A Clash of Catholic Cultures on the German-Polish Border: The Tale of a Controversial Priest in Poznań, 1839–1842

Abstract

Introduction In the spring of 1839, after years of searching for a proper candidate, a priest named Franz Pawelke was appointed to lead the German-- Catholic community in and around Poznan (Posen), a city lying roughly midway between Berlin and Warsaw in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. In many ways it was a plum of a post. The community numbered between 3,000 and 4,000 souls and was growing rapidly, making it by far the largest of its kind in the province. It was well endowed, and its progress was encouraged by the personal interest and financial support of the Prussian king himself, Friedrich Wilhelm Ill. The king, in fact, recently had provided the German Catholics with St. Anthony's Church, a richly ornamented, prominent edifice formerly owned by the city's Franciscan community. More acts of royal largess were soon to follow. Less than three years later Pawelke would be unceremoniously relieved of his duties and transferred out of the city According to his account, his downfall was caused by a small band of extremist malcontents in the community who had flagrantly misrepresented his innocent efforts at interior redecoration and his modest, officially sanctioned reforms of the liturgy and the community order. Conversely, in the eyes of his detractors Pawelke had nearly ruined their monument of a church, had sown discord within the community, and had attempted to undermine the very foundations of the Roman Catholic religion. What indeed happened during Pawelke's short and stormy tenure? A remarkable collection of correspondence between the priest, his flock, and archdiocesan officials offers a fascinating vantage point of the dispute. Piecing together the claims and accusations made on both sides of the conflict, it is possible to retrace the general contours of Pawelke's efforts and the responses they invoked. While in its own right a rather small incident in the life of the city of Poznan, the conflict provides a rare glimpse into the concerns of average Catholics living on the eastern rim of the Prussian Kingdom and illuminates some larger issues which were beginning to affect their lives. In particular, it highlights the significance of cultural divisions within the Catholic Church between the large Polish majority and a growing German minority. It also shows how the nationalist conflict between Poles and Germans in the Prussian East-a struggle which peaked in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-was already affecting the Catholic Church at the parish level by the 1840's. Larger Political and Religious Contexts Understanding the Pawelke affair requires a basic knowledge of the ethnic and religious history of the Poznan area, the policies of the Prussian government, and the political orientation of the local Catholic hierarchy. For close to a thousand years Poznan has formed the political and economic center of a region known as Great Poland (Wielkopolska), the cradle of the Polish state. From here the first Polish kings exercised their authority over an expansive territory, fostered its development, and found their final rest. Long after the Polish crown moved to Cracow in the eleventh century and the weight of the kingdom shifted eastward, Poznan continued to flourish, reaching an economic and cultural zenith in the sixteenth century. Like most Polish cities, it suffered severe setbacks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, owing to the depredations of war and general economic and political stagnation. Despite these hardships, Poznan remained the largest urban center in the western region of the Republic of Poland and Lithuania. As in many other Polish towns of any size, alongside Poznan's Polish majority lived substantial populations of Jews and Germans. Having arrived as early as the thirteenth century, these communities were well established, performed vital roles in the economy, and formed essential parts of the republic's diverse ethnic mosaic. …