Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891-1956

Kosicki, assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, provides a detailed account of the French influence on Polish Catholicism in the first half of the 20th century. In his telling, Catholics in France and Poland interested in bringing Catholicism into modernity adopted personalism, a theology exemplified in the writings of French theologians Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mournier. Unlike the various totalitarianisms then current, personalism asserted the innate dignity of the human person as created in the image of God. Personalism sustained dissident groups, such as those led by Jerzy Turowicz, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Kosicki writes, and later served as a corrective to communism. Various Catholic personalists arose in Poland after the war, like Jerzy Zawieyski, who embraced socialism as compatible with Catholicism, and die-hard anticommunist exile Karol Popiel. By carrying his narrative past 1945, Kosicki demonstrates how ideas that held sway in the interwar years continued their influence—for example, Polish Catholic anti-Semitic theology continued to grow after the war. In the Epilogue, Kosicki also provides a cursory description of Polish Catholic influence after 1956 (when de-Stalinization occurred) and links the influence of personalism to two pivotal late-20th-century developments: Vatican II and Poland’s Solidarity movement. This book will please specialists in 20th-century European Catholicism. (Jan.)