[2] 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.

"Mariavitism", from the Latin, quae Mariae vitam imitantur, 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.

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.

This rendered them heretics in the eyes of the church and placed their adherents under an immediate obligation to resume their traditional Roman Catholic practice on pain of excommunication.

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".