The Catholic Church in Lower Silesia Against Communism (1945–1974) ed. by Kazimierza Jaworska (review)

Reviewed by: The Catholic Church in Lower Silesia Against Communism (1945–1974) ed. by Kazimierza Jaworska Jim Bjork The Catholic Church in Lower Silesia Against Communism (1945–1974). Edited by Kazimierza Jaworska. Eastern and Central European Voices: Studies in Theology and Religion, vol. 4. Series edited by Rajmund Pietkiewic and Krzysztof Pilarczyk. ( Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. Pp. 280. €85.00. ISBN 978-3-525-57337-2.) The twentieth-century ideological confrontation between Communism and Roman Catholicism was a global phenomenon but unfolded in distinctive ways in different places. Although these differences are usually investigated along national lines, some of the most interesting and significant variation in church-state relations was regional. The Catholic Church in Lower Silesia against Communism (1945–1974), a volume of six essays by Polish scholars, is refreshingly focused on this regional level. As the title suggests, the volume approaches the Catholic-Communist confrontation from the perspective of the church. The unit of analysis here is not a province (województwo) but a diocese—or, more precisely, the apostolic administration of Wrocław, which only acquired full diocesan status with the official reorganization of former German ecclesiastical governance in 1972. The first two chapters, which cumulatively constitute half of the book, are organized around the first three prelates who governed this jurisdiction: Karol Milik (1945–51), Kazimierz Lagosz (1951–56), and Bolesław Kominek (1956–74). Other chapters focus on the development and repression of male and female religious orders and church-affiliated higher education. All contributors to the volume are themselves affiliated with Catholic institutions. In her preface, the editor, Kazimiera Jaworska, refers to Lower Silesia as a "laboratory for the building of socialism" (9–10). The massive demographic upheaval witnessed in Lower Silesia, like other northern and western territories newly acquired from Germany, provided especially fertile ground for projects of societal transformation, spurring the Communist regime to take earlier and more aggressive steps toward secularization. While the timing and pace of anti-religious measures varied, the contributors to this volume present the regime's overall stance toward the church as essentially fixed and inexorable. At the start of the first chapter, covering the post-war period to 1956, Jan Kopiec (current bishop of Gliwice as well as a church historian) insists that, from the beginning, there "could not be even a minimum level of cooperation" between church and regime (18). Many of the specific forms of state repression described in the volume—restrictions on public devotional activities, imposition of fines and taxes on the clergy, expropriation of property claimed by the church—were, indeed, common across Poland and the broader Soviet bloc and evident throughout the Communist period, albeit with fluctuations in intensity. Readers of the book will, however, also get tantalizing glimpses of counter-narratives that do not fit so neatly into a familiar story of church-state confrontation. As scholars such as Michael Fleming have pointed out, the national project of resettling the western and northern territories with newly arrived Polish migrants was one broadly shared by Catholic and Communist authorities. End Page 431 Jaworska's article, for example, notes Bishop Kominek's anxieties about in-migrant parishioners and priests failing to care for local churches as their permanent homes (78). State officials would not, of course, have focused such concerns on church buildings, but fundamental worries about "temporariness" in Poland's new territories were the same. And just as Polish nationalism could, under the particular conditions of the western territories, facilitate a surprising degree of church-state coordination, so could it generate forms of church-state conflict difficult to imagine elsewhere in Poland. As Agata Mirek recounts in her chapter on female religious orders, nuns in Silesia were subjected to an exceptional campaign of persecution in the late Stalinist period, with more than a thousand forcibly deported to other parts of the country. The region's nuns were targeted due to what Mirek describes as their "biculturalism" (178)—in other words, the fact that they were much more likely than other residents to be of indigenous Silesian origin and thus to have been educated in German. The book's account of Kazimierz Lagosz's administration of the church in Lower Silesia...