ABSTRACT
Every nation has its myth of foundation: its linked plots of growth and development, crisis and resistance, doom, victory and rebirth. These myths change over time, with the times, but always remain, their origins occluded; it is in that sense that nations are timeless. The most common and pervasive Polish myth is that of Poland’s intrinsic Catholicity: Polonia semper fidelis (Poland always faithful), the bulwark of Christendom defending Europe against the infidel (however defined); the Christ of nations, martyred for the sins of the world and resurrected for the world’s salvation; a nation whose identity is conserved and guarded by its defender, the Roman Catholic Church, and shielded by its
Queen, the miraculous Black Madonna, Our Lady of a nation that has given the world a pope and rid the Western world of Communism. If this representation is a caricature of the myth, it is, like all caricatures, distorted only by the picture being drawn with rather over-sharp angles.
