Reconquest, Reconstruction, Resumption: Churching Poland after the Second World War

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how the Roman Catholic Church in Poland navigated the enormous increase in church buildings at its disposal at the end of the Second World War. This expansion was largely due to the mass acquisition of post-German churches in lands transferred from Germany to Poland. But rapid reconstruction of most of the churches destroyed during the war as well as the resumption of new construction also played a role. Although access to increased worship space might seem to have been a boon for Poland’s postwar Catholic Church, the appropriation, reconstruction and completion of thousands of church buildings presented the church with an array of challenges. Refounding local Polish religious life in post-German, and often post-Protestant, houses of worship raised difficult questions about how various constituencies in newly formed communities could be made to feel at home in their new surroundings. Trade-offs between the expectations and customs of divergent groups were exacerbated by the prominence within the postwar church of Catholics who were themselves post-German, having spent the war categorized as German before being recategorized as Polish after 1945. Close attention to how Polish Catholics encountered new sacred spaces and one another reveals the complex negotiations and balancing acts required to form an ostensibly homogeneous religious-national community.