In 1927, a suspended Roman Catholic priest, Adam Anthony Oraczewski (1883‒1973), published a 60-page booklet in Kansas City, Missouri. It had a bold title: All in One True Faith. The front page features a photo of the author dressed in the papal white, declaring that as of August 7, he was Adam II, Pope of the Holy Catholic Church.

Oraczewski’s pamphlet scathingly criticized the Roman Catholic Church and proposed a drastic ecclesiastical reform that, according to the author, would lead to greater piety and human unity. The publication was the climax of fifteen years of conflicts between Oraczewski and Catholic church representatives in a long series of U.S. dioceses, parishes, and seminaries.

Among the twentieth-century alternative pontiffs we know of, Polish-American Adam II is one of the earliest and least known. In the book A Polish-American Pope:  Adam Oraczewski ‒ Adam II, I reconstruct Oraczewski’s biography by studying his own writings, newspaper articles, public records, and, not least, abundant files from ecclesiastical archives.

Oraczewski’s life story is very unusual and undoubtedly a part of the eccentric part of church history: an account of a pontiff in the periphery. It is a bewildering and tragic story, and it is worth telling.

A Polish-American Pope:  Adam Oraczewski ‒ Adam II is published as volume 19 in the ebook series Uppsala Studies in Church History and freely available here: