The Roman Catholic clergy and Catholicism as a topic for a controversy about the January Uprising in Polish historiography 1863-1918

The author’s intention is to demonstrate the complex historiographical discussion about the stance of the Catholic clergy and the involvement of the institutional Catholic Church in the January Uprising as well as the national movement preceding the insurrection. The discussion was composed of two distinct motifs an apology of the participation of the clergy in the uprising and its criticism. This division reflected rifts in the analysed debate held by historians and publicists. The historiography of the January Uprising was intensely polemical. The text analysing the nineteenth-century debate refers also to recent findings made by historiography examining the presence of the clergy in the 1863 rising. The apologetic current presented a wide spectrum of views based on exalted Romantic Catholicism (e.g. Stefan Buszczyński or Jan Stella-Sawicki). The support offered by the Church to the insurrection and the participation of the clergy was also defended in a more disciplined and intellectually cohesive manner (e.g. Kazimierz Gregorowicz). At the same time, historians often regarded the interests pursued by the national community and political Catholicism as identical. The most outstanding participants of the discussion were Walery Przyborowski and Stanisław Koźmian, with the latter defending religion against its politicalisation and arguing that religion, conceived as the domain of the sacrum, should not be applied for even such lofty proposes as the struggle for independence since it turns into its own contradiction.