Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Joseph P. Walshe (Holy See)
(Confidential)

I sent you our telegram No. 29 of the 20th March about Cardinal Sapieha's appeal after a conversation I had with the Taoiseach.¹

I need not tell you that he has no idea of rushing into any decision to recognise the present Government in Warsaw. His whole tendency is to approach the question with the utmost caution. As I mentioned in the telegram, however, we are anxious, both on account of our candidature for UNO and for other reasons, that, if the present Polish Government is to become generally accepted, we should not be too behindhand in recognising it. The dispositions of the Warsaw Government seem to be friendly. As you know, the Polish representative on the Security Council voted in favour of our membership application, and the Polish Ambassador in London recently called on Dulanty and had a pleasant conversation, in the course of which the question of recognition was not raised or referred to.² Poland has a special interest for the Department of Industry and Commerce at the moment because she is at present the biggest supplier of coal on the Continent and our prospects of getting even minimum coal requirements from Britain for the next few years are very poor indeed.

During his visit to Dulanty, the Polish Ambassador mentioned that the negotiations with the Holy See for a Concordat were progressing favourably. Jim Stafford, of Wexford, who was in London recently and visited the Polish Embassy with a view to exploring the possibilities of getting coal, gave me some further information. He said that a Polish diplomat named Pruszynski (who has acted as deputy for Dr. Lange on the Security Council of UNO) is at present in Rome conducting active negotiations with the Vatican and that things have reached a stage at which an envoy from the Vatican has gone to Warsaw with the first draft of the Concordat. I wonder is this so? Any information you can obtain about the present relations between Poland and the Vatican would be most interesting and useful.

The Polish Government have made it pretty clear to us, of course, that a sine qua non of recognition is that the present Consulate General here under Dobrzynski should cease to function. I don't think that would be any great harm. The small group of Poles remaining in London represent nobody but themselves, and nowadays don't even claim themselves to be a Government. That we should go on recognising Dobrzynski and his Consulate General in those circumstances is rather absurd. It is rather undesirable, too, if, as the papers report, Cardinal Sapieha is appealing to Poles to return to their own country, that Dobrzynski should be issuing Passports to them and encouraging them not to do so. The Press reports of Cardinal Sapieha's statement may not, of course, be correct. We hope that you will be able to give us some guidance on that point. But, when Bishop Gavlina, Chaplain-General of the Polish Forces during the war, was here recently, he told us something that tends to confirm them. He said that he had successfully made arrangements for thirty Polish seminarians to complete their studies in Spain when Cardinal Hlond vetoed the arrangements and indicated that the students concerned should return and do their studies in Poland. The Cardinal took the view that, if the seminarians stayed abroad and did their studies in a foreign atmosphere, they would be no good later as priests in Poland.

Although, as I say, the Taoiseach's whole tendency is to be very careful about recognising Poland, he is anxious to clarify the position and to make sure that we are not left behind by events. We shall be very anxious, therefore, to have your advice and to have as much information as you can manage to give us about the immediate prospects of the relations between Poland and the Vatican.