The Catholic Mariavite Church is an independent Old Catholic denomination in Poland resulting from a schism in 1935 within the Old Catholic Mariavite Church. Origins Originally, the Mariavite movement emerged as a call for renewal within the Polish Catholic church in the Russian Partition of the one time Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which had been forcibly broken up by foreign powers a century earlier. After the failed Polish insurrections of 1830-31 and 1863-64, Poles' continuing political dissent and desire for independence found partial expression in the second half of the 19th-century in an assertion of their traditional religious and spiritual values which ran counter to the Russian Empire's established Orthodox church. Despite curtailment and bans of Polish religious organisations, they proliferated both on the former Polish territory and abroad, chiefly in France, Italy and the United States, where Polish emigrants had settled and lent support. See role of Resurrectionist Congregation. "Mariavitism", from the Latin, , signified imitating the life of Mary, mother of Jesus in its simplicity. It was probably nurtured by the Capucin friar, blessed Honorat Koźmiński in a young Polish nun, Feliksa Kozłowska, who in 1893 began having a series of religious visions. These were said to have "instructed" her to take steps in particular to rescue Catholic clergy from the error of their ways, which members of the Polish élite tended to view as corrupt and estranged from the Gospel message. The movement rapidly gained influence among priests from educated or noble backgrounds. The new "tenets" emanating from the visions soon came into conflict with the church hierarchy who were hostile to their alleged provenance. Excommunication by Rome After the movement had found itself rebuffed first by the Polish church hierarchy, and subsequently, twice by the Holy See which saw no justification for the movement's cause, Kozłowska obeyed the instructions from Rome not to contact any of the Mariavite priests and remain in her convent. However, in 1906 the newly elected Pope Pius X emphasised the church's condemnation of the movement and its ideology by excommunicating Sister Feliksa Kozłowska and her priest lieutenant, Father Jan Maria Michał Kowalski. He had led the failed 1903–1906 attempt to incorporate the Mariavite movement in the Roman Catholic Church and to have Kozłowska's revelations judged as worthy of belief by the church. This rendered them heretics in the eyes of the church and placed their adherents under an immediate obligation to resume