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From the beginning of their association in the tenth century, the Roman Catholic Church and the Polish state have experienced an intimate and complex relationship. The Church served as the focal point for the continuance of Polish national and political, as well as spiritual and cultural, life after the state was threatened and finally destroyed in the eighteenth century. The re-emergence of an independent Poland in 1918 provided the Church with new opportunities for expanding its influence over Polish life, and its presence in Poland became especially pervasive between world wars. Accordingly, in this period the relations between the Church and the Polish state must be viewed on two levels, one representing the formal, official institutions of government and politics and the other concerned with the informal, more subtle and less evident ways in which Church and state interacted. Since the attitudes and practices developed in the interwar years exerted a major influence on Church-state relations in Poland after 1945, an understanding of this earlier period is essential to an appreciation of the situation in People's Poland.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1870-8_5

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