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PARTISAN REVIEW
impact of the state. In such a case the churches must appear as allies of
the people who defend their nationality against the oppressors. But the
ties between the clergy and national movements are also of less principled
nature . In some countries the clergymen of peasant origin were instru–
mental in bringing about a "national rebirth," acting in the name of the
peoples' culture against the culture of the upper classes. This happened,
for instance, in the Western Ukraine, where the Greco-Catholic Church
contributed to the Ukranian national consciousness, and in Lithuania,
where the first poets writing in Lithuanian issued from Roman Catholic
seminaries. The practical identification of Roman Catholicism with Pol–
ishness occurred during the nineteenth century because Poland was parti–
tioned by Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia . To be a Pole and a
Roman Catholic then became synonymous. This particular marriage of
the nation and the Church led to some dramatic situations in the inter–
war period, because the Church was used
to
seeing itself as a political
force. It threw its influence on the scale by backing the rightist National
Democratic Party and often acting against the socialists and numerous
national minorities. Of course, the position of the local clergy changed
considerably during the postwar decades; nevertheless, national aspirations
find a protective area in Catholicism.
This collusion of religious and national feelings must worry some
Catholics, for it is full of dangers. It is difficult to forget what happened
in Catholic Croatia during the last war, when crimes of genocide were
committed in the name of religion as the only distinctive mark separating
the Croats from the Orthodox Serbs. But it is not necessary to keep in
mind such blatant distortions of Christianity. Even if it takes Christian
and humane forms, religiously oriented nationalism threatens to abolish a
clear distinction between what is due God and what is due Caesar. Yet
Caesar means not necessarily the rulers of the state; Caesar can also mean
the society at large and a collective pressure.
It
seems to me that in to–
day's Poland the danger is clearly realized by Catholic intellectuals and by
at least a part of the clergy.
Let me end with a quotation from Isaiah Berlin:
It seems to me that those who, however perceptive in other respects,
ignore the explosive power generated by the combination of un–
healed mental wounds, however caused, with the image of the nation
as a society of the living, the dead, and those yet unborn (sinister as
this could prove
to
be when driven to a point of pathological ex–
asperation), display an insufficient grasp of social reality.
