In 1302, pope boniface viii wrote in his bull unam sanctam, “we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” The bull was a culmination of a theory of hierarchy of power developed over several centuries by Church jurists and theologians. That theory established an ideal of a society, a respublica Christiana, a broader Christian ecclesia. In its highest form that society was to be entirely Christian, functioning according to Christian laws and dogmas. It was to be, in the words of Pope Boniface VIII, “one sole mystical body whose Head is Christ and the head of Christ is God, and his vicar Peter and Peter's successor.” The pope claimed the supremacy of spiritual power and a hierarchy of power in the world: “For with truth as our witness, it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgment if it has not been good. Thus is accomplished the prophecy of Jeremiah concerning the Church and the ecclesiastical power: ‘Behold to-day I have placed you over nations, and over kingdoms and the rest…. Therefore whoever resists this power thus ordained by God, resists the ordinance of God’ [Rom 13:2].”

“TWO SWORDS … THE SPIRITUAL AND THE TEMPORAL”

Pope Boniface VIII justified the claim of papal supreme authority in his Unam Sanctam by citing a medieval interpretation of an ambiguous verse in Luke 22:38, “Behold, here are two swords.

After the reformation, the catholic clergy in poland sought to combat the spread of heretical ideas and, simultaneously, to promote Catholic doctrines, the one abetting the other. Catholic piety and dogma were promoted through devotional works and artwork in newly built or renovated baroque churches, serving as indirect religious polemic against Protestants. In more overt and more direct polemic, the Church provided Catholics with explicit counterarguments to Protestant ideas and and sought to discourage contacts between Catholics and heretics and others who did not submit to the authority of the Church.

PROMOTING MARY AND THE SAINTS

The vast majority of books written and published by the Catholic clergy in post-Reformation Poland were devotional. Still, even in these works, elements of polemic appeared in the promotion of baroque piety in the form of the cults of Mary, Jesus, and the saints, all figures the Protestants were challenging. The Church offered constructive responses to Protestant claims that Mary was Jesus' mother but not an object of veneration, that the cult of saints was a form of idolatry, and, as the anti-Trinitarians insisted, that Jesus was not divine. Protestants, for their part, acknowledged no intermediaries in the people's relationship with God. Wojciech Węgierski, a seventeenth-century Polish Protestant leader, wrote, “The Holy Scripture says that we should pray concerning our spiritual and bodily needs only to the true God, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, who knows our hearts and human thoughts.

Catholic church legislation against jews often did not stand alone but coincided with the rise of heretical movements within the Church itself. This was true of the 1215 regulations of the IV Lateran Council promulgated in the midst of the Church's battle against various heresies in Europe, and of the 1555 papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum, which established the Roman ghetto during the crisis of the Reformation. In Poland the Church reacted in similar ways. According to surviving sources, regulations of Jewish-Christian interaction – first promulgated at the Council of Breslau in 1267 and ordering a geographic segregation between Jews and Christians – did not reappear in Poland until the first half of the fifteenth century when, in the wake of the heresy of Jan Hus in Bohemia, Huss's followers moved north into the Polish territories, thereby posing a challenge to the Church in Poland.

Reacting to the Hussite heresy, the 1420 provincial synod held at Kalisz and Wieluń issued a number of decrees against heresy and recommended a number of “remedies” to combat it, requiring, among other things, that secular authorities cooperate with the Church in combating its spread. The “heresy” apparently affected mostly the literate elites. One paragraph of the 1420 synodal laws ordered confiscation of the books of those suspected of heresy when they were captured, but in pre-print culture, only a few could afford to own books.