Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and "Revolution," 1891-1956

Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes

by Piotr H. Kosicki

In Poland in the 1940s and '50s, a new kind of Catholic intended to remake European social and political life—not with guns, but French philosophy

This collective intellectual biography examines generations of deeply religious thinkers whose faith drove them into public life, including Karol Wojtyła, future Pope John Paul II, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the future prime minister who would dismantle Poland’s Communist regime.
 
Seeking to change the way we understand the Catholic Church, World War II, the Cold War, and communism, this study centers on the idea of “revolution.” It examines two crucial countries, France and Poland, while challenging conventional wisdom among historians and introducing innovations in periodization, geography, and methodology. Why has much of Eastern Europe gone back down the road of exclusionary nationalism and religious prejudice since the end of the Cold War? Piotr H. Kosicki helps to understand the crises of contemporary Europe by examining the intellectual world of Roman Catholicism in Poland and France between the Church's declaration of war on socialism in 1891 and the demise of Stalinism in 1956.

424 pages, Hardcover

First published January 9, 2018

About the author

Piotr H. Kosicki specializes in the transnational history of modern Europe--East and West--and its global implications. He focuses particularly on religion (especially Roman Catholicism), politics, historical memory, and the entangled history of ideas and activist networks. Trained as a historian of both Poland and France,his research has increasingly turned to Ukraine on the one hand and to Latin America (in particular, Venezuela) on the other.
He is assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. He has written for the Nation, the New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Reviews

[graceofgod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite frankly I'm amazed that this book even exists. It's such an incredibly niche (but important!) subject.

(Though I could do without the author's incredibly liberal bias, which goes even as far as to partially justify John Paul II's treatment of Latin American liberation theologians. With that being said, the book is still incredibly good, even just from a purely historical standpoint. It's filled to the brim with information about the 20th century Catholic left that I had no idea about.)

[Walter Plymale · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very niche yet informative book on the intellectual history of Catholic socialism during the interwar period, the Second Great War, and the post-war period in France and Poland. As a Catholic with a more conservative/free-market disposition, it was a fascinating look at those with whom I have profound disagreement. I found the chapter on the history of the worker priests to be really eye-opening. The worker priest movement gave birth to St. John Paul II, who is now a hero among conservative Catholics and distrusted by more liberal ones. The book does a good job of contextualising the religious landscape before the Second Vatican Council. Overall, a very well-researched and well-thought-out book.