Abstract

The contact of the Protestant population with the prevailing Catholic population in the Polish territories in the nineteenth century took place on three levels: religious, national and cultural. Protestants and Catholics were strangers to each other. Their systems of values on the religious, cultural, and usually also national level were different. In addition, Evangelical and Catholic opinion-forming circles emphasized mutual distances in order to strengthen faith. Barriers between them, however, were not impassable, as evidenced by quite numerous conversions, mixed marriages, as well as mutual acceptance of their differences in a number of environments and the meeting of cultures. The alienness of Evangelicals and Catholics, often turning into open hostility, was greater in the territories of the Prussian partition than in the Kingdom of Poland or in Cieszyn Silesia. Larger in the end than at the beginning of the 19th century. Th e decisive influence on this fact was the growth of nationalist tendencies, nationalist conflicts, especially Polish-German ones, on the Polish territories.