It was the misty dawn of a Sunday morning, September 12th, in the year 1683. From the height of the Kahlenberg, where the last wooded escarpment of the Alps dominated a landscape of hillocks and ravines, a man was gazing towards Vienna, some three miles eastwards. As the light strengthened he could pick out the spires and steeples of the city, and the broken ravelins and splintered bastions which marked the line of the fortifications. He could also see, between him and the city, a vast town of tents, where the besieging Turkish army had encamped in a crescent outside the ramparts of Vienna. A wind arose, and dissipated the mist, and the watcher, sitting his bay horse, could hear the trumpeting of elephants, the beating of little war-drums, and strains of eastern music. The horseman, though only fifty-four years of age, had grown corpulent, and his face was already heavy. But the large dark eyes, with their direct gaze, were accustomed to command, and indeed, those about him at this hour, Princes of the great houses of Europe, deferred to him. For he was a King as well as a renowned Captain. When he had surveyed the ground over which the coming action was to be contested, he again looked towards the city, clear now in the early sunlight. And from the ramparts the sentries of the depleted and exhausted garrison, who had seen the rockets of the relieving force dufing the hours of darkness, strained their eyes for some glimpse of their deliverers. They saw that the defiles and gorges leading out pf the hills were blocked by Turkish troops, and it was not known whether John Sobieski himself was with the allied forces. But the horseman on the Kahlenberg was Sobieski, the hope of Europe in that hour of destiny.

There are 21 of them in the territory of the Republic of Poland, 21 of Latin rite besides three of Greek and one of Armenian rite. The diocese of Wloclawek, of which I have been the Ordinary since 1929, does not differ much, in pastoral affairs, from its neighbouring dioceses of Eastern and Central Poland. Hence a brief survey of its history and of its state on the eve of the war,'will give quite a good picture of the whole Polish Church.

The capital of the diocese, Wloclawek, called in the Latin documents of the Middle Ages ‘Vladislavia,’ is situated on the left bank of the Vistula, at the place where the river has run a third of its way from Warsaw to the sea. At first the religious centre of this district (fertile Cuiavia) was Kruszwica, to-day a small town on the edge of lake Goplo. There Bishop Lucidus, native of Italy, developed his apostolic activity in the last decades of the tenth century, soon after the Poles had become Christian. He and his 13 successors—called by the Polish annalist, Jan Dlugosz, ‘bishops of Kruszwica’—were most probably missionary bishops, without a strictly specified territory. It was only in the thirteenth century that Michael Godziemba (1222-52), the first bishop of Polish extraction, left Kruszwica for the banks of the Vistula and founded (c. 1230) the See of Wloclaw, as Wloclawek was then called. The foundation's of the original Cathedral, which like all the castles in Poland at that time, was built of wood, can be still seen in the basement of a house on the bank of the river.

The Dominican map of Poland is a queer one. It is true that one can hardly find a town in Poland without a Dominican church and priory (the fathers numbered more than 2,000 and had about 200 houses at the first partition in 1772), but the churches do not belong now to the Order and the priories are being used as schools or prisons. For in the provinces occupied by Russia and Germany in 1772 and 1795, i.c. in 80% of the Polish territory, the religious life was proscribed and the monasteries confiscated. What we see now on the Dominican map is the result of this historical fact, combined with the striving of the new Polish Province to re-occupy its right place in Catholic life of the whole country.

So it happens that the bulk of the priories is situated in the south, in the former ‘Galicia.’ There the Dominicans had eleven out of their 16 houses which were nourishing in 1939—among them the venerable Monastery of Cracow, tlie great tormer ‘studium generale’ of Podkamien with about 300 cells, and the actual seat of the Provincial with its fine baroque church at Lwow. The other priories are small and unimportant relics of the time when the Austrian Government allowed the religious orders to exist only on condition that they occupied themselves exclusively in plain parish work.

The fact that Nazi Germany’s assault on Poland’s independence was the occasion of our declaring war, the bestial treatment of Polish citizens by the occupying'power, and a realization of the outrageous partitions of that country in the farther past have stirred the people of Great Britain to a determination that Poland shall be again restored and justice done in her regard. And In particular the enthusiasm (not unmixed with romanticism and a rather highly-coloured rhetoric) with which over years numerous Catholics have been foremost in upholding the Polish cause has brought to that cause an atmosphere of sacredness and mystique.

It is the more regrettable, therefore, that the people of Great Britain in general should have in certain respects an inadequate conception of the Polish situation : that they should (as so many of them do) imagine that the inhabitants of Poland are an almost entirely homogeneous people, one in culture, religion and history; that they should believe the difficulty about Eastern PoTand to be a straight issue between a united Poland on the one hand and the U.S.S.R. on the other.

[Stanislaus Zolkiewski, Chancellor of Poland, was born in 1547 and died fighting as a hero against the Turks in the fated battle of Cecora, on October 6th, 1620. He won great distinction as a classical scholar in his youth, but it is as a loyal and courageous general that he is known. For in spite of Sigismund Ill’s unfriendly distrust he served his King faithfully to the end. He advised the King against war with Muscovy, but obeyed when ordered to lead the army ; and, in spite of constant embarassment from the Sovereign’s antagonism, won the campaign at Kluszyn only to have his terms repudiated by Sigismund. His life was filled with disappointments of this sort, but his staunch faith preserved him from disloyalty or even bitterness, as may be seen in this Testament. He was an outstanding politician, a great strategist and victorious general; he was a patriot, who may also one day rank as a saint. He received the Grand Hetman’s staff in 1613, and thenceforward was engaged in fighting the infidel Turk. In so many bloody campaigns he often contemplated his own death on the field of battle. So it is not surprising that before each campaign he re-wrote his last will, amplifying it with further injunctions. As far as we know, two of these wills have been published. The first, written in the year 1606, was published by Michael Balinski at the Library of Warsaw in 1845. We here give a translation of the text edited by Arthur Sliwinski in his ‘Hetman Zolkiewski, Warsaw, 1920.’]

In the name of the Most Holy Trinity God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Before the eyes of every man should always be the uncertainty of his transient life, for it is subject to innumerable mishaps.