Paweł Włodkowic

There was another Catholic I am really proud of: Paweł Włodkowic. He was a Catholic scholar in the XIV-XVth century. He is famous for his thesis about the peaceful coexistance of Christians and pagans. In his time Poland was a relative tolerant country, which changed only during the Vasa dynasty reign.

BTW. Once, I remember, I needed a kind of nickname to distinguish myself from other people having the same name (there are several Pawel Biernackis). Wlodkowic has influenced me a little, so that I chose a similar form to be my nickname - Fadzeyovic. It is a patronymic derived from the Russian form of my father's name, just like Wlodkowic was in his case. Such forms are not used in the contemporary Polish any more. My father's name was Tadeusz (Greek Thadeios, Russian Fadey) and I was trying to figure out how it would sound if we were influenced by the Byzantine Empire rather than Rome. We do not have the soft "d" sound in Polish, instead it is usually "dz", therefore "Fadzeyovic" rather than "Fadeyevich".

As you might expect I regret a little that we were not under the Bizantine influence. The Greeks would have allowed us to write in our own language, unlike Rome. And they would probably allow both orthodox and catholic religions (just as it was in Great Moravia), which would greatly facilitate our relationships with the Belarussians and the Ukrainians. As far I know we did nasty things due to the catholic influence, for example burning the orthodox churches and persecuting the minorities. And this happened long after Wlodkowic's death.

His Excellency Ignacy Krasicki

As you may have noticed I am quite critical against the Catholic Church concerning our history. However there are few exceptions. There is for example a Catholic bishop I just adore - Ignacy Krasicki. He was a polish poet. One of his works is Monachomachia ("the war of monks"), it is quite funny. Here is my translation of one of his short poems:

A lamb and wolves

Who wishes to find an excuse, he could,
Two wolves have captured a lamb in a wood,
Were about to eat him, he asks: "What's your right?"
"You're tasty, weak, in a wood" - said the wolf before bite.

Pagan reaction

An interesting Wikipedia link - Pagan_reaction_in_Poland. It was our first revolt against the Catholic Church, in the XI century. Unfortunately we lost.

BTW. We, Polish, use Latin alphabet, unfortunately. There are some special polish letters, like "ą" or "ć". I regret very much that the Great Moravia was destroyed and we could not use the Glagolitic script to write in our own language. Due to the Rome domination it was written only in Latin, for 500 years. This way we lost any clue about how our language looked like after the Xth century.

And there was a chance for us, a chance that we lost. There was a written slavic language already in the IXth century, the so called Old Church Slavonic. Unfortunately it was banned by the Pope.

Sigismund III Vasa

One of the polish kings I really do not like was Sigismund III Vasa. This guy was under strong influence of the Counterreformation and it was his idea to attack Russia (1605-1618), mainly because Russia was orthodox and so independent from the Pope. He gave exclusive rights to the polish catholics and provoked a war with Sweden. His reign was the initial of the polish XVII century, which led to the decline of the country.

Ketlin

I have two links about the polish people murdered in the 1944 in the western Ukraina, both links in Polish:

http://www.stankiewicze.com/ludobojstwo/huta_stara.html
http://www.mojemiasto.slupsk.pl/index.php?id=3520

Antoni Kania "Ketlin" was a catholic priest living there at that time. In 1943 he notified Germans about the Ukrainians gathering there. This caused Germans to attack the Ukrainians, they were fighting for three days. I suppose the information he did it somehow got to the Ukrainians and they killed all the people in the village Huta Stara as a revenge in the 1944. I consider the priest responsible for their death. The interesting thing is that I am probably the only one who can see the corelation between these two facts. The persons having written these texts do not see any coincidence, they seem not to realize that what he did in 1943 may have caused the Ukrainians to strike back in the 1944. I think the Ukrainians may have found out about the betrayal from the Germans, or they may have just guessed it. One of the people killed in Huta Stara was Paweł Biernacki, aged 60 - his name was exactly the same like mine. It is extremely important to understand why what "Ketlin" did was wrong. He did something very dangerous for his people, but did not pay with his own life for that. He died long after the war, in the 1965.

Franz Josef von Habsburg

I suppose that Franz Josef von Habsburg has financed the polish anti-prussian propaganda in the late XIX century. This was a diplomatic war against Prussia, a continuation of the (lost) war from the 1866. The Kulturkampf was provoked by the Austrian-Hungarian agents, especially the Catholic Church. That is why I do not like von Habsburgs a little ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Prussian_War

A theory: how the Catholic Church made us to dislike a catholic nation

We, the Polish people, have been controlled by the Catholic Church throughout our history. I mean they largely influenced our politics. We are an exception among Slavs, because most slavic nations were either totally independent on the Church (like Russians), or were subordinate to the non-slavic nations, for example Austrians or Germans or Hungarians. It almost looks like we were the only slavic nation in a kind of anti-slavic coalition, since the Xth century. Our wars were wars against the enemies of the Church. For example the war against Russia (orthodox) in the XVIIth century, later against Ukraina (orthodox), later against Sweden (protestants), then against the Turkey (muslim). With a strange exception - Germany. Germans are a very strange exception indeed, because the last war we were fighting with them was maybe in the XIth century, yet we seem not to like each other. We did have had bitter enemies - the Prussians (not Germans), but they again fit into the schema, being protestants. Of course I suspect we did not like Prussians for the very same reason - because the Church did not like them.

My simple and stupid question is - how come we do not like Germans? Half of them are catholics and we did not fight with them for centuries, until the XXth century. So what happened in the XXth century? Suddenly something very strange must have happened. Well, my guess is that Germany "betrayed" the Rome in a way and joined the protestant Prussia (which happened in the 1871). Only then the Church decided that we should dislike also the Germans. I cannot prove my theory in numbers, but I know many examples from the polish literature (late XIX century) being very anti-german. One of the writers was Henryk Sienkiewicz, a very talented writer indeed. I spend some time reading his papers concerning the contemporary problems, and I must admit he was very anti-prussian and anti-german. I was also reading a little Bismarck ("Die Gedanken und Erinnerungen") and this led me to the conclusion that the Kulturkampf may have been provoked by the Catholic Church. Unfortunately the literature lives longer than opportunistic political strategies and the Church making us anti-german (just my theory) contributed to the tragic XXth century. In fact they made us anti-russian too (which I understand) and probably affected this way our attitude against the Soviet Union.

The large von Habsburg empire does not exist any more and the Catholic Church is not a serious threat since 1918. However the problem remains and we live between two large neighbour nations disliking them (to say the least). Neighbours usually have difficult history, but in this case I would say that the difficulties are unusually large. Of course, we say we dislike Russians because of the communism, but if my theory is correct then maybe the communism was that difficult for us BECAUSE we disliked the Russians. I can compare it now, since I live in Finland, and the Finns did not have had that many problems with the Russians as we did. The Finns were very practical about the communism. Well, I wanted to write about the Germans. If I am right then the Church did an extraordinary job making us anti-german in just few decades. I am sure they had no reason to do it before 1871, or, say, 1866, because then von Habsburgs were somehow controlling Germany. It is really strange that they succeeded, and now I guess most people in Poland would say that we have been fighting against Germans for one thousand years, which is not true. We were fighting with the Prussians, Russians, Swedish, Ukrainians, but almost never with the Germans.