of the re-emergence of the state. Before the First World War, the Orthodox Church was a part of the Moscow Patriarchate, which made decisions about its personnel, statutes, liturgical life, rites, etc. The church in Poland now has been detached from the Russian Church. On the one hand, the Republic’s authorities wanted to sever itself from the captivity of the past as much as possible. They strived for ecclesiastical independence for Polish Orthodoxy. On the other hand, Russia was overcome by the horrors of the Russian Revolution and was therefore confined to the sphere of domestic problems. The Patriarch was forced to struggle to survive. For him, the church’s situation in Poland was inevitably of secondary importance. At the time, there was a lack of bishops and priests in Poland. What’s worse, the pre-war hierarchs and priests, who were returning to their homeland possessed Russian citizenship. They were also shaped by Russian spirit of theological schools, from which they graduated, and by Russian Orthodox spirituality. This was not favourable for normalizing church-state relations. The authorities regarded the Orthodox Church in an unfavourable way, as they saw it as a relic of the partitions. The hierarchs were required to be fully loyal and to sign a declaration of loyalty. The community of priests were divided into two groups: those who were recognized by the state and those who were not. The latter could not count on receiving full-time pastoral positions, employment as catechists in public schools or obtaining citizenship (at any time they could be, and in some cases were, deported from their homeland). It was enough to oppose the polonization of the church, to fight the neo-union or criticise the plans for an Autocephalous church to find oneself in the “second category” of priests. The authorities also strived to limit the number of operational places for pastoral care. This was done in three ways. Firstly, several former parishes were not granted the right to independence, thus degrading them to the ranks of dependant parishes (even if they were made up of several thousand faithful). Secondly, immediately after the ending of the war, the process of revindication of Orthodox property commenced. If, in the past, any Orthodox land or church, even it belonged to the Roman Catholic or Uniate Church for merely a couple days, could now be re-possessed either by court ruling or by arbitrary action on the part of the non-Orthodox community. The Orthodox church was deprived of several hundred church buildings, tens of thousands of hectares of cultivated land and forests. The third way of destabilizing parish life were campaigns to destroy churches. What was propagated as dismantling abandoned churches in very poor technical condition was in fact a barbarian and planed program of destroying the Orthodox church in Poland. These churches were exploded, burned and dismantled and the few who defended the temples were mocked, beaten and humiliated. Simultaneously with the “physical destruction”, the state also waged a “legal war.” For many years, the Tsar’s church legislation, which allowed the state to penetrate into the internal life of the church was applied. The March Constitution of 1921 reaffirmed the privileged role of the Roman Catholic Church. The Provisional Regulations Concerning the Government’s Relation to the Orthodox Church in Poland as a unilateral governmental act did not take the specific nature of Orthodoxy into consideration. It also failed to resolve the most important issues. The episcopate was more and more inclined, in the face of the existing political situation (a hostile state and difficulties in contacting the canonical leader in Moscow), to strive for obtaining autocephalous status from Constantinople, to which we belonged until the 17th century. After several years of intervention in Moscow and Constantinople, autocephaly was announced in 1925. Independence allowed for the reorganization and development of education and publishing, normalization of structures within the territory, standardization of liturgical and ceremonial life, organization of specific areas of pastoral care (including the military ordinariate), youth activities (church brotherhoods), normalization of issues of nationality, etc. This, of course, deprived the Church of external protection and patronage. The gains seem to be much greater than the losses. There was a great amount of the latter. The state limited the development of Orthodox monasticism. It strived to impose on the Church the new (Gregorian) calendar and Polish as the official and liturgical language. These efforts did not cease, and in 1938 they intensified, now taking the form of destroying churches. The Orthodox community, which was composed of four million people (11-15% of citizens), repeatedly wondered why they deserved such unfair treatment. The community overcame all of these problems, but only after paying a tribute of blood and tears. Let us remember that all of this took place just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Republic, instead of uniting itself internally in the face of the deadly threat of war, chose to pursue a fatal policy of chauvinism, xenophobia and intolerance.