Thy Kingdom Come: Patriotism, Prophecy, and the Catholic Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Poland

Abstract

Few sentences have been more troublesome over the centuries than the second line of the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." 1 Many Christians have taken comfort in the promise that an earthly kingdom of God was approaching, and some have turned this hopeful conviction into a moral imperative, building a variety of political and social projects upon a theological foundation. When faced with a world that bore little resemblance to anyone's idea of a divine realm, they have assumed the responsibility of actively creating the kingdom of God. Christianity has generated such revolutionary utopianism from its earliest moments, but those in positions of clerical authority have almost always tried to repress the idea that faith could serve as the inspiration for radical political change. Within the Roman Catholic tradition in particular, theologians have attempted to domesticate the unsettling implications of the belief that God's kingdom was imminent.