Whence Polish ‘Catholic Socialism’?

With the formation of new state structures after Poland's liberation by the Red Army, supervision of churches and religiously affiliated associations fell initially to the Ministry of Public Administration. The minister Władysław Wolski created a Department of Religious Affairs to handle the logistics of administering confessional policy, while his office handled political decisions in direct consultation with the Central Committee of, first, the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR, Polska Partia Robotnicza) and, later, its successor, the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR, Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza). In April 1950, the Polish parliament would eliminate this ministry and turn the Department of Religious Affairs into an autonomous administrative unit answering directly to the prime minister. From that point onward, the Polish state security apparatus took over most of Wolski's portfolio.Footnote ¹⁴

Given how rapidly the new Soviet-backed establishment was replacing the hierarchy's interwar privileges with an apparatus designed more to keep the institutional Church in check than work with it, it is unsurprising that the most prominent Polish bishops of the mid 1940s – notably, Cardinal-Primate August Hlond and the Archbishop of Cracow, Adam Stefan Sapieha – looked to proven lay activists from the interwar and war years to represent the hierarchy's interests in Polish public life. The one group that initially catered to both the new regime and the ecclesiastical hierarchy in early post-war Poland was also the one group that played up its roots in interwar fascism as a strength, rather than a weakness. Arrested in 1944 as the leader of a guerrilla faction known as the Confederation of the Nation, Bolesław Piasecki hatched a plan while in NKVD custody to re-enter Polish public life in the war's aftermath by carving out his own domain: writers and politicians bound together by a self-described ‘social-Catholic journal’ that Piasecki ultimately grew into a financial micro-empire.

Following a series of conversations between the imprisoned Piasecki and NKVD general Ivan Serov, the PPR first secretary Władysław Gomułka summoned Piasecki for a face-to-face meeting on 4 July 1945.Footnote ¹⁵ Although Piasecki made Gomułka uneasy,Footnote ¹⁶ the PPR leader invited him back for a second meeting two weeks later, with instructions to prepare a political programme in the interim. Following their second meeting, Gomułka approved Piasecki's project to start a Catholic lay association anchored in a periodical.

The political programme that Piasecki submitted to Gomułka subsequently became the basis for the front-page headline article ‘Zagadnienia istotne’ (Essential Questions), with which Piasecki launched the first issue of Dziś i Jutro on 25 November 1945. After committing to making Poland a ‘bridging, not a dividing, factor between the world of the East and the West’ and to campaigning on behalf of Polish-Soviet friendship, Piasecki concentrated on the area of greatest personal and institutional interest to him: Catholic-socialist partnership. Piasecki declared,

In an attempt to appeal to Gomułka by adopting Marxist terminology, Piasecki used the term ‘idealists’ to refer to all religious people, a group in which he included himself. The operative terms in Piasecki's proposal were ‘sharing’, ‘co-operation’ and ‘mutual’, with the clear suggestion that Piasecki expected to build a partnership that would break down the wall between the two. As Mikołaj Kunicki has put it, ‘What distinguished Piasecki from opposition politicians was his approach to the Communists . . . Piasecki aimed at establishing himself within the PPR-dominated system. He did not command a fully fledged political party, but this limitation also spared him the worries that beset opposition leaders. Parties could be crushed and eliminated, but Catholics were there to stay’.Footnote ¹⁸

Though not entirely certain what to make of the ideologically realigned assemblage of former national-chauvinists and fascists, Primate Hlond initially offered them his token support, even contributing US$500 to help get their journal off the ground.Footnote ¹⁹ This newly constituted group chose as the subtitle for its journal the phrase katolicki tygodnik społeczny (social-Catholic weekly). Driven to cater at once to Catholicism and to Marxist socialism, having appeared to de-centre their nationalism in favour of the pursuit of social justice, and benefiting from the initial support of hierarchy and establishment alike, this milieu seemed poised to become post-war Poland's principal export to European Catholic activism.

In the first year of their weekly paper's operation, the Dziś i Jutro staff received a government concession to run a private bus company serving the Warsaw area. Their commercial ventures soon multiplied, growing to encompass two trading companies, Inco and Veritas; a private high school; a daily newspaper and the only publishing house in Poland with a concession to print the Bible in large quantities. From the outset, then, Dziś i Jutro both maintained a close working relationship with the emerging Communist establishment and pursued its own autonomous agenda – partly financial, partly ideological. In so doing, they drew on major currents in European Catholic thought, such as the return to the writings of Thomas Aquinas ushered in by Pope Leo XIII in the fin-de-siècle and the birth of a Dominican theology of labour in Belgium and France in the 1930s.Footnote ²⁰ Catholic natural law was to serve as a point of departure for activism at the intersection of Catholicism and Marxist socialism.

The interwar anti-Semitism and national-chauvinism of the movement's old guard gave way with the close of the Second World War to analogous sentiments directed against Germany. After the war ended, Germany remained an object of fear and loathing for Poles who had just survived a brutal occupation. Moreover, new fears developed that international efforts to reconstruct, rearm and reintegrate Germany into the European state system might turn it once again into a revanchist power. The decision approved by the Allied leaders at the 1945 Potsdam Conference to shift Poland's borders to the west had granted Silesia and Pomerania – immediately reimagined as ‘Recovered’ Territories – to Poland, in exchange for land taken by the USSR from the east of Poland. Two years of ethnic cleansing followed, targeting Germans from these territories in order to make room for eastern Polish deportees.Footnote ²¹ The entirety of post-war Poland's elites – bishops and Communists, writers and guerrilla fighters – accepted the new territory, and this consensus bred also a shared fear that Poland would be the first target of any German revanchism.

In light of the Holy See's decision to side with German bishops refusing to relinquish their diocesan jurisdiction over the Territories – in 1948, Pius XII addressed a long letter to the German bishops declaring full support for their claimsFootnote ²² – Dziś i Jutro found a new national-chauvinist focus. Though this focus certainly detracted from their declared agenda of social-Catholic activism, it dovetailed perfectly with the Polish raison d’état of defending the Recovered Territories at all costs. Indeed, even the Polish Episcopate refused to accept Pius XII's judgment with respect to Germany.Footnote ²³

At a glance, it might seem difficult to offer an unequivocal definition of the philosophy and theology of the Dziś i Jutro group. Ultimately, Piasecki's organisation would be derailed in 1955 by a Holy Office condemnation of both its flagship weekly and a collection of Piasecki's own essays gathered under the title of Zagadnienia istotne (Essential Questions) – the same title as his front-page article in Dziś i Jutro's first issue. In that volume, Piasecki argued, for example, that ‘ontologically’ God-loving Marxists – if true to their own ideology – were better poised to achieve salvation than ‘intentionally’ God-loving – yet sinful – Christians. Declared heretical for the exalted status accorded to socialists – Marxists, in particular – Piasecki's volume nonetheless drew extensively on some of the most pastorally progressive writings of his day, which a decade later would shape the reforms instituted by the Catholic Church through the Second Vatican Council. Piasecki's theological world-view thus included, for example, a clear and present justification of the Polish claim to the ‘Recovered Territories’, embedded in a veritable political theology of the global struggle for peace: ‘For the camp of peace, the matter of thought and work of the masses of the faithful is a question not of tactical significance, but of strategy in the struggle against the bellicose plans of imperialism. Catholicism has a decisive position here, for its attitude has a determining influence on all Christianity, and Christianity in turn profoundly shapes humanity as a whole’.Footnote ²⁴

Despite the strong hand with which Piasecki guided his movement, Dziś i Jutro played host to a range of ideologies and advocacies, yet all shared two central tenets, both couched in Catholic philosophy and theology: activism at the intersection of Catholicism and socialism, and anti-Germanism. In the service of both aims, the movement's various thinkers rewrote six decades’ worth of Catholic social doctrine dating back to Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, insisting that only the partnership of Catholics and state socialists could fulfil the aims of the Church's social teaching. Like Piasecki's 1954 collection, articles published in Dziś i Jutro between 1945 and 1955 consistently presented a Catholic imperative for an anti-German Polish foreign policy predicated on a logical slippery slope: rapprochement with Germany (after 1949, specifically with West Germany) would lead to German rearmament, which would destroy world peace, which would render social justice impossible.

Catholics, Communists and World Peace

With the launching of a Communist-backed international peace campaign, Catholic activists behind the emerging Iron Curtain got into the action as well, seeking to define the terms of their engagement in the new political order. The Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace that took place on 25–8 August 1948 in Wrocław (formerly Breslau) – the largest city in Poland's ‘Recovered Territories’ – was only the beginning of a tightly-packed series of peace campaign events. Together, these contributed to an explosion in the number of Dziś i Jutro's personal and institutional contacts in Western Europe.Footnote ²⁵

Polish Catholic activists were not privy to the backroom Cominform machinations that decided the terms on which would be formed, first, the International Liaison Committee of Intellectuals for Peace and, then, the Partisans of Peace.Footnote ²⁶ Christened thus in Paris in April 1949, the Partisans of Peace adopted a mission statement directed principally against the new North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and summarised succinctly by its chair, Nobel laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie: ‘We are not here to ask for peace, but to impose it’.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, it was the Paris congress's closing resolution, which called for a complete ban on atomic weapons, that set up the greatest success of the Communist-led peace movement: the Stockholm Appeal.Footnote ²⁸ In the Polish context, the Stockholm Appeal would become the glue holding together Dziś i Jutro's own international initiative, which the Polish Catholics undertook soon after the Appeal's announcement on 15 March 1950. Drafted by eminent Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg and accepted by acclamation by the assembled Permanent Committee of the Partisans of Peace, the Appeal demanded ‘the absolute prohibition of the atomic weapon’, stipulating that ‘the government which first would use the atomic weapon against any country whatsoever would commit a crime against humanity and should be treated as a war criminal’.Footnote ²⁹

The Stockholm Appeal shrewdly targeted religious, as well as political, constituencies. As Joliot-Curie wrote in June 1950, ‘We have come to a problem which involves all humanity, the American citizen as well as the English, the French or the Russian citizen, whatever his political or religious opinions may be’.Footnote ³⁰ Problematic as the appeal was for Pope Pius XII, it is not the case that ‘the Catholic church, for the most part, dodged the issue of the Bomb’.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, Yvon Tranvouez was right to call 1950 ‘the year of the birth of Christian progressivism’ precisely because of certain European Catholic circles’ enthusiastic responses to the Stockholm Appeal.Footnote ³² In particular, self-described ‘progressive Catholics’Footnote ³³ – whom the Poles of Dziś i Jutro called ‘Catholic socialists’ – chose not to remain on the sidelines of the global peace campaign, instead wholeheartedly taking on the task of developing principled justifications anchored in Catholic social teaching.

The degree to which the Stockholm Appeal succeeded in drawing Christian support away from the American camp to back a key Soviet-camp initiative frightened Pius XII. In 1950, the pope publicly condemned ‘pacifist efforts or propaganda originating from those who deny all belief in God’ as ‘always very dubious’.Footnote ³⁴ While thus casting aspersions on Communist-inspired peace activism, Pius XII unwittingly left the door ajar for progressive Catholicism, which, far from denying belief in God, in fact insisted that global peace activism necessarily followed from the social teaching promoted by the Vatican.

In Paris, the Union des Chrétiens Progressistes (UCP), a small advocacy group founded in 1948 by the prominent progressive Catholic author and Algerian independence activist André Mandouze, had flagged when he relocated to Algiers and subsequently devoted all his time to anti-colonial activism.Footnote ³⁵ In 1950, inspired by the Stockholm Appeal campaign, its most engaged members formed the core of a new progressive Catholic bi-weekly called La Quinzaine (Fortnight).Footnote ³⁶ Also invigorated by the Appeal was a French network of theological study circles whose members described themselves as the Jeunesse de l’Église. Its roots lay in two prominent French Catholic projects challenging Vatican orthodoxy on the Church's mission: the dissident Dominican theology of the seminary at Le Saulchoir, whose key exponents Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar campaigned for pastoral renewal and a return to patristic sources, and the pioneering Mission de France, a seminary established in occupied France to train French priests for missionary work amidst the French urban proletariat. Given that these were groups considered by the Vatican to be teetering on the edge of open heresy, the Jeunesse de l’Église itself remained in a precarious position.Footnote ³⁷

Separately, France sported both Dominican- and Jesuit-run think tanks of laymen and priests working together to develop a Catholic theory of political economy responsive to the dilemmas of decolonisation. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Dominicans’ Économie et Humanisme and the Jesuits’ Action Populaire had already begun to shift their focus towards the Global South. These were organisations born of the late interwar turn in Western European Catholic thought towards what Samuel Moyn has described as a Catholic ‘new rights-talk’ rooted in the notion of the ‘human person’.Footnote ³⁸ Convinced that a precondition to safeguarding the dignity of every person was an empirically informed theological valuing of human labour, avant-garde Catholic thinkers among clergy and laity alike throughout the 1940s and 1950s did pioneering work at the crossroads of anthropology and theology – as Gerd-Rainer Horn has amply documented.Footnote ³⁹

This work focused not only on Europe's industrial proletariat – for example, through the ‘worker-priest’ movement popularised in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the final years of the Second World War – but also on subject populations in the French and British overseas empires. Personalism therefore overlapped substantially with an emerging Catholic tiers-mondialisme.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Jesuit think tank was also closely connected to Pax Christi, a Catholic peace movement originally founded to promote Franco-German reconciliation that subsequently grew into one of Europe's most prominent peace-advocacy organisations.Footnote ⁴¹ Pax Christi would become one of Dziś i Jutro's most committed partners in the attempted construction of the Catholic-socialist international, hosting Dziś i Jutro leaders in France in 1951–2 and sending some of its top activists on a lecture tour of Poland in 1953.Footnote ⁴²

All of these organisations were already interested in the situation of Polish Catholics by the time the Partisans of Peace initiated the Stockholm Appeal, which came the same year as an April 1950 Polish agreement between Church and State that briefly promised to safeguard the ecclesiastical hierarchy's place in Poland's socialist ‘revolution’. In France, it was the Jesuit Fr Robert Bosc – the Jesuits’ point person for the Soviet bloc and Pax Christi's future emissary to Poland – who sang the praises of what would prove to be an entirely toothless accord.Footnote ⁴³ The French progressive Catholic renaissance came at a time when the Stockholm Appeal seemed poised to convince some Catholics that maybe the Soviet camp did, after all, have a valuable role to play in what the Catholic Church saw as its exclusive terrain: the promotion of peace and justice. It is thus perhaps no surprise that Pius XII was already throwing up his hands in frustration by mid 1950. Wladimir d’Ormesson, French ambassador to the Holy See, witnessed in May of that year what he considered a deeply disconcerting conversation at the Vatican between Pius XII and Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier of Lyon. With Gerlier complaining to the pontiff at length about the rising tide of ‘reckless and dangerous’ progressive currents among French Catholics, ‘Pius XII responded, smiling, “How many condemnations would you have me issue?” ’Footnote ⁴⁴

The Legacy of Emmanuel Mounier

Little more than a year after Emmanuel Mounier – French icon of avant-garde Catholic personalism since the early 1930s – spent three weeks in Poland in May 1946, Wojciech Kętrzyński, the future initiator of Dziś i Jutro's project of a Catholic-socialist international, came to Paris at Mounier's invitation. In May 1947, Kętrzyński enjoyed several days in the Parisian editorial offices of Mounier's monthly journal Esprit, establishing a personal rapport with his staff – most notably, the editorial secretary, Jean-Marie Domenach.Footnote ⁴⁵ Kętrzyński also took advantage of his perfect spoken French to introduce himself – sometimes on Mounier's recommendation, sometimes on his own – all over Paris, and in Lyon and Brussels as well: to the Dominican ‘new theologians’ at Le Saulchoir, to the UCP and many others.

What drew Kętrzyński to these groups was a combination of factors that can be grouped together under the broad heading of their willingness to take state socialism seriously while remaining – at least according to their own self-conceptions – on firmly Catholic ground. For Saulchoir's Father Congar, as for the Union's Marcel Moiroud and other francophone Catholic thinkers whom Kętrzyński sought out in Western Europe, a principled Catholic response to the material privation of the working classes in an industrialised Europe required more than the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. Indeed, at a minimum, it required close and careful examination of state socialist answers to the social question – from full employment guarantees, through collectivisation of agriculture and nationalisation of industry – which could provide Catholics with valuable lessons for their own activist efforts, insofar as Catholics might then incorporate what had worked for state socialism. Some of the progressive Catholics wanted to go even further: to reach out and connect with socialists, indeed, to develop syncretic blends of Catholicism and state socialism that would combine the best of both worlds.

As he observed this range of reactions in France to his visit and to the agenda of his movement back in Poland, the wheels in Kętrzyński's mind began turning. Seeking to meet his Western European counterparts on ground familiar to them, he read voraciously and quoted liberally from Mounier's writings. It helped immensely that the French thinker had been genuinely impressed by Dziś i Jutro during his 1946 visit to Warsaw, and for the rest of his life he remained consistently supportive of their efforts.Footnote ⁴⁶ As Kętrzyński would remind Mounier's successors at Esprit following the latter's death in March 1950, Mounier had introduced him to them in 1947 as ‘his most intimate of collaborators’ in Poland.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, in Kętrzyński's case, principle and political interest converged in such a way that he seemed to develop both a genuine affinity for Mounier's thought and a shrewd understanding of its potential political utility for linking his Polish movement with a range of groups scattered across Western Europe.

Indeed, this was not just about Kętrzyński. Even a quick glance at the personal correspondence between the staffs of Dziś i Jutro and Esprit reveals that these people liked each other and respected each other not only as brothers in arms, but indeed as friends. One must not forget this very real human element when reflecting on the reasons for Dziś i Jutro/PAX's success in the international arena, which was substantial enough to occasion in France two sets of attacks in print on the Polish Catholic socialists. The first came in 1956 from Maria Winowska – an interwar Polish Thomist who, having spent the war in France active in the Resistance, made a career after the war of writing hagiographies of modern saints and martyrs, as well as serving as Polish primate Stefan Wyszyński's unofficial personal representative in France. Winowska, writing under the penname ‘Claude Naurois’, published a book entitled Dieu contre Dieu, in which she accused a range of French Catholic activists – in particular, from La Quinzaine and Pax Christi – of having been ‘indoctrinated and brainwashed’ by Piasecki.Footnote ⁴⁸ Though both substantive and amply documented, Winowska's book went largely unnoticed because its publication in the autumn of 1956 coincided exactly with the ‘Polish October’ and the failed Hungarian Revolution.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, as late as 1957 and 1960, Polish Catholic Intelligentsia Club activists visiting Paris would note the discrimination that they experienced at the hands of, among others, Pax Christi, because they were Polish Catholics representing a movement other than PAX.Footnote ⁵⁰ Just a few years later, in the middle of the Second Vatican Council, came the coup de grace against PAX's influence in France. In response to PAX's attempts to use intermediaries to influence Wyszyński, the French Episcopate ensured the publication in the pages of France's highest-circulation Catholic journals, La Croix and France Catholique, unambiguously worded condemnations of PAX.Footnote ⁵¹

At the heart of this lasting political loyalty lay genuine interpersonal affection, on which Kętrzyński and his colleagues built institutional ties, then finally a common intellectual and political programme of Catholic socialism predicated above all on a philo-Soviet geopolitics of peace. In 1950, the half-dozen or so Poles who dealt most extensively with Western Europe felt genuinely crushed by Mounier's death. Their emotional response is clear in the coverage devoted by the Dziś i Jutro weekly to the French thinker, amounting to almost an entire special issue.Footnote ⁵² Mounier's death, moreover, bound them ever more profoundly to his successors at Esprit, who reciprocated the bond in no uncertain terms. On hearing of Mounier's death over Polish radio on his return from Stockholm in 1950, Kętrzyński immediately sat down to draft two letters, one to Esprit's new managing editor Jean-Marie Domenach and one on behalf of the entire Dziś i Jutro movement to the entire Esprit staff. In the latter letter, he wrote,

Kętrzyński pledged the balance of Dziś i Jutro's credit with Esprit – 4,200 unclaimed francs for article reprints and permissions – to Mounier's widow and children, left suddenly without income.Footnote ⁵⁴

A Catholic-Socialist, Anti-German Political Theology

Following the 19 January 1947 elections to the Polish parliament, Dziś i Jutro had three MPs. In an assembly of over 400 MPs co-ordinated by the iron fist of first the PPR and then the PZPR, the practical capacity of these MPs to get anything done was non-existent. Nonetheless, the mere existence of these MPs as official state functionaries who were also prominent Catholic activists carried symbolic weight in their movement's international dealings.Footnote ⁵⁵Dziś i Jutro's approach to Catholic social and political activism in Poland threaded a delicate balance between the national and the international, between raison d’état and broader conversations about the human race.

Even after state institutions began clearly and publicly – not just through censorship – to manipulate the structure and content of the Catholic press in Poland, Dziś i Jutro in fact expanded its usage of the term ‘social-Catholic’ to identify its press, parliamentary group and ideology.Footnote ⁵⁶ The goal was to try to play both sides of the field: to go all-in with the new ‘socialist revolution’ and, simultaneously, to present this choice as the one and only doctrinally viable option for Catholics. In so doing, the Dziś i Jutro activists were standing Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno on their heads, while earnestly maintaining that only they, as organised Catholic activists actually living under conditions of revolutionary socialism, understood the correct way to apply those encyclicals. As Kętrzyński put it in Dziś i Jutro in June 1948, ‘The encyclicals were written for Catholics living in liberal-capitalist orders, illuminating the correct path of reforming those orders, not falling into the opposite extreme’.

Meanwhile, revolutionary socialism supposedly demanded a revised interpretation of those encyclicals in order to preserve the ‘objective’ progress made by socialism relative to the ‘liberal-capitalist’ order – by which Kętrzyński meant first and foremost the industrialising societies of mid nineteenth- to mid twentieth-century Western Europe.Footnote ⁵⁷ Kętrzyński continued, ‘In our specific conditions, we demand that Catholics immediately undertake this work, taking as their point of departure the current social forms as they have emerged. For we see in them, aside from errors to be corrected, also values whose preservation is just as much the proper task of Catholics’. The task, as Kętrzyński saw it, was the ‘Christianisation of existing forces’ – in other words, to allow revolutionary socialism to establish itself, and then to repurpose its projects of collectivisation, nationalisation and social-welfare guarantees towards the goals outlined by Catholic social teaching.Footnote ⁵⁸ This attempt by Dziś i Jutro to arrogate to itself the right to interpret Catholic doctrine set it on a collision course with Poland's bishops, to say nothing of the Vatican.

Every plank of the ideological platform advanced by Dziś i Jutro came packaged as a ‘Catholic’ policy, almost as though the movement were presenting itself simply as the ‘progressive’ version of the Polish Christian Democratic Party that had been co-opted by the Communists and dismantled in the war's immediate aftermath, its leadership consigned to either exile or prison. To the extent that Christian Democracy came up in the pages of Dziś i Jutro, however, it was as an outmoded scheme for which ‘Catholic socialism’ represented an enlightened, more modern successor. Kętrzyński described himself and his colleagues in 1948 as ‘we, the young’, invested in the future and prepared ‘to undertake a methodical examination of the most burning issues framing the reality of the everyday life of Catholic society in Poland’.Footnote ⁵⁹ There was one overriding message for Kętrzyński's Polish Catholic reader in the age of self-proclaimed socialist revolution: carpe diem!

More than just advertising themselves as the Catholic political option in the ‘People’s’ Poland, the Dziś i Jutro group tackled specific questions of policy, explicitly stating that the answers that it was offering to questions broached by the PZPR followed from a progressive, personalist Christian doctrine. These declarations do in fact attest to keen study of French Catholic thought, acknowledging the priority of work as the sole path to valuing the dignity of the human person.

For example, in late 1948 the group weighed in on agricultural collectivisation, one of the newly merged PZPR's top priorities following the ousting of Władysław Gomułka.Footnote ⁶⁰ Taking a page from Mounier's Révolution personnaliste et communautaire, Andrzej Krasiński – scion of a long-prominent Polish aristocratic family that included the nineteenth-century Romantic poet Zygmunt Krasiński – suggested that the state had an ethical imperative to aggregate individual farmers into collectives. Krasiński claimed that the ‘fate of the individual and the family in the world to come’, seen through ‘the personalist world-view that we declare’, necessarily implied ‘co-operative forms of organising agriculture’.Footnote ⁶¹

The clearest statement of a Catholic political agenda pertained not to theories of social organisation, however, but to the legacy of wartime ethno-national hatreds. In a piece designed to lay out his movement's priorities for 1948, Kętrzyński made anti-Germanism a priority of raison d’état for Catholics and state socialists alike: ‘The defining task of our generation is the complete binding of the Recovered Territories to Poland, their assimilation into our economic, national and political whole. And, what is most important and most difficult – to convince the entire world that these Territories need not and indeed must not be taken away from Poland’ – a ‘Christian’ goal.Footnote ⁶²

Paradoxically, it was this consensus agenda of writing Germany out of the history of the ‘Recovered Territories’ that helped to assemble Dziś i Jutro's international ‘Catholic-socialist’ coalition. As Mikołaj Kunicki has argued in his analysis of Piasecki, ‘The same ardent nationalism that characterised the Polish church before the war facilitated the transformation of a former fascist leader into a Catholic activist’.Footnote ⁶³ Realistically, the movement's ability to shape domestic policy was quite limited. In the international arena, however, the movement could make a name for itself that would then reflect well also on the People's Poland, first and foremost by capitalising on and expanding contacts among Western European lay activists.

The model for the ‘work and combat’ to which Kętrzyński exhorted the Esprit staff following Mounier's passing was the socialist revolution that he claimed to be witnessing in Stalinist Poland. The Catholics’ role in this effort was to centre on transnational co-operation towards a goal that Kętrzyński's colleague Konstanty Łubieński had articulated most pointedly in 1948: ‘Catholicism and the socialist movement constitute two forces, which, co-ordinated, will lead humanity to a great future, will create a new “golden era”, while, if turned against one another, will lead to a catastrophe such as history has not yet seen’.Footnote ⁶⁴

One could easily dismiss Kętrzyński, Krasiński and Łubieński as ‘useful idiots’, their projects a political fantasy out of touch with the lives of the millions of Catholics around them who were finding the process of adaptation to Poland's new socio-political order much more difficult than they were. And yet, while the men of Dziś i Jutro certainly lived a privileged life, they were neither blind nor averse to the violence of ‘socialist revolution’, just as many – Kętrzyński first and foremost – had actively planned and carried out brutal killings during the Second World War in the Confederation of the Nation, Piasecki's guerrilla organisation.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Kętrzyński's mind, Catholic natural law could be understood as justifying this violence as a step towards ultimate social justice. This was precisely the purpose of his statement that, in the socio-political order of post-war Poland, the ‘liberal-capitalist’ world for which earlier anti-socialist and anti-Communist papal encyclicals had been written no longer prevailed. Even as post-war Poland slid from its ‘gentle’ revolutionary phase into Stalinism, Kętrzyński did not retreat into an ivory tower, instead arguing that Catholic natural law could explain and justify the course of events.

The Catholics and the Cominform

The fact that Kętrzyński had met with a few dozen Catholic activists face to face in 1946 and 1947 did not, of course, mean that Western Europeans would accept the theses that he and his colleagues published in 1948, amounting to a Catholic defence of Poland's Stalinisation. Yet the notion that the Second World War had moved Europe – on both sides of the Iron Curtain – beyond the ‘liberal-capitalist’ framework of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno was music to the ears of progressive French and Belgian Catholics, who shared with their Polish counterparts a distrust of Germany and the United States.Footnote ⁶⁶ As a geopolitical actor, the Holy See, too, aroused the suspicions of these Western Europeans, sympathetic as they understood it to have been towards fascism in the interwar and war years, then to the emerging American cold war camp.Footnote ⁶⁷ The groundwork was already in place at the crossroads of geopolitics and ideology for Catholic anti-liberal dialogue and partnership across the Iron Curtain.

It was in 1948, following the Wrocław peace congress, that Dziś i Jutro's options multiplied for making of its international contacts something more than courtesy visits and exchanges of pamphlets and journals. Appointed in 1949 as one of the official Polish delegates to sessions of the Wrocław congress's successor movement, the Partisans of Peace, Wojciech Kętrzyński became a leading Catholic peace activist functioning in a transnational, predominantly Communist network. Moreover, with the movement's decision in advance of its 1949 Paris congress to call for the formation of national peace committees in all participating countries, Kętrzyński became a key player in the Polski Komitet Obrońców Pokoju (PKOP, Polish Committee of the Defenders of Peace).Footnote ⁶⁸

Wojciech Kętrzyński, as Dziś i Jutro's designated ‘foreign affairs’ specialist, attended the Partisans of Peace congress in Paris – one of 2,000 delegates from 72 countries – while a parallel congress took place in Prague, assembling those who had been refused French visas.Footnote ⁶⁹ Kętrzyński was able to brag in Paris then and again one year later in Stockholm without any voice to the contrary about the great achievements of the PKOP.Footnote ⁷⁰

The kind of argumentation that Kętrzyński presented on behalf of Catholic-socialist co-operation in the PKOP gained even more weight – indeed, making the Poles seem the world leaders of Catholic-socialist co-operation – after the third conference of the Cominform, which took place on 16–19 November 1949. Palmiro Togliatti, the iconic head of the Partito Comunista Italiano, gave a speech at this conference that, doubtless, haunted Pius XII and deepened his sensitivity the following year to the Stockholm Appeal and its attendant support from progressive Catholics. The title of Togliatti's speech – ‘Working-Class Unity and the Tasks of the Communist and Workers’ Parties’ – foreshadowed nothing particularly noteworthy. The speech's content, however, was a veritable reinvention of his French Communist counterpart Maurice Thorez's so-called main tendue to French Catholic workers, declared in 1936–7.Footnote ⁷¹

Arguing that only the Soviet Union was pursuing a ‘consistent policy of peace’, Togliatti condemned the Marshall Plan and its contributions to Western European political integration: ‘When they talk of “uniting” Europe the agents of American imperialism are really trying to disrupt co-operation between the peoples of Europe, to set up a barrier between them in order to isolate the Soviet Union and the people's democracies’.Footnote ⁷² Noting the growing importance of ‘Catholic trade unions’ and ‘Catholic parties’ across Western Europe, Togliatti lamented that Western Europe's ‘Catholic parties are the principal bourgeois parties and direct the state’.Footnote ⁷³ With Western European Christian Democracy and its pro-European integration stance in mind, Togliatti took the ultimate step: distinguishing between the institutional Church and Catholics as members of that Church, and appealing to Catholics as lay activists rather than to the Church as a whole. This was a prescient rhetorical strategy, calling for the Catholic laity to step up and claim their role in their faith:

The clear message of Togliatti's appeal was for Catholic laymen to ignore their reactionary, imperialism-allied pontiff, Pius XII, and to embrace ‘left-wing, progressive trends’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The pope had, in fact, campaigned heavily on behalf of Christian Democracy: in the case of the 1948 Italian parliamentary elections, the pontiff literally turned Catholic Action into a grass-roots electoral organisation for the Democrazia Cristiana Italiana.Footnote ⁷⁶ That said, the principal object of Togliatti's ire – though unspecified in his speech – was the decree issued by the Holy Office on 1 July 1949 condemning to excommunication any Catholic ‘faithful professing materialist and anti-Christian doctrine as Communists and, above all, those who defend or propagate such doctrine’.Footnote ⁷⁷

What Togliatti proposed seemed, rather than co-optation, to centre on partnership in the service of the most exalted among temporal causes, most convincing in its presentation because tempered with a dose of humility: ‘Bringing a large section of the Catholic workers and working people into the united front for the defence of peace, freedom and the living standards of the working people is one of the pre-conditions for rendering this defence effective’.Footnote ⁷⁸ A small, but important, group of Western European Catholics bought into this message – one of the most notable being Jean-Marie Domenach, who was soon to succeed Emmanuel Mounier at the helm of Esprit. The mobilising power of the Stockholm Appeal campaign, launched less than four months after the Third Cominform congress, only magnified the reach of Togliatti's new and improved, cold war-proof main tendue.Footnote ⁷⁹

A Polish-led Catholic-Socialist International

For Dziś i Jutro, Togliatti's speech inspired a document pitched by Kętrzyński to the movement's leadership.Footnote ⁸⁰ This document was nothing less than a blueprint for a ‘Catholic-socialist international’ dedicated to the pursuit of global peace through transnational co-operation at the European level. Beginning with a half-page excerpt from Togliatti's speech, the document framed its proposed initiative as a response to the Italian leader's call, albeit adapted to Poland's unique status as the most firmly Catholic country in the Soviet bloc:

Praising the Dziś i Jutro movement without identifying it by name, the document observed that, since ‘there have emerged in these years in Poland essentially Catholic organisations clearly founded on acceptance of the new order’ – read: Dziś i Jutro – ‘These considerations make Poles uniquely responsible to the Catholics of the Western world’.

There followed a declaration of the purpose of the new ‘international’: ‘Within this state of affairs emerges a design for the creation of an international movement of Catholic socialists’. Next came the designation of an appropriate set of core nodes for the new transnational network: countries whose self-styled progressive Catholics were deemed most likely to form durable partnerships with the Poles. To constitute the new international's geographical core, Kętrzyński chose Poland, France and Italy. The Dziś i Jutro leadership would soon replace Italy, which would prove harder to penetrate than anticipated, with Belgium. Indeed, beginning with France, the blueprint enumerated specific organisations with which the Polish activists should begin, given the greatest likelihood of achieving the crucial first bilateral commitments: ‘the progressives [Union des Chrétiens Progressistes], Mission de Paris, Jeunesse de l’Église, L’Esprit, Témoignage Chrétien, Mouvement Populaire des Français, L’Économie et Humanisme’. Despite the intellectual or pastoral, rather than political, nature of most of these organisations, the document classified the new international's activities as belonging above all to the ‘political realm, with the reservation that ideological elements will also constitute a consolidating factor’.

For the initial stages of the international's construction, the blueprint recommended secrecy, avoidance of ‘too ostentatious contact with Catholic groups openly condemned by the Vatican’ and initial incorporation only of organisations with ‘significant reach’. Nonetheless, the blueprint made clear the proposed international's ultimate goals: ‘1) A campaign within the Catholic camp against reactionary elements; 2) Direct action against capitalism; 3) Co-operation with the socialist camp’. Over the course of its functioning, the Catholic-socialist international was to seek ‘to reach, in the end, all progressive-Christian elements’.

This was, quite simply, a revolutionary proposal. Taking one page from the Cominform and another from its sworn opponent, Western European Christian Democracy, the Dziś i Jutro leadership adopted a design aiming at nothing less than an institutional foundation for its alternative, anti-Marshall Plan vision of European partnerships across the Iron Curtain. It was thus a logical consequence at once of the Wrocław congress, Togliatti's speech and what the Dziś i Jutro activists styled in their public writings as attempts to ‘Christianise’ socialism from within.

For the Poles, the term ‘Catholic socialism’ thus superseded the French-derived terms ‘progressive Catholicism’ and ‘progressive Christianity’, underscoring as it did a literal intermixing of Catholic and socialist elements and binding them with each other in one entity. It was nonetheless in recognition of the debt owed to French Catholic thought and activism that the Dziś i Jutro blueprint advised going first after long-term partnerships in France. It is important to emphasise, however, that Franco-Polish Catholic relations were neither the full extent nor the ultimate goal of the proposed Catholic-socialist international: rather, that goal was an active network of peace-advocating Catholic organisations, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, of people who would see in Catholic social teaching a principled rationale for the geopolitics of the Soviet bloc.

Inspired though this proposal was by Togliatti's Cominform statement, no available documentation suggests that the Polish United Workers’ Party leadership either initiated or steered it. While the Polish security apparatus closely monitored contacts established and maintained by individual members of Bolesław Piasecki's movement in the course of their travels abroad, consultation with Party officials proceeded through back channels to which Piasecki alone was privy. Indeed, the movement's leader not only knew of, but frequently mediated in these contacts. The tasks assigned by Poland's security apparatus to Dziś i Jutro/PAX's two principal ‘foreign agents’ – Dominik Horodyński and Konstanty Łubieński – concerned the Polish émigré communities in London and Paris, though both also reported extensively on their ‘Catholic-socialist’ contacts.Footnote ⁸¹ Mikołaj Kunicki has convincingly demonstrated that Piasecki frequently succeeded in influencing or carving out spaces of action for his movement by falling back on excellent personal relationships with key figures in the post-war state apparatus, especially the Public Administration minister Władysław Wolski, who retained close ties to the NKVD, and Col. Julia Brystygier, the redoubtable éminence grise of the secret police, who personally handled, among others, Horodyński and Łubieński. As Kunicki puts it, ‘Piasecki was quick to learn how informal one could be with these people and how much profit this familiarity could bring. Consider the case of Ryszard Reiff, who had escaped from a Soviet camp and secretly returned to Warsaw: Piasecki resolved the matter over a bottle of cognac that he and Reiff shared with Wolski’.Footnote ⁸²

It is unsurprising that, to the extent that Party officials were aware of Dziś i Jutro's international project, this awareness yielded no public statements or affiliation with state policy. Applicability behind the Iron Curtain remained unclear for the Holy Office's threat of excommunication pronounced on 1 July 1949 against Catholics overtly working with or on behalf of Communists, but the Holy See and the episcopates of Western Europe alike became highly attuned to Western European Catholic contacts with Communist parties, particularly in the battleground states of France and Italy, where Communists represented a major electoral force.

Togliatti's appeal for co-operation with Catholics was thus an exhortation to find new methods of Catholic-Marxist collaboration that might circumvent the letter of Holy Office policy and Kętrzyński's proposal fitted this bill perfectly. This was to be an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, attack on capitalism and liberal democracy. The goal was thus not to frontload contacts and joint initiatives with Western European Catholic organisations with grand advocacies of nationalisation, expropriation or class warfare. Quite the opposite – the goal was to build confidence and familiarity between organised movements of Catholics on either side of the Iron Curtain. With that groundwork in place, Dziś i Jutro might then propel forward French, Belgian and Italian Catholic conversations in a key that would harmonise with its own publications back in Poland. Extensive fieldwork in France and fortuitous contacts in Belgium turned both of those countries into promising centres of transnational Catholic-socialist co-operation.Footnote ⁸³

Assembling the various nodes of this international required a differentiated, systematic approach on the part of the Dziś i Jutro activists. The first step involved deepening and consolidating existing contacts. The Poles’ anchor was Esprit, whose founder had, after all, provided a key source of inspiration for Dziś i Jutro's own Catholic-socialist ideology. Kętrzyński, Krasiński, Łubieński and Horodyński then built on this ideology with contacts made between 1947 and 1950. Mounier's death in March 1950, little more than a week after the Stockholm Appeal's announcement, only deepened the ties between Dziś i Jutro and Esprit.

The second step of the planned international's construction was pegged to the Partisans of Peace movement. The Stockholm Appeal preceded by only a few months the movement's Second World Peace Congress, which, through a combination of sabotage and happenstance, fell at the last possible minute to Warsaw to host. Dziś i Jutro then took full advantage of the opportunity to integrate into its expanding network the various Catholic activists in attendance.Footnote ⁸⁴ The congress, from 16 to 22 November 1950, gave Dziś i Jutro the opportunity to host an unprecedented conference of Catholic-socialist peace activists on the territory of the ‘People's Poland’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Given how hastily the congress was prepared, the Dziś i Jutro meeting, which took place on the congress's second day, amounted to a spontaneously arranged celebration coinciding with Dziś i Jutro's fifth anniversary. With Piasecki hosting the celebratory dinner and Kętrzyński running the substantive meeting that preceded it, the goal of the gathering – clear from Kętrzyński's typed report for Piasecki – was to push the project of a Catholic-socialist international as aggressively as possible on selected activists from Western Europe.Footnote ⁸⁶

For this reason, though he played host to a total of 80 Catholic participants from around the world, Kętrzyński in his notes virtually ignored the delegations from Canada, Korea, Madagascar and Vietnam. Instead, he focused his attention almost exclusively on Catholic activists hailing from Belgium, France and Italy, who were not only an object of Polish interest, but indeed were themselves fascinated by Communist Poland. As Kętrzyński put it, the delegates from these countries in particular ‘demonstrated a deeper interest in the ideological situation of Catholics in Poland, particularly Catholics concentrated in or around our milieu’.

Esprit and Anti-Germanism

When Wojciech Kętrzyński had written to Emmanuel Mounier's successor at Esprit in the wake of the latter's passing, the sorrow that he expressed appeared genuine. Mounier's ideas were central to Kętrzyński's choice of words and arguments in his pursuit of international partners for Dziś i Jutro. Indeed, he had so assimilated Mounier's writings through hours spent poring over them that he had succeeded in introducing into the Polish movement to which he belonged a personalist political theology that – like Carl Schmitt's anti-Weimar decisionismFootnote ⁸⁷ – he believed justified the brutality and violence of Poland's newly Stalinist regime.

Tony Judt has famously indicted Mounier for his embrace of the Stalinisation of much of Central and Eastern Europe, arguing that it was ‘the moral price he was driven to pay in order to sustain his faith in the intrinsic value of revolutionary action’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet if Mounier's support for the PZPR evidenced a genuine moral dilemma, the behaviour of his successor at Esprit betrayed no such conflict, according to Judt, whose analysis thus does not capture Domenach as it does Mounier. Jean-Marie Domenach – who in 1950 received a promotion to rédacteur-en-chef, or managing editor, of Esprit, alongside the Swiss philosopher Albert Béguin's elevation to directeur de la revue, or executive editor – swallowed Dziś i Jutro's arguments hook, line and sinker. His reply to Kętrzyński's condolence note following Mounier's passing made it immediately clear that Dziś i Jutro could count on him for close, lasting co-operation. Thanking Kętrzyński and his fellow Dziś i Jutro personnel for their condolences, which have ‘truly touched our hearts’, Domenach added, ‘I hope that you will want to maintain with me the amicable contact that you have shared with Emmanuel Mounier’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Indeed, the emotional bond that Domenach and Kętrzyński developed almost overnight combined with certain qualities of Domenach's personality to produce an overtly political alliance without Kętrzyński ever needing to make a concerted pitch to the new rédacteur-en-chef. Here, Domenach and Kętrzyński's shared experience as active young members of the anti-Nazi resistance in their respective countries helped to bring them almost immediately onto the same page. Though Kętrzyński was six years older, they shared the same core generational event: the Second World War.Footnote ⁹⁰ Moreover, they shared similar experiences of loss and Christian martyrdom at German hands: for Domenach, his best friend Gilbert Dru, killed while active in the Lyon-based resistance movement, Témoignage Chrétien; for Kętrzyński, Włodzimierz Pietrzak, the young Warsaw Uprising martyr of the future Dziś i Jutro milieu. These two young personalists died only weeks apart at the hands of the same enemy, albeit at opposite ends of Europe.

Unlike Mounier, then, who had managed to position Esprit on the cutting edge of current events while nonetheless keeping everyone guessing as to his exact agenda and partisan affiliation, Domenach left nothing hidden. Though he was the junior editor to Béguin, his anti-Germanism quickly set the tone for Esprit's new political agenda and brought the French journal into the welcoming embrace of the Dziś i Jutro movement. An opponent of both European integration and the remilitarisation of Western Europe, Domenach wrote to Kętrzyński as early as his fifth month as an Esprit editor, ‘We are entering a difficult period, and the rearmament will aggravate France's situation even further. We are going to regroup our forces in order to fight against fanaticism and the spirit of war, but in spite of the confidence that we have, there are days when the future seems deeply ominous’.Footnote ⁹¹

Three months later, Domenach could only nod his head in agreement with the anti-colonialist agenda espoused by Kętrzyński in a rant against Western European Christians, who, the Polish activist argued, had capitulated to the lies of (West) German-sympathising Christian Democrats. Namely, ‘out of fear, evidently, of suffering and chaos that await them on the path towards a better tomorrow’, even the most pious of ‘Catholic opinion in the West’ warmly embraced ‘“an established, yet odious, order”’. Meanwhile, Kętrzyński argued, Western Europeans needed to summon up courage as Christians morally obliged to struggle for social justice in the temporal realm.

The courage that Western Europeans needed, the Polish activist argued, was to accept the violence of revolution as a way-station en route to a much better tomorrow than the present chaos of colonialism and cold war could ever allow one to imagine. Kętrzyński thus insisted that France must follow Poland's path of ‘“revolutionary, tragic disorder”’ from which could only spring forth the framework for a new, better order’ – in other words, the path of revolutionary socialism.Footnote ⁹² Clearly influenced by his Polish colleague, Domenach lobbied Béguin to organise a public event at which Esprit's extensive network of French supporters might meet with Kętrzyński and Łubieński. This public event came to fruition in the early autumn of 1951.Footnote ⁹³

In addition to facilitating continued expansion of Dziś i Jutro's contacts among francophone Catholic activists, the Esprit–Dziś i Jutro axis of partnership yielded tangible policy-related consequences bearing directly on the global peace campaign. This was the heart of their shared, East–West ‘Catholic-socialist’ advocacy. Namely, while the Stockholm Appeal partisans were converging on Warsaw in November 1950, Domenach was helping to launch a Comité Français pour la Solution Pacifique du Problème Allemand (French Committee for the Peaceful Solution of the German Problem).Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1952, Domenach signed on as co-chair – with Michel Bruguier, a Parisian appellate court prosecutor – for an international conference sponsored by this committee and its German partners in a neutral location, for which Odense, Denmark was selected. Invited in March 1952 to join the conference executive committee, Kętrzyński, however, could not attend its meeting in West Germany for lack of a visa.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the end, the conference was something of a disaster: held only three months after its executive committee first met, its leadership dropped the ball on co-ordination with the Danish government, which ended up refusing visas to almost all invitees from Austria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland.

The fact that the East German delegation was limited to two lesser figures was particularly bad news for a conference designed to convince Germans above all to enter into collective socio-political action against Europe's remilitarisation. In October 1950, this had become a concrete political prospect, following the public presentation by French prime minister René Pleven of plans for a ‘European defence community’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Intended as a rapid-fire follow-up to the economic integration announced in the Schuman Plan of June 1950, the Pleven Plan raised over half of Europe up in arms on the premise that the creation of NATO had endangered the world sufficiently. The point was that the West German government, only five years after Hitler's fall, could not be trusted with a share in governance over Western Europe's military arsenal.

As the working document produced by the Odense Conference declared, the goal was not to strip Germany of its rights, but to ‘impede the renaissance of militarism in Germany’ by means of a collective ‘neutralisation’ of the region. The declaration suggested that a definitive disarmament of Germany should lead to the (voluntary) ‘disarmament of Germany's neighbours’, which, in turn, could result in ‘general simultaneous, progressive and controlled disarmament’ of the entire world.Footnote ⁹⁷

These goals were entirely unrealistic, going fundamentally against the grain of cold war Realpolitik, yet their spirit was attractive at least as a statement of principle for peace activists behind the Iron Curtain. The one Pole who had made it to Odense was Rev. Eugeniusz Dąbrowski, a biblical theologian closely tied to Dziś i Jutro, whose retranslation of the New Testament, reprinted by the PAX publishing house, sold out in 50,000 copies almost overnight.Footnote ⁹⁸ Though Dziś i Jutro activists could never get away with proposing Polish, let alone Soviet disarmament, Dąbrowski and Kętrzyński together took the document back to the PKOP.

One particular plank in the declaration, calling the reunification of a demilitarised Germany a ‘legitimate exigency of the German people acquired in the course of history’, gained the approval of the Polish establishment figures in the committee, led by long-time Communist Ostap Dłuski. Dłuski invited Dominik Horodyński from PAX – the Dziś i Jutro movement's new name from April 1952 – to co-chair a Polish Committee for the Peaceful Solution of the German Problem, beginning in the summer of 1953. It was for the purposes of launching this committee that Domenach would make his first trip to Poland, in January 1954.Footnote ⁹⁹ Paradoxically, Domenach would thus be setting up the perverse political legacy of Dziś i Jutro and Esprit's joint Catholic-socialist collaboration: anti-German, anti-European Catholic activism at a time when the institutional Catholic Church was under heavy attack in Poland.

Defending a Compromised Catholic Socialism

Between 1951 and 1953, just as the Catholic-socialist ‘international’ was developing a presence in European public life, the institutional Church in Poland suffered through the arrests of three bishops (including the nation's primate, Stefan, Cardinal Wyszyński) and the show trials of Bishop Kaczmarek of Kielce and of the Cracow Archdiocese's top priest-administrators, assistants of the late Cardinal Sapieha.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Not only did PAX fail to speak out against these repressions, but indeed it attempted to pressure Wyszyński, among others, into accepting everything the PZPR asked of him. Furthermore, after Kaczmarek's sentencing and again after Wyszyński's ‘suspension’ as primate, PAX ran its own propaganda campaign of ‘indignation’ and ‘sadness’ targeting the hierarchy, rather than defending it.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In the interest of ramping up its appeal to the Catholic-socialist partners whom Kętrzyński and Łubieński had been courting since long before the show trials began, the Dziś i Jutro editors produced an eight-page, all-French-language edition (Aujourd’hui et demain) for Christmas 1953, highlighting the articles of greatest interest from the entire year. Similar issues would follow in 1954 and 1955. Kętrzyński supervised the selection of mailing recipients for these issues, creating a specifically targeted list of current or potential partner groups. Among the highlighted articles was a text by Horodyński entitled ‘We place our trust in France’, focused on the debates over the European Defence Community. In fact, almost every text included in the French-language edition touched in some way on the question of peace and Germany's neutralisation.Footnote ¹⁰²

This focus begged for a greater engagement on the part of Jean-Marie Domenach in his capacity as co-chair of the committee for a ‘peaceful solution of the German problem’. In mid 1953, Poland produced its own committee of the same name, inspired by Domenach's group and led by PAX's Dominik Horodyński and the PZPR's Ostap Dłuski, who brought Domenach to Poland at the end of January 1954 as their committee's honoured guest. Domenach spent just over a week in Poland, visiting Cracow and Lublin in addition to Warsaw, acquiring what he described as a better understanding of the Poles’ ‘traditions and hopes for the future’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In these he found a perfect synergy with his own.

A mere three months later, PAX bestowed upon Domenach its annual prize for overall achievement by a Catholic activist, named after Włodzimierz Pietrzak, the young personalist-poet of the Confederation of the Nation who had perished in the Warsaw Uprising. PAX's Andrzej Krasiński showed great tact in his announcement of the prize to Domenach, consulting him first on whether or not the Esprit editor would even permit the Poles to advertise the decision:

Worthy of attention is Krasiński's effort to distance PAX from its four-year international campaign by placing the phrase ‘progressive-Catholic international’ in scare-quotes. Subsequent correspondence shows that this was Krasiński's way of gauging Domenach's general attitude towards PAX. Despite the many deeply personal conversations that he had shared with Domenach in January–February 1954, Krasiński recognised that the issue of Wyszyński's arrest still hung heavily in the air and thus Krasiński preferred to tread carefully.

This care, however, proved entirely unnecessary. Although Domenach did not, in the end, announce his receipt of the Pietrzak Award in the pages of Esprit, he invested considerable time, thought and passion into planning the substance and logistics of his second voyage to Poland in 1954 to receive the award. The connection between Pietrzak and his own ‘martyred’ Témoignage Chrétien friend Gilbert Dru was not lost on Domenach. Indeed, it only convinced him further of the need to commit ideologically to the Poles in their shared international cause: anti-Germanism in the service of world peace.

Domenach's sympathy for PAX's agenda followed not only from personal affinity for Kętrzyński, Krasiński and others in the movement, but also from his perception of a symmetry in Polish-German and Franco-German relations. This was no marginal concern in France: not only the French Communist Party, but also the socialists of the the French Section of the Workers’ International (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO) and a wide cross-section of French society feared for Alsace, Lorraine and other territories that might come into play in the event of German ressentiment. Common coal and steel market or no, French memory of the defeat of 1940 – and even of France's humiliation at Prussian hands in 1870 – remained fresh.

As he accepted the Pietrzak Award in Warsaw, Domenach declared, ‘If countless Christian activists – both Catholics and Protestants – have decided to struggle, together with peace fighters, against the remilitarisation of Germany, they have done so above all for moral reasons: the example of Munich has taught us all that a nation that betrays its friends prepares its own demise.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Both the private correspondence and public statements exchanged between Domenach and his Polish counterparts thus underscore the existence of a genuine sense of solidarity on both sides. As Domenach wrote, ‘our Polish friends’ cause is in solidarity with our own’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The core of this solidarity was a joint political project pursued as a self-styled Christian alternative to European integration, indeed, a project of global peace beginning with the effacement of any possibility of German rearmament. The PAX laudation for Domenach (read aloud by Kętrzyński at the award ceremony) thus began as follows:

The symmetry between the language used by the Polish Catholic socialists and that used by Domenach, not only to congratulate each other, but indeed to reinforce each other's political convictions on grounds of religious principle, is striking. For both, geopolitics and Christian faith were inextricably intertwined as motivations for organised lay activism. In his acceptance speech, Domenach declared,

What Domenach counterposed to the (Western) European integration project was, rather, a ‘Europe reaching back to the traditions of all struggle against exploitation, and particularly the most recent struggles for liberation from fascist occupation, a Europe of the past but also of the future, which, in a mutually assured peace, will seek the path to the reconciliation of nations, cultures and peoples’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

At every stage, the enterprise that brought Domenach to Poland in the summer of 1954 seemed genuine. Ideological affinity, a shared policy agenda and personal relationships combined to make the Polish bond with Esprit, already strong after Mounier's visit in 1946, more intimate and more committed than ever. This – less than a year after Kaczmarek's sentencing and Wyszyński's arrest, discussion of which appears nowhere in any of the papers or statements involving Domenach and his friends from PAX. The shared anti-German programme was no mere rhetorical strategy, but a serious policy advocacy. Domenach, Kętrzyński and their friends could not have anticipated the contingent geopolitical consequences of Nikita Khrushchev's ascent to power in the USSR, most notably Khrushchev's public reception of the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in Moscow in September 1955.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even thereafter, both milieux kept alive a transnational political memory of Germany as aggressor that continued to shape Franco-German-Polish relations into the 1960s.

This was a bond with Esprit, not just with Domenach personally. The Esprit executive editor Albert Béguin; long-time Esprit contributor and Mounier confidant Jean Lacroix; Henri Bédarida, the president of the Centre Catholique des Intellectuels Français and the renowned Catholic sociologist Henri Bartoli made a one-week trip to Poland in April 1955 – five months before Konrad Adenauer's visit to Moscow. In the course of their Polish sojourn, they gave lectures in Cracow, Lublin, Warsaw and Wrocław, with PAX shepherding them around as foreign dignitaries.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Indeed, all were so impressed with their time in Poland and their treatment at the hands of their hosts that they pledged to return seven months later for the tenth-anniversary celebration of Dziś i Jutro.Footnote ¹¹¹ This – despite the obvious propagandistic significance accorded to their visit by the PAX leadership, evident from just a few sentences of its announcement in the pages of Dziś i Jutro: ‘The visit of the French Catholic intellectuals came at a time when the entire Polish nation was signing the Vienna [Peace] Appeal. The fact of the mass signings by Polish society made an enormous impression on our guests, who appreciate in full the significance of the struggle for peace. Professor Lacroix voiced this appreciation in his farewell address, in which he emphasised Poland's great role in the work of maintaining peace’.Footnote ¹¹²

This passage suggests the height of success for Kętrzyński's project: prominent French Catholic activists visiting the ‘People's Poland’ and returning home to spread the gospel of Catholic socialism, thereby adding credence and clout to PAX's own efforts, national and international alike. And yet, a mere two months after the Polish sojourn of Béguin, Lacroix and their colleagues, the Catholic-socialist international – by now in its fifth year – was in crisis. In the interim, the Holy Office had condemned the Dziś i Jutro flagship weekly, alongside a collection of Piasecki's essays published in late 1954 under the title Zagadnienia istotne. Piasecki had overplayed his hand, circulating copies of his manuscript in translation around Western Europe and seeking a publisher in Italy. Outraged at some of Piasecki's claims – for example, that Marxists might be better Christians than Christians themselves – the prominent Fribourg-based Dominican scholar I. M. Bocheński helped to engineer the manuscript's condemnation.Footnote ¹¹³