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Schism between the Commonwealth and the Holy See seemed a real possibility in the aftermath of the law Fund for the Army. The tact and dexterity of the nuncio, Ferdinando Saluzzo, bought time for the negotiations between himself, the episcopate, and the sejm's ‘clerical deputation’. These negotiations covered many points at issue between clergy and laity, including residence, surplice fees, and monastic profession, and finally yielded a compromise proposal, whereby the bishops could draw their equalized revenues from landed property rather than in salaries. However, its acceptance by the sejm seemed impossible until the proposer of Fund for the Army, Wojciech Suchodolski, left Warsaw. The reason for his departure yields a vignette of the relationship between a magnate and his client. The chapter also considers religious and ecclesiastical dimensions of other questions discussed by the sejm in 1789‐90: military recruitment, local government, education, towns, and the new form of government.

The fortunes of the Commonwealth and the Church in the eighteenth century are sketched via the career of Kajetan Sołtyk (1715‐88), successively bishop of Kiev and Cracow, who in 1767 was deported to Russia for his defiance of Catherine II, subsequently became mentally ill, and was controversially confined. The king's brother, Michał Poniatowski, who ran the diocese of Cracow after 1782, sought to unite it with the primacy and archbishopric of Gniezno. The sejmiks of August 1788 encouraged the opposition and worried King Stanisław August. The instructions called for the army to be expanded, and for as much as possible of the burden to be placed on the clergy. This led the papal nuncio Ferdinando Saluzzo and the primate to consider how best to defend the Church at the forthcoming sejm. The instructions are compared with the cahiers de doléances drawn up for the Estates General in France in 1789.

This chapter considers the questions of legal codification, education, ‘police’, and censorship in terms of a conflict between the hosts of God and Caesar. Warsaw and Rome engaged each other on several fronts. The king wanted papal blessing for the Constitution of 3 May 1791, and so reined in reformers (linked with Hugo Kołłątaj) who wished to use the projected ‘Code of Stanisław August’ to restrict papal jurisdiction and end monastic autonomy in the Commonwealth. The monarch was also happy to help avert a request to restore the Jesuit order, which would have embarrassed the pope. The newly founded Police Commission encountered some resistance from the clergy in its attempts to regulate hospitals and move cemeteries outside city walls, but much cooperation in combating vagrancy. The episcopate was frustrated in its efforts to implement ecclesiastical censorship of works on religion or corruptive of morals, although few laymen opposed the principle.

Warsaw was not prepared to concede to Rome on the question of an autocephalous or autonomous Orthodox hierarchy. This was seen as essential to cutting off Russian influence and preventing rebellion among the Orthodox Ruthenian peasantry. However it was only following further papal approval of the Polish Revolution in May 1792 that the sejm agreed a comprehensive reform of the Orthodox Church within the Commonwealth. At the same time it shelved the question of a fundamental reform of the Catholic clergy of both rites. Hugo Kołłątaj and his circle pressed both reforms, but for the sejm, the Russian invasion of 14 May made the one an urgent geopolitical necessity and the other dispensable. The chapter analyses the proposed reforms to the Catholic clergy, and concludes with a coda that brings together the Commonwealth's ecclesiastical policies in its most confessionally volatile corner — the Ukraine.