A considerable proportion of the clergy were genuinely interested in the reform of the Church. The Christians of the Orthodox rite had always enjoyed three of the demands of the Protestant movement: the marriage of priests, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, and communion in both kinds. The Protestant demands were therefore less shocking and novel in Poland than in other Catholic countries. It was not uncommon for Catholic priests to emulate their colleagues of the Orthodox rite by having common-law wives, and these were keen to regularise their position and legalise their broods. Stanisław Orzechowski (1513-66) married while Canon of Przemyśl, and defended his action in a long debate with his bishop and with Rome, published in pamphlet form.
Apart from the practical demands concerning marriage and the vernacular, Luther’s revolt aroused strong feelings among the clergy against the medieval practices of the Church. Marcin Krowicki (1501-73) left the priesthood and published his
King Zygmunt the Old (1506-48) felt that the religious debate was none of his business. He came under considerable pressure from Rome and from those of his own bishops who were in favour of stamping out the heresy. He was even reproached by Henry VIII of England for not taking a more energetic line against the Protestants. Whenever this pressure became overwhelming, he would take some action to satisfy the zealots, but his edicts were invalid without the approval of the Sejm. His attitude is summed up in the words of his successor, who shared it fully. ‘Permit me to rule over the goats as well as the sheep,’ he told one Papal envoy who was demanding arrests and executions.
In many countries the Reformation had social and political overtones. In Poland it was above all a constitutional issue. As the Papal Nuncio’s secretary noted after witnessing the debates of a Mazovian sejmik, the assembly seemed staunchly Catholic when the discussion turned on the faith, the sacraments and the sacred rites, but when the talk was of the privileges of the clergy, a number of ‘Protestant’ voices could be heard, and when it came to the subject of the Church’s immunity from taxation, the entire assembly appeared to have become fanatically Calvinist. In 1554, Bishop Czarnkowski of Poznań sentenced three burghers to death by fire for heresy, but they were rescued by a posse of mostly Catholic szlachta. The same bishop later sentenced a cobbler to the same fate, and this time over a hundred armed szlachta of all denominations, led by the foremost magnates, laid siege to the episcopal palace and freed the condemned man. On one or two occasions, the ecclesiastical courts managed to execute the sentence before anyone could take preventive action. In 1556 Dorota Łazewska, accused of stealing a host from a church and selling it to some Jews for alleged occult rites, was burnt at the stake in Sochaczew. The execution caused uproar, and this came in time to save the lives of the three Jews who were to be burnt on the next day. They too were saved by the intervention of Catholic as well as Protestant szlachta. As Jan Tarnowski pointed out, ‘It is not a question of religion, it is a question of liberty.’
All were agreed that there could be no liberty while a body independent of the parliamentary system was able to judge people, and the ecclesiastical tribunals’ jurisdiction was duly annulled by act of the Sejm in 1562. Two years later, when a young Arian, Erazm Otwinowski, snatched the monstrance from the prelate during a religious procession in Lublin, threw it on the ground and stamped on the Blessed Sacrament, shouting obscenities, he was brought before the Sejm tribunal. This body, made up of Catholics and Calvinists, heard the case and agreed broadly with the defence, ably conducted by the poet Mikołaj Rej, who argued that if God was offended, God would punish, and as for Otwinowski, he should be ordered to pay the priest ‘a shilling, so he can buy himself a new glass and a handful of flour’ with which to repair the monstrance and bake a new host.