Abstract
The rise of nationalism threatened the integrity of the Catholic milieu in borderlands such as Prussian Upper Silesia. Facing this challenge, the ecclesiastical elite developed various strategies. This article presents interpretations of sacred art works from the first half of the 20th century, which reveal different approaches to national discourses expressed in iconographic programs. The spectrum of attitudes includes indifference, active counteraction to the progress of nationalism by promoting a different paradigm of building temporal imagined communities, acceptance of nationalistic metaphysics, which assumes the division of humanity into nations endowed with a unique personality, and a synthesis of Catholicism and nationalism, in which national loyalties are considered a Christian duty. The last position proved particularly expansive. Based on the primordialist concept of the nation and the historiosophical concept of Poland as a bulwark of Christianity, the Catholic-national ideology gained popularity among the pro-Polish clergy in the inter-war period. This was reflected in Church art works, which were to present Catholicism as the unchanging essence of the nation and the destiny of the latter resulting from God’s will. This strategy was designed to incorporate Catholic Slavophones into the national community. The adoption of a different concept of the nation by the pro-German priests associated with the Centre Party—with a stronger emphasis on the subjective criteria of national belonging—resulted in greater restraint in expressing national contents in sacred spaces.
Highlights
The example of Upper Silesia shows what dilemmas resulted from this ambivalence in the borderland, where Catholicism was the common denominator and priests identified themselves with different temporal communities
The analyzed examples from a Central European borderland show to what extent church art, through which, as the believers saw it, spoke the authority of the institution, could be used to impose national loyalty on the faithful as a moral obligation derived from the religious premises or to shape the sacred space as a place of refuge from the growing nationalizing pressure and of supra-ethnic reconciliation
National–Catholic symbiosis was characteristic of Polish tradition from the second half of the 19th century, and national symbols were widely accepted inPolish church art around 1900
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The nationalization of Upper Silesians and the local Catholic clergy’s attitude towards nationalist projects has already been discussed at length (Bjork 2008; Michalczyk 2010), but the problem of using church art for or against nationalism has usually remained on the margins of reflection In recent years, it has been researched by the author of this article, the results being presented in Polish in several partial studies, focused on individual objects (Gorzelik 2016; Gorzelik 2017; Gorzelik 2019), and in a newly issued monograph (Gorzelik 2020).
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