Yes! There Are Polish Protestants
That Polishness is steeped in Catholicism has become a given in the minds of many, both Poles and foreigners. But the truth, as always, is more complicated. Read on to learn the story of Poland’s Protestants, from the 17th century to today.
Though modern-day Poland is rather homogenous, both ethnically and religiously, this is a rather recent development in history. In fact, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795) was a unique meeting point of various cultures, languages and religions.
Plenty of historians and commentators point to the multi-confessional legacy of the region where Jews, Catholics and Orthodox Christians lived together. In our modern retelling, these religions have become stand-ins for nationality. According to this narrative, the Catholics are Poles or Lithuanians, the Orthodox are Belarusian or Ukrainian, the Uniates Ukrainian, and Jews are ascribed Jewish nationality (though this is open for debate). And where do Protestants fit in? For the most part, the presence of Lutherans, Calvinists, Unitarians and others has been connected to German-speaking peoples on Polish territory. But this view eliminates the possibility of Polish Protestants, who were and still are a significant minority.
In popular representations, and in the minds of many Poles, Catholicism is part and parcel to Polish identity. The devotional religious practices, or the Church itself, have served as an anchoring point for ethnic nationalism. This idea most recently received a boost because of the Solidarity protest movement that the Church supported, and the high visibility of the Polish Pope John Paul II. That Polishness is steeped in Catholicism has become a given in the minds of many, both Poles and foreigners. But the truth, as always, is more complicated.
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On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's Reformation, the Seventh-day Adventist Church organized a happening on the Main Square in Kraków, where a man dressed as Martin Luther nailed the theses symbolically to the door, photo: Beata Zawrzel / Reporter / East News
The first grave error is to project our modern conceptions of nationality into the distant past. What we perceive as national identity is in no way comparable with how our Mediaeval and Early Modern ancestors understood themselves. For example, one popular line of thinking draws a straight line between the baptism of Poland’s first king, Mieszko I, and modern nationhood and statehood. In 1966, Poland celebrated a millennium of Poland using this event as the marker. The mythologised baptism into the Roman Church has also served to highlight Poland’s supposedly primordial Catholic nature.
However, for centuries, to be Polish meant only to be an enfranchised member of the Polish nobility by grant from the king. This meant privileges and rights, and often acculturation to the Polish language; though language remained somewhat fluid and flexible. Moreover, until the 18th century, there was no requirement or pressure for the szlachta – or nobles – to be Catholic. There’s no better illustration of this than the history of the Reformation in Poland.
Reformation ideas come to Poland
The Protestant movement began most prominently in 1517 when Martin Luther, a Catholic priest, nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in Saxony. Luther and others challenged the authority and infallibility of the Church, specifically with regard to the sale of indulgences to the faithful in order to reduce the time that their deceased friends and relatives would spend in purgatory before being granted entrance into heaven. This dispute opened the way for a much larger discussion of the Church’s harmful practices which had been enshrined in the everyday lives of people.
As Luther’s ideas flowed eastward through printed books and travelling priests, townspeople in Poland, craftsmen and the humanist elite were very receptive to these ideas. And despite prohibitions on the sale and printing of such writings (under pain of death!), these works continued to be distributed widely.
Historians in the recent past connected such episodes into a simple dichotomy, of ‘Germans’ with Protestant sympathies and ‘Poles’ remaining staunchly loyal to the Old Church. But as mentioned above, we shouldn’t use our own national categories when assessing such remote periods in history. Moreover, there were many members of the Polish nobility who joined Protestant parishes or attended these services.
'Portrait of Zygmunt August' (Potrait of Zygmunt August) by Lucas Cranach, 1556, photo: National Museum in Kraków During the reign of King Sigismund II August (1548-72) there was a marked toleration of Protestant views, and the gentry left the Church in droves. Accordingly, by the 1570s, the Polish-Lithuanian elite was dominated by non-Catholics. Protestants of different stripes held a slight majority in the country’s governing bodies.
In Poland’s capital at the time, Kraków, many prominent ‘dissenters’ could be found. Andrzej Trzecieski (Tricesius the Elder) was a renowned humanist and classicist. According to the contemporary Bishop of Kraków, Piotr Tomicki, Trzecieski had taken on the new faith as early as 1528, a little over a decade after Luther made his views public in Wittenberg. He travelled to the Holy Roman Empire to gather newly published books, and returned a zealous Protestant. Despite his controversial views, he remained a close adviser to Poland’s kings during his lifetime, even receiving a large grant from the famed King Stefan Bátory to carry out his studies without having to work.
Importantly, the Trzecieski family were in no real danger for their supposed heresy, because they were of noble rank. The same was not true, however, for the Polish townsfolk or burghers who were also willing recipients of the Reformed message. We might think that changing one’s way of thinking is a personal thing and nearly impossible to see on the outside. However, adopting the Protestant faith often meant abandoning certain religious practices considered sacred in the community, such as observing fasts. You can imagine that if the entire town was taking part in these rites, that it would certainly stand out if one person began to eat or prepare food during a period of fasting. In the 1530s, Matthias Guthslar, a goldsmith in Kraków, allegedly invited Lutherans to eat meat at his home during the fast. For this, he was arrested and put on trial.
Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski was another source of Protestant thought in Poland. Modrzewski, or Mredvius in Latin, was a philosopher and considered to be the founder of Polish democracy. It may come as a surprise then that Modrzewski was himself a parish priest, who studied theology in Wittenberg, where he came under the influence of prominent reformers. Though he never left the Church officially, he became known for some radical ideas that likely originated from his acceptance of reform theology. For example, without abandoning his priestly rank, he married Jadwiga Kamieńska, in a clear violation of his commitment to celibacy. But this single act was hardly as earth shattering as his book De Republica Emendanda (On the Rectification of the Republic) – which called for, amongst other things, the end of feudalism, equal rights before the law for all people, and harsh punishments for even minor offences to promote order in society.
In Modrzewski’s view, the role of the state is to protect its citizens, not control or harm them. He drew inspiration from the ancient philosophers, his contemporary Erasmus of Rotterdam, and directly from the teachings of the Bible. Though Modrzewski’s proposals seem eminently reasonably today, elites at the time saw this book as extremist and dangerous: Pope Paul IV even added it to the list of prohibited works in 1557.
Clandestine ‘house churches’
Lutheran teaching especially emphasised that churches were not the only house of God, and that what makes a church special is the gathering of the congregation – the fact of coming together in worship, reflection and prayer. Lutherans and others claimed that the ‘house of worship’ was simply a social construct that could be set up anywhere and at any time, so long as a few hungry souls could be found to gather.
Protestant services were held inside town houses to minister to a small number of the faithful at a time. For decades, there was little official tolerance of ‘heretical’ gatherings and certainly no permission to construct their own churches. Protestants in Kraków received the right to assemble in 1572, but the tenement house where they gathered became the site of many attacks from townspeople who did not appreciate the existence of another denomination in their midst. Rioting resulted in multiple deaths on several occasions, and the building was often damaged severely. During these early years of the Reformation, Polish kings tended to protect members of different faiths, but the ire of the common townsfolk could not be stopped.
Despite multiple attempts to stamp out Protestantism in the Polish lands, there were still many who remained loyal to the new faith or joined voluntarily, sometimes at great social and economic cost. By the late 19th century, Protestants made up about 31% of the Greater Poland region around Poznań, 70% in Masuria and 27% in the Cieszyn region. Amongst these areas, only Cieszyn remains a centre for Protestant life in Poland today.
The Cieszyn region as a centre of Protestantism in Poland
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The Church of Jesus, Cieszyn, photo: Robert Neumann / Forum
The fact that the largest grouping of Polish Lutherans is concentrated around Cieszyn and the surrounding towns – including Bielsko-Biała – is related to peculiar historical circumstances.
The Piast Duchy of Cieszyn passed to the Habsburg (Austrian) realm during the early years of the Reformation. Under the leadership of Duke Wenceslaus III Adam, the population was obliged to convert to Lutheranism and did so in large numbers. The reasons for this are rather opaque. We do not know how much of it was based on attachment to the ideas being preached by reformers, or if they were compelled by other incentives. There are indications that the Duke offered tax relief and other benefits for those who were willing to leave the Catholic Church.
The Duke died in 1579, and his son, Adam Wenceslaus, took the reins of power carrying on in the new denomination, at least for a time. By 1610, the Habsburgs pressured the Duke, who was facing financial trouble, to return to the Roman Church.
A few years later, one of the largest conflicts in human history broke out over the divide between Protestants and Catholics: the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). At its conclusion, the Peace of Westphalia set the boundaries between the two worlds, dividing kingdoms and principalities between the two confessions. The next years set off a series of repressions against Protestants in the Counter-Reformation as non-Catholics living under Catholic rulers were stripped of their rights in the cities.
For the next half century, authorities drove Lutherans in Cieszyn underground. They were forbidden from forming their own parishes or having their own churches. Some of the faithful took to meeting in remote locations in the mountains. These so-called ‘Forest Churches’ became a staple of the Protestant movement in the Beskid Mountains. Many of them are even preserved today.
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‘Leśny Kościół’ (Forest Church), a secret Lutheran service place used in the time of the Counter-Reformation at the place called Zakamiyń (‘Behind the Stone’) in Nýdek on the west side of Czantoria Mount, a plaque on the rock commemorates George Tranoscius, photo: Wikipedia.org
The Lutheran faithful could finally breathe a sigh of relief when their protector, the King of Sweden Charles XII, forced the Habsburg Emperor Joseph I to allow Protestants to practice unencumbered. During the Great Northern War, the Treaty of Altranstaedt in 1707 between the Habsburgs and the Swedes allowed for the construction of new churches. The Habsburg Emperor had to return more than 100 churches confiscated during the Counter-Reformation.
In the 19th century, the Duchy of Cieszyn was multi-lingual – Czech, Polish and German – and religiously diverse with Jews, Lutherans and Catholics. A recent sociological study claimed that this area bucked the conventional image in that, on the whole, the German-speakers here were Catholic and Polish-speakers Lutheran. Cieszyn was the centre of the Polish Lutheran universe, and it attracted people from all over who were committed to both the Protestant faith and the Polish national idea. Several prominent thinkers led the charge to try to eliminate the stereotype that all Poles must be Catholic and that all Lutherans must be German.
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Morning on the Cienkowo ridge, Wisła, Beskids, photo: Forum
Pastor Juliusz Bursche, superintendent of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church, 1933, photo Leopold Otto (1819-1882) was born in Warsaw and spent much of his life as Lutheran pastor and staunch national activist. In the 1860s, he moved to Cieszyn (then under Habsburg rule) where he could freely publish journals and other works that combined his two passions. Otto inspired the next generation of Lutherans in Poland to follow in his footsteps – most prominently, Pastor Juliusz Bursche (1862-1942), who went on to become the first Polish bishop of the Lutheran Church. Long before then, Bursche was nominated as the ‘superintendent’ of the Church in the Kingdom of Poland, then under Russian rule. He introduced Polish-language services to the church, when they had previously only been held in German. Bursche was in close contact with the Polish intelligentsia in the area of Cieszyn and he often travelled there for vacation in its mountain resorts.
Despite resistance from inside his own congregation, Bursche opposed the Germanisation of the church throughout his life. He was such an outspoken supporter of the Polish state project – and such an enemy of Nazism – that when Germany invaded in September 1939, Bursche and his family became prime targets. The pastor was first arrested only one month later, and taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where he was tortured repeatedly. The details are uncertain, but in all likelihood, the Nazi secret police were attempting to extract from him an admission that he was not Polish, but actually German. As the underground press reported in 1942, ‘Despite pressure from [the head of the SS] Himmler himself, despite the suffering that his whole family endured because of his refusals – the Bishop never denied his Polishness and never yielded to the temptations proposed by the enemy’.
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Agata Buzek, photo: Grzegorz Celejewski / AG
More recently, Polish Protestants have made their way in the cultural, sports and political worlds. Jerzy Buzek, a member of the European Parliament, was born on the Czech side of the Cieszyn region and is related to a Lutheran family that was active in Interwar Poland’s politics. His daughter, Agata Buzek, is also one of Poland’s leading actors, known for her performances in films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Revenge and Borys Lankosz’s Reverse. For the latter film, she won the Best Actress Award at the 34th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia and at the 12th Polish Eagle Awards.
Jerzy Pilch, one of Poland’s most well-known authors, was also from the Cieszyn region and grew up in the Polish Lutheran Church. And of course, there is the man who single-handedly popularised ski jumping in Poland, Adam Małysz. He too hails from the mountains around Cieszyn and grew up in a Lutheran household. He still holds the number three spot all time for wins, even though he hasn’t competed in almost a decade. Małysz has influenced more than a generation of young Poles and sky-rocketed the country to become a top competitor in the sport.
Written by Zachary Mazur, Dec 2020, edited by LD, Jan 2021
