campaign to safeguard Poland from subversion (this was in reference to the Vatican). The government conducted a propaganda campaign in the early years that depicted the Vatican and Polish hierarchy as germanophiles; the Vatican refused to change Poland's diocesan boundaries to mark the state's new territory. The Vatican was often attacked in Polish propaganda as a negative influence on Poland, and claimed that Poland ceased to exist in the 18th century because the Vatican had weakened it. Propaganda also tried to link the Vatican with fascism, and claimed Pius XII was responsible for Franco's coup d'état in Spain as well as the Vichy regime in wartime France. Polish clergy loyal to the Vatican were also considered as fascists in the propaganda. The Church signed an agreement with the government in 1950, after the old 1925 concordat was thrown out by the government on the grounds that the Vatican had violated it by supporting Germany in World War II (the Vatican had allowed a German bishop in Danzig to have jurisdiction over Germans living in Poland). This agreement was not approved by the Vatican. It contained some features favourable to the Church (which the government would not always observe in the following years), including the right to teach religion in schools and to allow children to receive religious instruction outside school, permitting the Catholic University of Lublin to continue operating, Catholic organizations still being permitted to exist, allowing the Catholic press to exist, allowing public worship in churches to continue, allowing pilgrimages, allowing religious processions, allowing chaplaincy work in the armed forces, allowing monastic orders to continue to function and continuing to allow the Church to conduct charity work (by contrast, many of these things had been outlawed in the neighbouring USSR). In return the state required the Church to submit to it politically and condemn Catholic activities that the state did not permit. Communist constitution In 1952 the new Polish constitution was created, which did not include previously given protections to religion and the position of the Church in the country was worded ambiguously enough to allow for almost any new law of the Sejm to not be in contradiction with it. Persecutions of individuals for religion in the first few years were rare, because the state initially was concerned strictly with suppressing armed political resistance. From 1947–1953, the Catholic Church in Poland became the primary target for persecution in