In western Poland, the party-state confronted a society whose social structure, politics, and culture represented much that its most committed adherents desired to eliminate. In particular, the power of the Roman Catholic Church soon became a cause of ongoing concern for the authorities. Yet in Poznań, the need to stabilize the party-state's control of the country's prewar provinces and to sustain settlement further west into an East Brandenburg that slowly was being reshaped into Ziemia Lubuska saw Poland's Communist regime drawn into a conflicted, yet important, grassroots partnership with the Catholic Church in 1945.

The increasing influence of Catholicism throughout society was among the many unintended consequences for the regime in seeking to create a nationally homogenous polity. In Poznań, the mutually reinforcing relationship between Polishness and Catholicism (which had long predated the war) took on a deeper meaning in the context of both the wartime Nazi religious persecution and the postwar cooperation of state and society to ethnically cleanse western Poland. Local society and the authorities not only seized German shops and farms, but also worked together to convert Protestant churches into Catholic places of worship and ensure a Catholic religious presence for Polish colonists in Ziemia Lubuska.