It was a frozen grey-and-white Sunday, in the bleakest years of communist Poland. The red-white party banners hung all over Warsaw, but the streets had been silent and empty all morning. The people of Warsaw were in church. Then, at noon, they came flooding cheerfully down the steps of 300 basilicas and churches and cathedrals, and the city became alive as they made for their favourite cafes for coffee, a scrap of cake with ersatz cream and maybe a small cognac or three.
Sitting in the Wilanowska coffee-house with an old friend, I asked him why he went to mass so much. He replied: "Because it's the only place in Warsaw where you can still get pre-war quality!"
I saw what he meant. Everything else was a miserable substitute - the coffee, the emaciated and censored literary reviews, the tinpot imitation of patriotism doled out by the regime's propaganda. But in there before the altar, the gold was still gold, the words were still the same words and the sacred miracle was available in limitless supplies for everyone. The last bastion of Polishness, the Catholic Church, still held out.
This identification of nation and faith was not always there, although Poles like to believe that it was. The old "Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania", the huge and ramshackle state which survived until the partitions of the 1790s wiped Poland off the map, was a relatively tolerant place of many faiths.
The Reformation, coming from Hussite Bohemia, converted many - including a fair part of the nobility who elected the kind. In the Commonwealth lived Lutheran Germans, Calvinist Scots, Orthodox or Uniate Belarusians and Ukrainians, Muslim Tartars from the remnants of the Golden Horde and the world's largest Jewish population. To be a Pole meant simply to be a loyal subject of the Commonwealth, and the term had no definite connotations of race, language or religion.
The Partitions changed this, even more effectively than the Counter-Reformation. Poland was abolished (not for the last time) and its territory carved up between Prussia, Austria and Russia. The Catholic Habsburgs were tolerant in their part of Poland. But the Russians and Prussians soon began a campaign of brutal cultural assimilation.
The Germans had every schoolchild in the Grand Duchy of Poznan flogged for speaking Polish, while the Kulturkampf set out to break the power of the Catholic Church. The Russians, especially after the failed Polish insurrection of 1830, banned the language from public life, closed the universities and tried to impose the Orthodox faith.
The persecution lasted for almost 125 years. Where they could, the parish priests kept culture and language alive with the Catholic faith, and many fought in the valiant but doomed insurrections against foreign occupation. But the Vatican, anxious to keep in with the Holy Alliance of the three empires, abandoned the Poles to their fate in spite of all the pleas and curses of Polish poets and intellectuals.
IN THOSE years, Polishness inevitably became identified with the Catholic faith. Strange beliefs arose, like the doctrine of Messianism - preached by the charlatan mystic Towianski and his disciple the great poet Adam Mickiewicz.
Messianism taught that Poland was the collective reincarnation of Jesus Christ: the nation was destined by God to suffer crucifixion and death, to descend into the darkness of the tomb and then to be resurrected to buy the salvation of all nations.
In this way arose the idea that God had created humanity in three sacred, concentric circles: the individual, the family and the nation. To violate any of the three was the unforgivable offence against divine order. Strong traces of these beliefs survive, even in this Polish Pope. When he kneels to kiss the ground of each nation he visits, it is to Messianism that he is bearing symbolic witness.
The fusion of Polish identity with the Catholic faith had many consequences, not all desirable. One result, exploited by the ultra-nationalist politician Roman Dmowski, was the re-invention of Polishness as the exclusive property of Catholic Slavs; other creeds, and above all Judaism, were abused as Poland's misfortune by a "modern" nationalism which was founded on racism and the ideal of racial homogeneity.
A second consequence, shared by Ireland, was that a Catholic nation suppressed throughout the 19th century missed the enormous and historic upsurge of liberal lay Republicanism which swept Catholic Western Europe in the later decades of the century and broke the Church's privileges - including its monopoly of education.
No current of strong, confident liberalism emerged in Poland, even after the country regained its independence in 1918. Politics were divided between the twin intolerant colossi of Catholic Nationalism and Marxist socialism. In Poland between the wars, the witty and disrespectful intellectuals who mocked all claims to total wisdom were often of Jewish extraction.
During the Nazi occupation and the Communist decades which followed, the Church once again functioned as the guardian of Polish identity. But the impression of Poland as a nation led by its Church was misleading. Often, it was the other way round.
In 1980, the mighty Solidarity revolution saw industrial workers marching behind the cross and kneeling in the shipyard to pray. But the truth was that the people were dragging the Church behind them, confident that the Episcopate backed their struggle. In reality, the hierarchy wanted only to preserve the hard-won pastoral rights of the Church, and were terrified that a bloodbath or a Soviet invasion would sweep all their gains away. They took the offered place at the head of the procession only because they feared popular outrage and rejection if they refused.
Now Poland is a "normal" country, whatever that means. It is not yet a "post-Catholic" country: most people remain pious in observance and the extreme-nationalist Radio Marija, xenophobic, anti-"European" and often anti-Semitic, is heard by millions. But the Church is slowly retreating from the centre of politics to a position in which it defends its sexual prohibitions and institutional privileges before an increasingly sceptical population. Sometimes it is as if the Poles face a moral choice between becoming "European" and westernised, and remaining faithful children of the Church. A new 21st century identity, remote from that of the 19th and 20th centuries, is emerging.
