their traditional Roman Catholic practice on pain of excommunication. Kowalski set about codifying the movement's doctrines and beliefs with Kozłowska. Along with the priests who resisted the orders from the Vatican, he turned instead to the schismatic Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands and found a welcome among the clergy. He was invited to attend their 1909 congress in Utrecht, when he was consecrated bishop. The apostolic succession of that church validated his elevation and thereby turned the movement into a new church, which the Russian authorities quickly consented to recognise as an "independent denomination." As the ailing Kozłowska's influence waned, so the forceful Kowalski had free rein to mould the new church to his liking. Collision course However, under his leadership Mariavite adherents declined. This was due in part to the rise of Polish nationalism, in which Roman Catholicism was an intrinsic part of the Polish national identity, and the creation of a sovereign Second Polish Republic in 1918. But much of the decline could be traced to factors involving Kowalski himself – his generally autocratic style in governing the church, as Kozłowska's successor and, innovations that he had introduced which drove him further away from the Catholic Church. These included the endorsement of consummated clerical marriages between priests and nuns, and later the ordination of women as priests and bishops. It eventually, in 1924, alienated him from the Old Catholic church as well and took the Mariavite church out of fellowship with it. 1935 schism In 1935, a majority of the Old Catholic Mariavite Church clergy, many of whom had participated in his "innovations", deemed him to have become a "dictator" and deposed Kowalski. He rejected the "coup" and moved out of the Płock sanctuary and installed his headquarters in the village of Felicjanów, named for the foundress. He declared his loyal following to be the Catholic Mariavite Church, despite its considerable departure from traditional doctrinal Catholic teaching. Kowalski, by then promoted to archbishop, continued to consider himself the valid leader of all genuine Mariavites. Freed from the restraining influences of much of the clergy, formerly subordinate to him, he made ever more radical pronouncements, including the view that Kozłowska had in fact been the "incarnation of the Holy Spirit on earth". In 1940, during the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Kowalski was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Dachau concentration camp. He