Yet the Catholic Church had to tread warily as it set about the reconquest of Poland, as the battle lines criss-crossed society in the most confusing way. When Cardinal Aldobrandini, the future Pope Clement VIII, visited Wilno in 1588, he was astonished at a dinner given by a Catholic canon that the principal guest was a Calvinist, Judge Teodor Jewlaszewski of Nowogródek, whose father was the Orthodox Bishop of Pińsk, and whose son was brought up as an Arian. In such situations it was not feasible to be rigoristic. Even the bigoted Zygmunt III grudgingly had to allow his Lutheran sister Anna to install a Protestant chapel in the Royal Castle.
The most fervent Catholics tended to feel that they were, as the saying went, ‘born noble, not Catholic’; the political solidarity of the szlachta far outweighed religious loyalties. When the King had a Protestant book seized in 1627, there was immediate uproar. The Arian Samuel Przypkowski voiced the proto-Orwellian sentiments of the majority of the szlachta when he raged: ‘The next move will be to institute torture for having thoughts…Our cause is bound to the cause of common freedom by a knot so tight that the one cannot be separated from the other.’
The progress of the Counter-Reformation was slow. The number of Protestant chapels dwindled by some two-thirds in the last third of the sixteenth century, and the Protestant majority in the Senate in 1569 shrank to a handful by 1600. The fact that a fervently Catholic king favoured those of this faith when making appointments was no doubt one reason. But it was not until 1658 that the Arians were banished, for having refused to bear arms at a time of national peril and allegedly siding with the enemy. In 1660 the Quakers were expelled from their colony near Gdańsk, whence they set sail for America. In 1668 the Sejm ruled that nobody could leave the Catholic Church for any other on pain of exile, and in 1673 admittance to the szlachta was barred to non-Catholics. None of these measures prevented anyone from practising the faith of his choice, and there was a twilight zone between what the Sejm decreed and what even the most zealous Catholic officer of the law was prepared to implement against a fellow citizen.
Yet the drift back to Catholicism coincided with a change of intellectual climate and a spiritual reawakening, reflected in, among other things, a spectacular resurgence of monasticism. The Dominican Order, for example, numbered no more than three hundred brothers in forty communities at its lowest point in 1579. Twenty years later there were nine hundred brothers, and by 1648 there were 110 large communities. Between 1572 and 1648 the number of monasteries in the Commonwealth rose from 220 to 565. The same period saw the foundation of new contemplative or ascetic orders such as the Benedictine nuns of Chełmno and the Barefoot Carmelites, starting a mystical tradition in Polish religious life that had seldom been in evidence before.
This was in large measure the work of the Jesuits. Their principal instruments in the battle for the soul of Poland were the colleges they established all over the Commonwealth, of which there were nearly forty by the mid-seventeenth century. They were free, they accepted Arians, Calvinists and Orthodox as readily as Catholics, and the teaching was of a high standard. The Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English and French priests who taught in them added an element of cosmopolitanism which the poorer szlachta appreciated. In 1587, twenty-three years after the first Jesuit had set foot in Poland, the Jesuit College of Wilno had some sixty priests and novices teaching over seven hundred pupils. ‘There have always been and there still are in the classes of this college very numerous sons of heretics and schismatics,’ explained the Rector, Garcias Alabiano. ‘Their parents send them to our schools solely to learn the Arts, and not to be taught the Catholic Faith. However, by the Grace of God, not one of them has to this day left without abjuring his parents’ errors and embracing the Catholic Faith.’