Untitled

VATICAN II
BEHIND THE
IRON
CURTAIN
VATICAN II
BEHIND THE
IRON
CURTAIN
Edited by
Piotr H. Kosicki
The Catholic University of America Press

Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2016
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

of American National Standards for Information Science—Perma-
nence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.
∞
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kosicki, Piotr H., 1983– editor.
Title: Vatican II behind the Iron Curtain / edited by Piotr H. Kosicki.
Description: Washington, D.C. : Catholic University of America
Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016041227 | ISBN 9780813229126 (cloth : alk.
paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Vatican Council (2nd : 1962–1965 : Basilica di
San Pietro in Vaticano) | Catholic Church—Foreign relations—
Communist countries. | Communist countries—Foreign relations—
Catholic Church.
Classification: LCC BX830 1962 .V3225 2016 | DDC 262/.52—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041227
CONTENTS
vii
Abbreviations
•••
1 Introduction
Piotr H. Kosicki
– Vatican II and the Cold War

27 One
Gerald P. Fogarty
– Vatican II and Hungary

50 Two
Árpád von Klimó
– Vatican II and Yugoslavia

75 Three
Ivo Banac
– Vatican II and Czechoslovakia

99 Four
James Ramon Felak
– Vatican II and Poland

127 Five
Piotr H. Kosicki
•••
199 Bibliography
219 Contributors
221 Index
ABBREVIATIONS
AAN Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of Modern Records,

Warsaw)
ABH Arhiv Bosna i Hercegovine (Archives of Bosnia and

Hercegovina, Sarajevo)
AIPN Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Archives of

the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw)
AJ Arhiv Jugoslavije (Archives of Yugoslavia, Belgrade)
ASP Archivio di Stato di Parma (State Archive of Parma)
AUKUL Archiwum Uniwersyteckie Katolickiego Uniwersytetu

Lubelskiego im. Jana Pawła II (University Archives of
the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin)
BKJ Biskupska konferencija Jugoslavije (Bishops’

Conference of Yugoslavia)
BU Biuro Udostępniania (Bureau for Provision and

Archivization of Documents)
ChSS Chrześcijańskie Stowarzyszenie Społeczne (Christian

Social Association)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
DKO Dílo Koncilové Obnovy (Work of Conciliar Renewal)
GDR German Democratic Republic
KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee

for State Security)
KPR
Kabinet Predsednika Republike (Cabinet of the
President of the Republic)
MHKD Mírové Hnutí Katolického Duchovenstva (Peace
Movement of Catholic Clergy)
vii
MP Member of Parliament
OSA Open Society Archives (Budapest)
PZPR Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United

Workers’ Party)
RCC Roman Catholic Church
RKVP Republička Komisija za Odnose s Vjerskim Zajednicame

(Republic Commission for Relations with Religious
Communities)
SIV Savezno Izvršno Vijeće (Federal Executive Council of

Yugoslavia)
SKJ Savez Komunista Jugoslavije (League of Communists

of Yugoslavia)
TASS Telegrafnoye Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza (Telegraph

Agency of the Soviet Union)
UDB-a Uprava Državne Bezbednosti (Directorate of State

Security)
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Výbor na Obranu Nespravedlivě Stíhaných (Committee

VONS
for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted)
viii ABBREVIATIONS
VATICAN II
BEHIND THE
IRON
CURTAIN
INTRODUCTION
• • • Piotr H. Kosicki
The announcement of the Council aroused great interest and great

hope. It seemed that, after the stifling regime of Pius XII, the win-
dows were at last being opened; one could breathe. The Church was
being given its chance. One was becoming open to dialogue. Little
by little, these hopes became shrouded in a fine film of dust.
—Yves Congar, OP, Council expert, reflecting on preparations
for the First Session
Roughly near the Palazzo della Cancellaria we stop at a small pizzeria

to nourish ourselves with hot pizza and red wine and to share our
impressions of the city and the news of the Kennedy tragedy. The
evenings in this city are long, and it’s warm; everything is encourag-
ing us to continue our stroll through the ever-more tranquil streets
and beautiful cul-de-sacs. Holding me back is the lone thought that
I have yet to take several different buses to return to the dormitory
where I am staying, which is far away.
—Janusz Zabłocki, Polish Catholic journalist, after a long
day covering Council fathers’ reactions to news of the
JFK assassination
On January 25, 1959, the recently elected Pope John XXIII an-
nounced plans for an ecumenical council “to proclaim the truth”
and “to reanimate the faith of Christians.”1 Charged with the
Epigraphs are from Yves Congar, OP, My Journal of the Council, trans. Mary John
Ronayne and Mary Cecily Boulding (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2012), 5;
and Janusz Zabłocki, Dzienniki, vol. 1, 1956–1965 (Warsaw: IPN-KŚZpNP, 2008), 494;
author’s translation.
1. Xavier Rynne [Francis X. Murphy], Vatican Council II (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1968), 3–4.
1
aggiornamento, or updating, of the Roman Catholic Church, what
became known as the Second Vatican Council soon took on an
almost mythical stature—inside and outside the Catholic faith.
Opening on October 11, 1962, and closing on December 8, 1965,
the Council included four sessions that hosted a total of close to
3,000 bishops.2
Entire bookshelves’ worth of memoirs, theological commen-
taries, and historical studies have recapitulated the major achieve-
ments of Vatican II, from introducing the vernacular liturgy to
engineering the Catholic Church’s embrace of modernity, Juda-
ism, ecumenism, and the laity. Called as an “ecumenical” council,
Vatican II was, by definition, concerned with the “unity of the
Church.” Among the many tasks this implied for Council fathers
was redress of the eleventh-century Great Schism between Latin
Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy.3 This alone would require a
Herculean effort, yet it would be only one of many transformative
projects to grace the Council’s agenda.
Neither Catholic nor secular commentators have been bashful
about expressing their admiration for Vatican II’s achievements.
José Casanova has credited it with “the transformation of the Cath-
olic church from a state-centered to a society-centered institution.”4
Meanwhile, Brian Porter-Szűcs has described the Council as the
site “where the word modernity itself was officially rehabilitated.”5
2. By Melissa J. Wilde’s count, “approximately 2,200 bishops voted on any one

vote, but over the four years of the Council almost 3,000 bishops participated because
of illness, death, and replacement”; Wilde, “How Culture Mattered at Vatican II: Colle-
giality Trumps Authority in the Council’s Social Movement Organizations,” American
Sociological Review 69, no. 4 (2004): 577.
3. For example, Augustin Bea, “The Council and Christian Unity,” Furrow 13,
no. 6 (1962): 311–26. “[W]e wish to study together what the Council can do, in the
present situation, to promote the unity of all those who, by baptism, are joined to
Christ”; ibid., 311.
4. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 71.
5. Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 109.
2 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

Based on responses to questionnaires circulated to dioceses
and Catholic organizations all over the world in 1959 and 1960, pre-
paratory commissions assembled working documents. Although
the four sessions that followed the Council’s launching in Octo-
ber 1962 began with these schemata, the Council fathers quickly
broadened their agenda. Dissent emerged within the bishops’
ranks, and opposing factions called on the expertise of periti—re-
nowned theologians and philosophers invited to participate in
the Council.6
Over the course of four years, two-month stretches of de-
bate were separated by nine-month “intersessions,” during which
ideas percolated, factions negotiated, and debates played out
among Catholics at the parish, diocesan, and national levels. Spe-
cially appointed commissions and subcommissions of Council
fathers drafted working conciliar schemata, revised as the Coun-
cil unfolded. Bishops deliberated and ultimately produced a final
corpus of documents for which the phrase “Vatican II” has be-
come a metonym.
The Council’s prolific textual output alone makes it unprece-
dented in the history of Christianity. Vatican II is responsible for
thirty-five volumes of acta in addition to the nineteen volumes
produced by its preparatory commissions, compared to just sev-
enteen altogether produced by the Council of Trent four hundred
years earlier. Vatican II yielded sixteen final documents, whose
total pagination is almost double the length of the final editions
left by Trent.7 As John W. O’Malley has put it, “Vatican II thus
6. As John W. O’Malley describes the mood at the First Session, “just as the
Council of Trent and Vatican I had mandated revision and emendation of liturgi-
cal texts, experts were now unanimously convinced that, while holding fast to the
liturgical tradition of the church, similar changes in texts and rites were needed ‘to
accommodate them to the ethos and needs of our day.’ The aggiornamento theme
was clear”; O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2008), 130.
7. O’Malley, “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?” in Vatican II: Did Anything Hap-
pen? ed. David G. Schultenover (New York: Continuum, 2007), 60.
INTRODUCTION 3
took greater account of the world around it than any previous
council and assumed as one of its principal tasks dialogue or con-
versation with that world in order to work for a better world, not
simply a better Church.”8
Following the nineteen-year pontificate of Pius XII, who had
held the reins of the Holy See through both World War II and the
start of the Cold War, the seventy-seven-year-old Angelo Cardi-
nal Roncalli was expected to be no more than an interrex. And
yet, in the course of a reign lasting only five years, he marked
the Church more than almost any of his predecessors. Pope Fran-
cis described his icon’s influence thus as he canonized the “Good
Pope” on April 27, 2014: “In convening the Council, John XXIII
showed an exquisite openness to the Holy Spirit. He let himself be
led, and he was for the Church a pastor, a servant-leader. This
was his great service to the Church; he was the pope of openness
to the Spirit.”9
Yet Francis gave this speech to honor not only John XXIII,
but also the Polish-born John Paul II, who achieved recognition
as a saint at the same time as the pontiff who had called Vati-
can II. Though Catholic and secular media alike at the time of the
two popes’ canonizations mostly emphasized how different they
were, a few voices made a case for the fundamental continuity
between them. After all, John Paul II, as both a pastor and a phi-
losopher, was a product of the council that his predecessor had
called. The forty-two-year-old bishop from behind the Iron Cur-
tain arrived in Rome in 1962 as a Council father. Over the next
three years, Karol Wojtyła would prove himself a living link be-
tween what Pius XII had termed the “Church of Silence”10—bear-
8. Ibid., 62.
9. Pope Francis, Homily for Holy Mass and Rite of Canonization of Blesseds
John XXIII and John Paul II (April 27, 2014), at http://w2.vatican.va/content/fran-
cesco/en/homilies/2014/documents/papa-francesco_20140427_omelia-canonizza-
zioni.html; accessed June 1, 2014. Italics in the original.
10. Quoted in Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch, The Vatican and the
4 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

ing witness to the Gospels under an openly anti-religious, Com-
munist regime—and John XXIII’s Church of aggiornamento.
In his ability to bridge East and West throughout the Cold
War, Wojtyła proved that the “Church of Silence” idea was inad-
equate to the task of capturing the historical reality of Roman
Catholicism behind the Iron Curtain. Each Communist country
had its own way of dealing with the Catholic Church, informed
by demographics, geography, and political tradition. Everywhere,
the Church was on the receiving end of political repression. In
Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Communist regimes had, for the
most part, succeeded by the mid-1960s in co-opting the Church.
And yet, even there, independent Catholic thought and activism
remained. Catholics continued to pray, to go to Mass, and even to
join associations—some regime-sponsored, some not. Notwith-
standing the very real state efforts to silence the Church behind
the Iron Curtain, Catholics remained active participants in the life
of the universal Church; they never became voiceless subalterns.
A substantial historiography has coalesced across national
and linguistic divides to document the Second Vatican Council.
Yet virtually no attention has been paid to the links between the
Council and the Catholic faithful who had found themselves liv-
ing behind an iron curtain by the end of the 1940s. In fact, his-
torians of the modern Roman Catholic Church—even, for the
most part, those based in Central and Eastern Europe—have
dismissed out of hand the possibility that Communist countries
played a role in the Council’s story or that the Council in turn
shaped the subsequent paths of those countries.11 Regrettably
Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of Eastern Europe (New York: Geoffrey Chapman,
1999), 103.
11. The exceptions tend, on the other hand, to overdetermine the role of Com-
munist state actors in the story. A key example is Polish historian Sławomir Cenck-
iewicz’s insistence that reform-minded Catholics behind the Iron Curtain on the one
hand and Communist politicians and secret police on the other “complemented one
another in popularizing a singularly understood ‘conciliar thought’ ”; Cenckiewicz,
INTRODUCTION 5
representative—and inaccurate—is the blanket assertion that
“inside these countries there was no possibility of taking part in
the changes in ecclesiology and society.”12
Historiographically, the result has been a narrative leap from
the show trials of Iron Curtain bishops at the turn of the 1940s
and 1950s—most notably, of Yugoslav primate Alojzije Stepinac,
Czechoslovak primate Josef Beran, and Hungarian primate
József Cardinal Mindszenty —to the election of Karol Cardinal
Wojtyła to the papacy in 1978. Even Vatican Ostpolitik—one of
the bedrocks of Paul VI’s papacy, led by the man who would be-
come John Paul II’s secretary of state, Agostino Cardinal Casa-
roli—has only recently been rehabilitated as a subject of inquiry.
For too long, it was consigned to the historiographical dustbin,
despite path-breaking research in the late 1970s by German jour-
nalist Hansjakob Stehle.13
It is little wonder, then, that—like the Catholic faithful of
Communist Poland in 197814—historians, too, tend to see the
election of John Paul II as something of a miraculous deus ex
machina rather than the logical outcome of processes in the works
for two decades by then. Brian Porter-Szűcs has importantly cau-
tioned against “turning actual Christians into the passive objects
of broad cultural processes and patterns, obscuring the ways in
which people built and sustained (and resisted and manipulated)
the very generalities that were said to define them.”15 Whether
“Cisi sprzymierzeńcy reform,” Christianitas, November 19, 2010, at http://christian-

itas.org/news/cenckiewicz-cisi-sprzymierzenscy-reform; accessed February 2, 2014.
12. Paul Richard Blum, “The Catholic Church in Hungary: A Case of Remodern-
ization?” Religion, State and Society 27, no. 3–4 (1999): 315.
13. Hansjakob Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 1917–1979, trans. Sandra
Smith (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981); Roland Cerny-Werner, Vatikanische
Ostpolitik und die DDR (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2011).
14. As Polish philosopher Rev. Józef Tischner put it fifteen years later, “Every-
thing that came later was one great miracle”; Adam Michnik, Józef Tischner, and
Jacek Żakowski, Między Panem a Plebanem (Kraków: Znak, 1995), 281.
15. Brian Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction: Christianity, Christians, and the Story of
6 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

Croat, Hungarian, or Slovak, Catholics behind the Iron Curtain
learned about the Second Vatican Council and responded to it ac-
cording to their particular circumstances. Their stories are as im-
portant a part of the conciliar legacy as the Polish story—which,
likewise, cannot be reduced to an account of the roots of Pope
John Paul II.
The goal of this volume is to begin the process of writing Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe back into the story of the Second Vatican
Council, its origins, and its consequences. Paul Blum was obvi-
ously not wrong to suggest that political repression constrained
the ability of Communist-controlled societies to respond to the
pastoral and ecclesiological revolution ushered in by Vatican II.
Yet it is important to disentangle traditional historiographical
suspicions, particularly among nonspecialists of Central and
Eastern Europe, of that region’s “backwardness” from the con-
tingent constraints imposed by Communist regimes after World
War II.16 The precise nature of those constraints is deserving of
extensive future research, as are the changes achieved in spite
of them.
This volume makes no pretense of being either exhaustive or
definitive. Rather, it assembles, for the first time in any language,
a broad overview of the place of four different Communist-run
countries—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia—
in the history of Vatican II. Framing these national stories is an
account of how the Cold War between the United States and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics impacted the Council and its
reception. This book relies on both the history of ideas and the
Modernity in Eastern Europe,” in Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, ed.

Bruce R. Berglund and Brian Porter-Szűcs (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2010), 3.
16. On the “modernity” or “backwardness” of Christianity in Central and East-
ern Europe, see, for example, Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction,” 17; Pedro Ramet, “Reli-
gion and Modernization,” in Cross and Commissar: The Politics of Religion in Eastern
Europe and the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 7–10.
INTRODUCTION 7
historical sociology of movement formation, and it also draws
heavily on the national historiographies of the countries that it
examines. The result is a broad lens on the present state of re-
search (covering all relevant languages), with hopes to propel
that research forward.
All of the chapters draw on both non-English-language sec-
ondary literature and original primary sources—some published,
some archival—with the most extensive sourcework coming for
the two countries for which the least scholarship exists. Paradox-
ically, these are the two cases that differ most substantially from
other Communist-run countries: Poland, for its overwhelmingly
Catholic population following the annihilation or displacement
of its pre–World War II Jewish, German, and Ukrainian nation-
al minorities; and Yugoslavia, for the unique nonaligned status
achieved by its postwar leader Josip Broz “Tito,” who governed
the country until his death in 1980.
The Iron Curtain and the Catholic Church

By the time of Nazi Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, the
Red Army and its satellite armies from across Central and East-
ern Europe had marched westward into the heart of Germany,
taking Berlin and establishing a zone of occupation that would
serve as the basis for the postwar partitions of Berlin, Germany,
and the whole of Europe.17 Historians still disagree about when
exactly the Cold War began, but by March 1946—when former
British prime minister Winston Churchill famously declared that
“an iron curtain has descended across the continent”—Red Army
boots seemed to have come to stay in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.18
17. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone
of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1995).
18. See, for example, Norman M. Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii, eds., The Estab-
8 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

Both Czechoslovakia and Poland had a higher percentage of
Catholics at the war’s end than at its beginning. Protestant Ger-
mans were expelled from both countries. Poland, furthermore,
lost the substantial Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic popu-
lations who had inhabited its interwar eastern territories, ceded
in 1945 to the Soviet Union.19 Most dramatically, the Holocaust
took its toll on the postwar demographic composition of Central
and Eastern Europe—especially in Poland—as did waves of out-
ward Jewish migration in the immediate postwar by Holocaust
survivors, accelerated in some instances by pogroms like the one
in Kielce, Poland, in July 1946.20
As historians have noted over the years, the establishment of
Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe did not pro-
ceed uniformly. Some countries by the war’s end already sported
a Soviet-backed puppet government (Poland), while others took
several years to arrive at Communist domination (Czechoslova-
kia).21 All of the states that came to constitute the Soviet Bloc—a
geopolitical entity defined by the nominal sovereignty of its mem-
ber states, as constrained by autarky and military dependence on
the USSR—experienced forced migration and substantial demo-
graphic shifts in the war’s course and aftermath. In addition to
Czechoslovakia and Poland, both Germany and Romania were re-
defined by border revisions and forced migrations.22 On the other
lishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview

Press, 1997).
19. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 108–38.
20. Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz; An Essay in His-
torical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2006); Bożena Szaynok, Pogrom
Żydów w Kielcach 4 Lipca 1946 (Warsaw: Bellona, 1992).
21. Mark Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist
Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944–53,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Com-
munist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2009), 51–102.
22. Philipp Ther, The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Eu-
rope, trans. Charlotte Kreutzmüller (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 143–208.
INTRODUCTION 9
hand, the Baltic states lost their sovereignty entirely, subsumed
as they were into the USSR as new Soviet “republics” pursuant to
the terms set out in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.23
How the war had been fought was a crucial factor in deter-
mining what kinds of Communist regimes would emerge in dif-
ferent parts of Central and Eastern Europe. As Mark Kramer has
noted, “The establishment of Soviet dominance in the region
at the end of World War II was due as much to East European
weakness as to Soviet strength.”24 Yet there are two outliers from
Kramer’s observation, both in the Balkans. In neither Yugosla-
via nor Albania was there was a lasting Red Army presence; So-
viet troops were in Yugoslavia only briefly in September 1944,
en route to Hungary. The success of Tito’s and Hoxha’s wartime
Communist insurgencies against both the Axis occupiers and—
in Tito’s case—the fascist Ustaše puppet state in Croatia legiti-
mized their postwar rise to power in Yugoslavia and Albania,
respectively.25 In Yugoslavia, Catholics made up over 30 percent
of the population, but Communists effectively traded on the
Church’s wartime ties to the Ustaše government.26 The widely
accepted legitimacy of the postwar Tito-led Communist govern-
ment of Yugoslavia constrained the USSR’s ability to influence
Tito’s strategy of governance.
23. See, for example, Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 124–46.
24. Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc,”
62.
25. On Yugoslavia: Enver Redžić, “The Partisan Movement,” in Bosnia and Her-
zegovina in the Second World War, trans. Robert Donia (New York: Frank Cass, 2005),
197–246; Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation
and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). On Albania: Miranda
Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 141–84.
26. Kurt Hutten, Iron Curtain Christians: The Church in Communist Countries
Today, trans. Walter G. Tillmanns (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1967), 356. On the grim
postwar fate of the Catholic Church in Albania, see Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold
War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 101–4.
10 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

When top Soviet Communist A. A. Zhdanov announced in
1947 that the world had split into “two camps”—one imperial-
ist, the other anti-imperialist—he included Yugoslavia alongside
the Soviet Union in the anti-imperialist camp.27 Nonetheless, the
infamous Tito-Stalin split one year later launched Tito’s efforts
to pioneer a geopolitical “third way” between these two camps.
American and Western European states not only maintained
trade relations with Yugoslavia, but in fact provided it with sub-
stantial material aid. Yet even an influx of tourists from all over
the world did not diminish the repressive nature of Tito’s Com-
munist regime.28 For this reason, even though Cold War Yugo-
slavia was not, strictly speaking, part of the Soviet Bloc, this vol-
ume gives Yugoslavia a place of prominence in order to paint a
more complete picture of Catholicism’s fate behind the emerging
Iron Curtain.29
The Roman Catholic Church had already identified social-
ism in its various forms as a danger to the Catholic faith in the
mid-nineteenth century. When the Russian revolutions of 1917
led to the creation, among others, of both the Comintern and
the Soviet Union, the Holy See chose a radical anti-Communist
course.30 It was one thing, however, for Pius XI to condemn in
27. Zhdanov’s speech announcing the doctrine is reprinted at A. A. Zhdanov,

“Comrade Zhdanov’s Report: On the International Situation,” September 25, 1947,
in The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949, ed. Giuliano
Procacci et al. (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1994), 216–50.
28. On the split: Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yu-
goslav Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). On tourism: Igor
Tchoukarine, “The Yugoslav Road to International Tourism: Opening, Decentral-
ization, and Propaganda in the Early 1950s,” in Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History
of Tourism in Socialism (1950s–1980s), ed. Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor (Buda-
pest: Central European University Press, 2010), 107–40.
29. Hutten, Iron Curtain Christians; John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice
There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 233–85.
30. Piotr H. Kosicki, “The Roman Catholic Church and the Cold War,” in The
Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (New
York: Routledge, 2014), 259–71. On the Catholic Church’s response to the Industrial
INTRODUCTION 11
his 1937 encyclical Divini redemptoris the “pernicious” influence
of “bolshevistic, atheistic Communism” and another entirely for
his successor, Pius XII, to watch the Red Army bring communism
to Central and Eastern Europe in 1944–45.
It was against the backdrop of the Soviet advance across Eu-
rope that Pius XII issued his first public statements in support of
democracy. These represented a distinct turn away from the pon-
tiff’s perceived wartime sympathy for the Axis powers. His new
emphasis on “true democracy” struck a blow against Communists’
appropriation of the term; for Pius XII, “true democracy” could
never be reconciled with Soviet-style “people’s democracy.”31
Only in Poland did the ecclesiastical hierarchy attempt to
meet the new regime halfway.32 Elsewhere, Communists encoun-
tered dogged defiance; teetering on the verge of sedition, post-
war public statements by the primates of Hungary, Yugoslavia,
and Czechoslovakia condemned the new governments, calling
for Catholics’ civil disobedience.33 Already in 1945, the regimes in
power across Central and Eastern Europe began unilaterally ab-
rogating standing concordats: Poland in 1945, Romania in 1948,
Czechoslovakia in 1950, Yugoslavia in 1952. The concordats that
Pius XI had concluded with Latvia and Lithuania were rendered
irrelevant by the fact of those states’ incorporation into the USSR.
Nonetheless, Communist regimes did not begin with frontal
assaults on the Catholic Church, instead pursuing attempts at ac-
commodation and cooptation. This strategy envisioned two pos-
sible outcomes. Bishops could choose “to give national interests
Revolution, see Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrial-
ization to the First World War (New York: Crossroad, 1991).
31. Pius XII, “1944 Christmas Message,” in Christmas Messages, ed. Vincent A.
Yzermans (St. Meinrad, Ind.: Grail Publications, 1956), 85–86.
32. Luxmoore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 40–41, 60–63.
33. In Yugoslavia, for example, Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac went so far as to
promote Italian claims to the city of Trieste and the territory of Venezia Giulia at
the expense of Yugoslav sovereignty; Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 163.
12 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

priority over those of Italy and the papacy,”34 or—better yet—
Catholicism would be reduced to the status of “a national church
separate from other churches—to win over the lower clergy and
to neutralize the episcopate.”35
The Holy See’s response to this drive for Catholicism’s nation-
alization was what Peter C. Kent has called the “lonely cold war of
Pope Pius XII,” in which the pope “constantly warned about the
threat of communism and worried about the future of his church
in the event of the extension of communist power across the en-
tire European continent.”36 With the indictment of Yugoslav pri-
mate Alojzije Stepinac in 1946, Yugoslavia fell out of the Vatican’s
orbit. Pius XII shifted his focus to France, Italy, western Germany,
and the Benelux countries, with whose postwar political leader-
ship he developed an anti-Communist synergy that went hand in
hand with the project of launching European integration.37
In tandem with his support for the economic and political in-
tegration of Western Europe, Pius XII sought to prevent Catho-
lics from joining or supporting Communist initiatives. On July 1,
1949, the Holy Office issued a decree threatening excommunica-
tion against any “faithful professing materialist and anti-Christian
doctrine as Communists and, above all, those who defend or prop-
agate such doctrine.”38 This decree proved effective in justifying
34. Ibid., 104.

35. Milan J. Reban, “The Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia,” in Catholicism
and Politics in Communist Societies, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1990), 146.
36. Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 4. Kent’s argument is a response
above all to Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Cold War, 1945–1980 (Nor-
wich: M. Russell, 1982).
37. See, for example, Wolfram Kaiser, “Creating Core Europe: The Rise of the
Party Network,” in Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191–252; Robert A. Ventresca, “When
Politics Reaches the Altar: Catholic Action Gets Out the Vote,” in From Fascism to
Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Election of 1948 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2004), 177–97.
38. Decree of the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic Church, July 1, 1949, repro-
INTRODUCTION 13
interventions against some of the most flagrant philo-Communist
initiatives—like Czechoslovakia’s Peace Movement of the Catholic
Clergy, Hungary’s Kereszt and Opus Pacis, and Poland’s PAX.39
Peter C. Kent has suggested that Pius XII’s Holy See fought
its own “lonely” cold war that “was not in sympathy with the
[American] policy of containment which separated Catholic Eu-
ropeans of the West from Catholic Europeans of the East.”40 As
Communist regimes decisively attacked their countries’ most
outspoken Church leaders, they created what Pius XII described
in his 1951 Christmas message as a “Church of Silence”: “Hands
tied, lips sealed, the Church of Silence responds to our invitation.
She shows with her gaze the still fresh graves of her martyrs, the
chains of her confessors . . . her silent holocaust.”41
While Kent is correct that the postwar pontiff’s principal
Cold War weapon was the threat and practice of excommunica-
tion, Iron Curtain regimes’ ability to make rising stars even of
excommunicated activists meant that this practice really only
worked in countries not yet controlled by Communist parties. As
a result, Pius XII’s “lonely cold war,” like the larger Cold War, fo-
cused on containing the Communist threat to Central and East-
ern Europe rather than pursuing an offensive drive to reestablish
pastoral control behind the Iron Curtain. The Holy See was es-
duced in Yvon Tranvouez, Catholiques et communistes: La crise du progressisme chré-

tien, 1950–1955 (Paris: Cerf, 2000), 42.
39. On Czechoslovakia, see Bogdan Kolar, “The Priestly Patriotic Associations
in the Eastern European Countries,” Bogoslovny vestnik 68, no. 2 (2008): 231–56. On
Hungary, see László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, 1945–1956: Between the United
States and the Soviet Union (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004),
164. On Poland, see Mikołaj Stanisław Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red: Na-
tionalism, Catholicism, and Communism in 20th-Century Poland; The Politics of Bolesław
Piasecki (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Piotr H. Kosicki, “The Soviet Bloc’s
Answer to European Integration: Catholic Anti-Germanism and the Polish Proj-
ect of a ‘Catholic-Socialist’ International,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 1
(2015): 1–36.
40. Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 5.
41. Quoted at Luxmoore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 103.
14 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

pecially intent on protecting France and Italy. As Jonathan Lux-
moore and Jolanta Babiuch have argued, “the general anathema
reaffirmed in the 1949 Decree made practical discernments im-
possible. Above all, Pius XII lacked the will to go beyond legalis-
tic formulations.”42 In other words, the relegation of Catholics in
Communist countries to a “Church of Silence” followed not only
from the political repressions introduced by those countries’ new
leaders, but also from the concrete geopolitical and pastoral cal-
culations made by the Holy See.43
This is, for the most part, as far as the existing historiography
takes us. Yet Central and Eastern Europe in the 1950s constitut-
ed neither a pastoral vacuum nor a graveyard of martyrs for the
Roman Catholic Church. It is true that, following their imprison-
ment of successive head bishops, Communist regimes succeeded
in co-opting and steering many, if not most, Catholic initiatives.
The Vatican, too, seemed to be losing interest until Cardinal Ron-
calli’s arrival on the throne of St. Peter in 1958, whereupon the
new Holy Father initiated a turn toward dialogue and Ostpolitik.
This was visible already in the 1959 encyclical Ad Petri cathedram
(John XXIII’s first), which, while using the phrase “Church of Si-
lence,” couched it in a declaration of the Church’s readiness “to
forgive all freely and beg this forgiveness of God.”44
Reversing Pius XII’s policy of excommunication and contain-
ment, John XXIII thereby opened the door for serious diplomacy
and deal-making. Hansjakob Stehle has offered the best defini-
42. Ibid., 94.

43. As Peter C. Kent writes of Pius XII, “his advice to the churches and peoples
of eastern Europe was to refuse all cooperation with their Communist overlords in
spite of the fact that these Communists controlled all the power. Had he had less of
a predetermined agenda, he might have responded to more of the responsible ad-
vice which he was receiving from his advisors within the Secretariat of State”; Kent,
Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 10.
44. John XXIII, Ad Petri Cathedram (June 29, 1959), at http://www.vatican.va/
holy_father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_29061959_ad-petri_
en.html; accessed May 2, 2014.
INTRODUCTION 15
tion of this “Eastern politics of the Vatican”: “defense of one’s
own interests through confrontation where coexistence is im-
possible, through compromises where they seem to be tolerable,
through cooperation where there are partners for it.”45
While it was difficult to dialogue with Communist puppets—
or outright agents of the secret police—among the bishops and
leading Catholic activists behind the Iron Curtain, theirs was
not the whole story. Although Communist regimes prevented
many Catholic leaders from attending the Second Vatican Coun-
cil, none of the countries discussed in this volume were walled
off from Vatican II. The situation was different within the Soviet
Union—notably, for Roman Catholics in Lithuania and Latvia or
Roman and Greek Catholics in western Ukraine and Belorussia.46
The fact remains, however, that residing behind the Iron
Curtain did not automatically consign Catholics to four decades
inhabiting a “Church of Silence.” John XXIII’s goal was to make
it easier for Christians in Communist countries to practice their
faith. As Stehle has put it, “The metaphysical significance of a
martyrdom did not replace priests and bishops for the faithful.”47
“Aggiornamento” behind the Iron Curtain

This book is not a history of the Second Vatican Council per se.
Rather, it attempts to engage the origins, substance, and conse-
quences of what Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak have
called the “spirit and dialectic” of Vatican II. As those scholars
45. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 5.

46. See, for example, Christopher Lawrence Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics
of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2001), 384–446. On Lithuania, see V. Stanley Vardys, The Catholic Church, Dissent,
and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania (Boulder, Colo.: East European Quarterly, 1978).
On Ukraine, see Natalia Shlikhta, “Competing Concepts of ‘Reunification’ Behind
the Liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church,” in Christianity and Moder-
nity in Eastern Europe, Berglund and Porter-Szűcs, 159–90.
16 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

have argued, “The Council did not intend to produce a new doc-
trinal ‘Summa’ (according to John XXIII, ‘that did not require a
Council’!) nor to give answers to all problems.” Recognizing those
aspirations, this book focuses not on the minutiae of conciliar
debates and declarations, but rather on the proper place of indi-
vidual and collective human agency in the Council’s story, “as an
expression and prolongation of the event itself.”48
By the numbers, it is not difficult to see why historians have
traditionally questioned the conditions of possibility for agency
within the story of Vatican II by Catholics behind the Iron Curtain.
Out of a total of nearly 2,500 bishops who participated in the first
conciliar session, only two were from Hungary, four from Czecho-
slovakia, twenty-four from Yugoslavia, and twenty-six from Po-
land. These numbers varied over the course of the Council, yet in
view of the total number of bishops in Rome at any given moment
while the Council was in session, they remained consistently un-
impressive.
And yet close analysis of these bishops’ voting records tells a
dynamic and often surprising story. Sociologist Melissa Wilde’s
unprecedented access to the Vatican II voting records held within
the Vatican’s secret archive has allowed her to develop a typology
of “progressive” and “conservative” voting tendencies by bishops
from around the world, grouped by their country of origin.49 Al-
48. Giuseppe Alberigo, “Preface: 1965–1995: Thirty Years After Vatican II,” in
History of Vatican II, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak, trans. Mat-
thew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995), 1:xii.
49. Wilde derives these broader classifications from a close study of two small,
informal groups of Council fathers, each of which constituted a nexus for opinion-
making and lobbying for votes among the remaining bishops: respectively, the “pro-
gressive” Domus Mariae and the “conservative” Coetus Internationalis Patrum. For
an explanation of Wilde’s methodology, see Wilde, “How Culture Mattered at Vatican
II,” 579–80. Wilde was also kind enough to share additional data on voting patterns
in Communist countries. The raw votes that she has compiled are now available on-
line at “Second Vatican Council Votes,” Association of Religious Data Archives, at
http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/VATICAN.asp; accessed Janu-
ary 1, 2014.
INTRODUCTION 17
though this volume does not hold fast to that binary, it repre-
sents an immensely useful starting point.
The bishops from behind the Iron Curtain may have been few
in number, but many of them defied expectations in ways that
had important consequences, both for the Council and for their
home countries. On certain issues, they voted “progressively” as
often as they did “conservatively”—as in the case of Polish bish-
ops splitting in October 1964 over whether or not to recognize
Mary as “Mother of the Church.”50 On others, they resoundingly
chose the “progressive” option—as in the cases of Hungarian,
Polish, and Yugoslav bishops voting in October 1963 on the prin-
ciple of “collegiality,” which gave the bishops co-authority over
the Church, in collaboration with the pope.51
Even more telling than episcopal voting patterns, however,
are the complex interactions both within Catholic populations in
Iron Curtain countries and between those populations and the
Holy See. As a result, as important as what happened in Rome
between 1962 and 1965 are national-level debates on aggiorna-
mento, preparations for the Council, reception of the Council
while it was in progress, and its legacy. These varied by country,
but in all cases key players in the story included not only bishops,
but also lay intellectuals, journalists, theologians, Communist
statesmen, and even secret-police agents.52
The road to the Council, its four sessions, and their after-
math all play a central role in each of this book’s five chapters.
50. On the Marian vote, see Melissa J. Wilde, Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of
Religious Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 102–3, 114–15.
51. On “collegiality” and its ultimate expression in the dogmatic constitution
Lumen gentium, see O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 180–85; Wilde, Vatican II,
59–63. Given the positive outcome of the vote, as O’Malley puts it, “The bishops, by
their presence at the council and their active participation in it, had actually expe-
rienced collegiality. It was for them now part of their lived reality”; O’Malley, What
Happened at Vatican II, 184 (italics in original).
52. On the involvement of Communist security forces, see especially chapter 2,
by Árpád von Klimó, in this volume.
18 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

The volume thus understands Vatican II not merely as time spent
by bishops, auditors, and periti in session in the autumn of 1962,
1963, 1964, and 1965, but rather as the sum-total of the Catholic
experience of aggiornamento in preparation for and surrounding
the Council as well as the living witness that has been its legacy.53
John XXIII, drawing on Matthew 16:3, wrote in his 1963 encycli-
cal Pacem in terris of the “signs of the times,” to which the Council
must serve as the Church’s response.54
It is therefore crucial to examine Vatican II in the fullness of
its historical context.55 The Council began at a moment of global
crisis framed by the construction of the Berlin Wall, the decolo-
nization of sub-Saharan Africa, the end of French military in-
volvement in Algeria, and the nonviolent resolution of the Cu-
ban Missile Crisis. In the middle of the Council’s Second Session,
U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Two months
before the Fourth Session’s opening, the U.S. Congress adopted
the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing American involve-
ment in what became the Vietnam War; one month into that
session, Nikita Khrushchev resigned as Soviet Communist Party
general secretary.56 As Council peritus Hans Küng wrote during
53. Joseph A. Komonchak has described the Council as a historical “ ‘aggregate

of little facts’ called ‘Vatican II’ ”; Komonchak, “Vatican II as an ‘Event,’ ” in Vatican II,
ed. Schultenover, 36.
54. “You know how to judge the appearance of the sky, but you cannot judge
the signs of the times”; Mt 16:3, in The New American Bible, rev. ed. (2011), at http://
www.usccb.org/bible; accessed March 3, 2014. French Dominican theologian Marie-
Dominique Chenu—one of the leading periti at the Council—wrote in 1964 that
signs of the times represented “signs of the compatibility of the Gospels with hu-
man hope”; Chenu, “I segni dei tempi,” in La chiesa nel mondo contemporaneo, ed.
Enzo Giammancheri (Brescia: Queriniana, 1966), 97.
55. José Casanova described it thus: “It is no longer a question of the church
teaching the world eternal truths and upholding the objective moral order onto-
logically inscribed in natural law, but of the church accepting the task of having to
appropriate the meaning of the Gospel in and through historical interpretation”;
Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 72–73.
56. On the context, see, for example, Gerard J. DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged:
INTRODUCTION 19
the First Session, “So much that was decisive in the first ses-
sion of the Second Vatican Council did not happen in the aula.”57
This was as true of the Council taken as a whole as of any single
session.
One of the crucial misconceptions that this volume seeks to
correct regarding Vatican II is that historians can exhaust the
Council’s intellectual and theological achievements simply by ex-
amining the documents published during its final session in 1965,
from Nostra aetate’s embrace of Judaism and Apostolicam actuosi-
tatem’s insistence on lay involvement in the life of the Church to
Gaudium et spes’s celebrated embrace of the “modern world.”58 In
addition to the sixteen documents produced by the Council, two
encyclicals published in the years of the Second Vatican Council—
but not while the Council was in session—also play an important
role in this volume: Pacem in terris (issued on April 11, 1963) and
Ecclesiam suam (August 6, 1964).
In Pacem in terris, imagining the brink of destruction to which
the previous year’s Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world,
John XXIII called on American and Soviet Cold War camps alike
to “co-operate in the effort to banish fear and the anxious expec-
tation of war from men’s minds. But this requires that the funda-
mental principles upon which peace is based in today’s world be
replaced by an altogether different one, namely, the realization
that true and lasting peace among nations cannot consist in the
possession of an equal supply of armaments but only in mutual
A Kaleidoscope History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 2008).
57. Hans Küng, The Council in Action: Theological Reflections on the Second Vatican
Council, trans. Cecily Hastings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), v.
58. On the origins of Nostra aetate, see John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother:
The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2012). On the origins and broader context of Apostolicam actuosita-
tem, see Paul Lakeland, The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church
(New York: Continuum, 2003). On Gaudium et spes, see Norman Tanner, The Church
and the World: Gaudium et Spes, Inter Mirifica (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2005).
20 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

trust.”59 Pacem in terris was therefore about policy, but it made
clear the Vatican’s newfound priority of dialogue, intended to en-
gage also countries behind the Iron Curtain.60
Much to the chagrin of a large proportion of the bishops who
attended Vatican II—not least the Poles61—no official conciliar
document included a condemnation of communism. As Melissa J.
Wilde has underscored, even though communism “was an impor-
tant issue at the Council,” and “many conservatives were quite in-
vested in getting the Council to condemn it . . . progressives gener-
ally avoided the issue, and no condemnation of communism came
from the Council.”62
Ecclesiam suam, issued one year later by the next pontiff, could,
at face value, be seen as compensation for that failure. In a move
calculated to keep atheism and communism from monopolizing
the attention of frustrated conservatives, Paul VI devoted an entire
section of Ecclesiam suam to “Communist Oppression.” In a pas-
sage reminiscent of Pius XI and Pius XII, Paul VI describes “athe-
istic communism” as an ideology that denies “God and oppress[es]
the Church . . . it is rather they and their politicians who are clearly
repudiating us [Catholics], and for doctrinaire reasons subjecting
us to violent oppression.”63 Dialogue with Communist regimes—
warned the pontiff—would be “very difficult, not to say impossi-
ble.” Rather, Paul VI concluded, “The only witness that the Church
59. John XXIII, Pacem in terris (April 11, 1963), at http://www.vatican.va/holy_
father/john_xxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem_en.html;
accessed January 1, 2014.
60. On Pacem in terris, see chapter 1, by Gerald P. Fogarty, in this volume; Lux-
moore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 117–20.
61. See chapter 5, by Piotr H. Kosicki, in this volume.
62. Wilde, Vatican II, 137. Wilde tells the story of a petition, circulated two
weeks into the Fourth Session by the Coetus Internationalis Patrum lobby seeking
the Council’s condemnation of communism, that garnered only 435 signatures, of
which more than a third came from Italian or Spanish bishops; ibid., 70.
63. Paul VI, Ecclesiam suam (August 6, 1964), at http://www.vatican.va/holy_fa-
ther/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_06081964_ecclesiam_en.html;
accessed June 2, 2014.
INTRODUCTION 21
can give is that of silence, suffering, patience, and unfailing love,
and this is a voice that not even death can silence.”
The passion and pathos evident in Paul VI’s language should
not, however, be mistaken for a vindication of the idea that Vati-
can II made no difference behind the Iron Curtain. Rather, this
is Ecclesiam suam’s final word on communism: “we have today no
preconceived intention of cutting ourselves off from the adher-
ents of these systems and these regimes. For the lover of truth
discussion is always possible.”64 Only in light of these words can
historians make sense of Paul VI’s pragmatic Ostpolitik, which
through his representative Agostino Casaroli allowed the Holy
See to reach agreements with Communist Hungary and Commu-
nist Yugoslavia, as well as craft the language on human rights for
what would become the Helsinki Final Act of 1975.65
The contrast between these two sets of phrases from the
same passage of the 1964 encyclical underscores the importance
of painting a full picture of the relationship between the Catholic
Church and Communist countries. Neither silence nor dialogue
can fully explain the complex historical interplay between Vati-
can II and the lives of Catholics behind the Iron Curtain. For this
reason, each chapter in this book looks at national-level events
as well as the Vatican, at bishops and laymen, at official decla-
rations and practical decision-making, as it develops a more nu-
anced picture of Vatican II behind the Iron Curtain.
•••
Gerald P. Fogarty opens the volume with the story of Soviet over-
tures to the Vatican during the pontificate of John XXIII. These
64. Polish Catholic journalist Janusz Zabłocki, covering the Third Session in
1964, underscored the importance of this very passage in the encyclical: “While
rejecting that which is unacceptable in atheistic communism, the Church does not
shut the door to dialogue, in which the Council seeks to interest all people of good
will”; Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:591.
65. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 314–74; Marco Lavopa, “L’Ostpolitik
vaticana di Mons. Agostino Casaroli et lo ‘spirito di Helsinki’ (1963–1975),” Democra-
zia e Diritto nos. 1–2 (2013): 510–18.
22 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

frame the chapter’s overview of the Cold War context surround-
ing Vatican II—the arms race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ostpo-
litik—as well as close attention to the story of Ukrainian Greek
Catholic archbishop Josyf Slipyj. Imprisoned from 1945 to 1963
within the USSR, Slipyj ultimately benefited from efforts by the
Holy See to secure his release, made possible also by American
involvement. Slipyj’s story attests to the ability of Soviet and
American diplomats to work with the Church in the spirit of ag-
giornamento to temper Soviet confessional policy and to achieve
concrete results through international dialogue and peace.
The case of Hungary, too, attested to the ability of the Holy
See to make diplomatic headway with Communist regimes. As
Árpád von Klimó demonstrates, however, along the way the re-
gime co-opted the national episcopate to a significant degree.
The Partial Agreement concluded in 1964 between the Commu-
nist regime and the Holy See lent legitimacy to a roster of Hun-
garian bishops and theologians participating in the Council who
were either puppets of the regime or outright secret-police in-
formants. Nonetheless, the debates and decisions taken at the
Council reached Hungary, inspiring movements like Regnum
Marianum and Bokor, as well as top-down liturgical reform by
the Hungarian episcopate.
The volume’s third chapter, written by Ivo Banac, concerns
the story of Vatican II and Communist Yugoslavia. Banac’s path-
breaking research on Vatican II’s significance for Tito’s realm
appears here for the first time in English.66 The Council gener-
ated serious hopes for confessional and political liberalization,
in particular among Croatian Catholics getting news from Rome
in the pages of Glas Koncila (Voice of the council). These hopes
seemed to find confirmation in subsequent years, with Yugosla-
via’s conclusion with the Holy See of a protocol in 1966 and full
66. Ivo Banac, Hrvati i Crkva: Kratka povijest hrvatskog katoličanstva u modernosti
(Zagreb: Svjetlo riječi, 2013).
INTRODUCTION 23
diplomatic relations in 1970, as well as the short-lived reformist
“Croatian Spring.” Although a subsequent repressive turn ended
hopes for a more permanent liberalization, the short-lived expe-
rience of reform and aggiornamento inspired in part by Vatican II
prepared the path, at least in Croatia, for Catholics to play a role
in political opposition in the 1980s.
While Yugoslavia had the Croatian Spring, Czechoslovakia
had its celebrated Prague Spring. As in Yugoslavia, so in Czecho-
slovakia did the pursuit of ecclesiological reform coincide with
attempted democratization within the Communist Party. James
Ramon Felak documents in the fourth chapter what he calls the
Communist aggiornamento in the context of reformist Catholic im-
pulses migrating from Rome to Prague. The Party co-opted some
of these—for example, restyling the old philo-Communist Peace
Movement of the Catholic Clergy as “Pacem in Terris,” after the
1963 encyclical. Yet lasting liturgical and pastoral reforms took
hold, even amidst a Czech population inculcated with centuries of
skepticism toward the Roman Catholic Church. The convergence
of Communist and Catholic aggiornamenti outlasted the suppres-
sion of the Prague Spring, surviving the so-called political “nor-
malization” of the 1970s to play a visible role in the Velvet Revolu-
tion of 1989.
Unlike Hungary or Yugoslavia, Communist Poland saw no ne-
gotiations at the highest levels between regime representatives
and the Holy See in the years of the Second Vatican Council—
though leading lay activists repeatedly attempted to bring both
sides to the table. Poland did, however, witness the largest and
freest flow of information and people back and forth across the
Iron Curtain to Rome throughout Vatican II. Conciliar debates
and reforms opened the door not only for Polish bishops, but
also for lay activists to make their mark on Church and Cold War
alike. The clearest long-term result of these exchanges was the
papacy of John Paul II. Along the way, however, Poland became
24 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

an emblematic case of the confrontation between tradition and
modernity in a Catholic environment defined sometimes by grid-
lock, at other times by a united front on behalf of civic freedom.
In all of these cases, aggiornamenti went hand in hand with
waves and spurts of political liberalization. Though mostly short-
lived, civic aggiornamenti magnified the impact of religious aggior-
namento. Every country behind the Iron Curtain was different, yet
even across such diverse cases as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Po-
land, and Yugoslavia one can find copious evidence for societies’
active engagement in the spirit of Vatican II. The Council also had
practical, tangible consequences—both short- and long-term—for
all of these countries, furnishing norms and aspirations that would
come to play a significant role in each of these countries during the
final years of the Cold War. The election of a Polish pope in 1978 lit
a match, but the tinder had been set much earlier for moderniza-
tion, reform, and an embrace of pluralism among Catholic popula-
tions behind the Iron Curtain.67
•••
Some of the chapters in this book are based on papers delivered at
a conference organized by the editor at the University of Virginia
on December 1, 2012, under the title of “The Second Vatican Coun-
cil and Communism.” The conference was part of the University
of Virginia’s Polish Lecture Series, made possible by the Rosenstiel
Foundation and the American Institute of Polish Culture. Thanks
for their support are also due to the University of Virginia’s Center
for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, as well as the
Jewish Studies Program and departments of History and Slavic
Languages and Literatures; the Institute of the Humanities and
Global Cultures; the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought;
and the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion.
67. For a much more systematic account of John Paul II’s place in this story, see
George Weigel, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Com-
munism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
INTRODUCTION 25
Special thanks are due to Jeffrey Rossman and Melissa J.
Wilde. Árpád von Klimó helped to keep this project on track, and
Trevor Lipscombe of the Catholic University of America Press
kindly and patiently oversaw its transition into published form.
The editor thanks the press’s two anonymous readers, as well as
colleagues at the University of Maryland’s Department of History
for their support, and the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-
Campbell National Fellows Program at Stanford University’s Hoo-
ver Institution, which funded the research leave during which the
editor completed work on this volume.
26 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

ONE
VATICAN II
AND THE
COLD WAR
• • • Gerald P. Fogarty
On January 25, 1959, John XXIII, elected only three months ear-
lier, startled the world by convoking the Second Vatican Council.
He would create yet more surprise by his relations with Nikita
Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union and general secretary
of its Communist Party. Both men, so different in religious faith,
were wily peasants, unafraid to try something new. On the eve of
the Council, each was drawing closer to the other, but for vast-
ly different reasons. On September 10, 1961, the pope issued a
plea for negotiations between East and West to end threats to
peace. His appeal won support from Khrushchev, who said the
pope “talks common sense.” In an interview with reporters from
Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and Izvestia, the gov-
ernment’s paper, the Soviet leader said that he welcomed such
appeals, “no matter from what source.” He went on to ask, “will
such adherents of the Catholic faith as John Kennedy and Kon-
rad Adenauer and others heed the ‘sacred warning’ of the Pope
of Rome?”
In his speech, the pope had called on leaders to settle their
differences and “face squarely the tremendous responsibilities
they bear before the tribunal of history and, what is more, be-
27
fore the judgment seat of God.” Khrushchev noted that he was
not afraid of “the judgment of God,” for, “as a Communist and an
atheist, I do not believe in ‘Divine Providence,’ but I can say one
thing firmly: the Governments’ great responsibility before their
peoples and before mankind require that they make all possible
efforts and begin jointly to search for ways to liquidate the re-
mains of World War II, to eliminate points of tension, to curb the
torchbearer of a new general conflagration.”1
John XXIII actually took the next step. He dispatched Father
Giuseppe De Luca secretly to meet Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the
Italian Communist Party, who was about to go to Moscow. The
priest’s mission was to discuss how to improve Soviet-Vatican rela-
tions. He suggested—and Togliatti concurred—that Khrushchev
should send a telegram congratulating John XXIII on his eightieth
birthday, a type of message that would be cordial, but would not
commit the Soviet Union to any particular course of action.2
On November 25, 1961, John XXIII turned eighty. Through
the Soviet ambassador to Italy, Khrushchev congratulated the
pope and expressed his “sincere wishes of good health and of suc-
cess in his noble aspiration to contribute to the strengthening
and consolidation of peace on earth and to the solution of inter-
national problems through frank negotiations.” To the conster-
nation of some of his advisers, the pope thanked the premier
for “the good wishes and on his side expresses also to the whole
Russian people cordial wishes of increment and consolidation of
universal peace through happy understandings of human frater-
nity; and to this end raises his fervent prayers.” Although word
of this exchange had leaked out earlier, only on December 16
1. New York Times, September 21, 1961; see Giancarlo Zizola, The Utopia of Pope
John XXIII, trans. Helen Barolini (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1978), 120–21.
2. Peter Hebblethwaite, Pope John XXIII: Shepherd of the Modern World (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 393; see also Andrea Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca: 1940–
1990 (Rome: Editori Laterza, 1992), 223–25. Riccardi suggests that the Soviet ambas-
sador to Italy may have played a more significant role.
28 GERALD P. FOGARTY

did the Osservatore Romano report this exchange of messages.3
In the course of this rapprochement between the Vatican and
the Kremlin, John XXIII began negotiating for the presence at
the Council of bishops from the Soviet Bloc. Here he used the
services of Archbishop Francesco Lardone, apostolic delegate to
Turkey, a post that John XXIII had himself held during World
War II, well before his elevation to the papacy. Largely through
Lardone’s efforts, the First Session witnessed the presence of
one bishop from Bulgaria, two bishops and an administrator
from Hungary—József Cardinal Mindszenty, archbishop of Esz-
tergom, remained sequestered in the American embassy in Bu-
dapest—four from Czechoslovakia, and three vicars capitular
from the Soviet Union itself. With the arrival of a large Polish
contingent, including Karol Wojtyła—the future John Paul II,
auxiliary bishop of Kraków from 1958 to 1964—a total of thirty-
five bishops from the Soviet Bloc were present at the First Ses-
sion. Efforts to obtain the presence of bishops from China were,
unfortunately, unsuccessful.4
The overtures between John XXIII and Khrushchev laid the
groundwork for one of the most significant preconciliar ecumen-
ical endeavors. The pope envisioned his council as an invitation
to Christian unity, but the initial response was mixed. One of the
first to respond was Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople,
previously the Metropolitan of the Greek Orthodox archdiocese
of North and South America, headquartered in New York. In De-
cember 1959 he issued a statement from Jerusalem expressing
his hope for the eventual reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic
churches.
On Christmas Day, Athenagoras invited Francis Cardinal Spell-
3. New York Times, December 17, 1961; New York Times, December 1, 1961; see
also Francesco Capovilla, Giovanni XXIII: Lettere, 1958–1963 (Rome: Edizioni di storia
e letteratura, 1978), 337.
4. Alberigo and Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II, 1:402–3, 483–94; Riccar-
di, Il Vaticano e Mosca, 232–35.
VATICAN II AND THE COLD WAR 29

man, archbishop of New York—then in Istanbul to visit U.S. troops
in Turkey—to a conference at his residence. The cardinal then al-
tered his itinerary to fly to Rome for an audience with John XXIII
on January 5, 1960, and presented the patriarch’s “views to his
holiness [to] see if some reunion were possible.” The pope was en-
thusiastic, but Domenico Cardinal Tardini, the secretary of state,
was less so. Spellman subsequently drafted a letter to Athenago-
ras, which he planned for the Vatican to send, but Tardini altered it
and instructed Spellman to send it to the patriarch himself. Spell-
man would later recall that the new letter was not as cordial as he
had originally intended.5 It would be four years before Paul VI’s
dramatic meeting with Athenagoras in Jerusalem, and this chilly
response may have contributed to the patriarch’s having no repre-
sentative during the first two sessions of the Council.
In the meantime, on June 5, 1960—Pentecost—John XXIII
established the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. As
president, he appointed Augustin Cardinal Bea, SJ, former rector
of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, with Johannes Willebrands as
secretary. Initially viewed by some merely as a clearinghouse for
information for non-Catholics, the secretariat gradually won the
right to prepare schemata before the Council. Later, it was grant-
ed equal status with the Theological Commission, presided by Al-
fredo Cardinal Ottaviani, secretary of the Holy Office. John XXIII
instructed its members to carve out territory for the secretariat.6
Before the Council, the secretariat had the tasks of drafting a
preliminary schema on religious liberty and of arranging to have
invitations extended to non-Catholic observers to attend the
Council. The invitations to non-Catholic observers proved to be
complicated. The first break came when John XXIII, without con-
5. Spellman to “Dear Friends,” n.p., “Christmas Night”—probably December 27,

1959, Archives of the Archdiocese of New York.
6. Thomas F. Stransky, “The Foundation of the Secretariat for Promoting Chris-
tian Unity,” in Vatican II by Those Who Were There, ed. Alberic Stacpoole (London:
Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), 79–80.

sulting other members of the Curia, agreed to accept a “courtesy
visit” from Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury on Decem-
ber 2, 1960. Next came an invitation from Visser’t Hooft, secre-
tary general of the World Council of Churches, to have the secre-
tariat send observers to the Third General Assembly, held in New
Delhi from November 18 to December 5, 1961. Bea favored it, but
Ottaviani objected. As a compromise, the secretariat designated
five observers, who were not official staff members of the secre-
tariat. This paved the way for John XXIII in his Christmas allocu-
tion formally to invite other Christians to send observers to the
Council.
But the Orthodox proved more difficult. In September 1961,
the first Pan-Orthodox conference was held at Rhodes, at Athe-
nagoras’s convocation. Its final session proclaimed the essential
unity of all of the Orthodox churches and called for unity in all of
their activities.7 In July 1961, the official journal of the Moscow
patriarchate had already dismissed the notion of sending observ-
ers to the Council, issuing a solemn non possumus. The Russian
objection flowed from its perception that the Vatican was too
active in the political sphere. From September 27 to October 2,
1962, Willebrands then undertook a secret mission to Moscow
to inform the patriarch and his advisors of preparations for the
Council, its nonpolitical agenda, and the invitation to all of the
churches. Cardinal Bea then telegraphed Metropolitan Nikodim,
director of the patriarch’s Department of External Affairs, to
say that he had sent an invitation to Patriarch Alexius, who re-
sponded almost immediately that he would send delegates to the
Council.8 They were Archpriest Vitaly Borovoy and Archiman-
drite Vladimir Kotlyarov. In light of the close supervision that
the Soviet government exercised over the Russian Orthodox
Church, Khrushchev had to have approved the patriarch’s action.
7. New York Times, October 1, 1961.

8. Alberigo and Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II, 1:324–46, 403–4.

It was one more step in the relationship that the premier was de-
veloping with the pope.
The Russian decision, however, did not sit well with other
branches of the Orthodox Church. The Greek primate condemned
the Russians for breaking the unity of the Orthodox Church.9
Athenagoras, who had been most open to sending delegates, was
apparently caught off guard. Given the Rhodes call for Orthodox
unity in opposing any delegates, his synod announced that it
would not be represented at the Council.10
When the Council opened, Russian Orthodox observers were
present, while, among others, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj of the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church remained a prisoner of the
Soviet Union. Sentenced in 1945 to confinement, Slipyj, after
serving his sentence, found himself exiled indefinitely to Sibe-
ria; there, too, he was unable to carry out his pastoral duties. The
irony was not lost on the Ukrainian bishops from the diaspora
outside Ukraine—including the United States. The public protest
against this situation later caused the Vatican some difficulties.
In 1960, John XXIII had named Slipyj a cardinal in pectore; in oth-
er words, his name was not published at that time. But the pope
wanted to do more. Through an intermediary, he had Togliatti,
the secretary of the Italian Communist Party, broach the ques-
tion of Slipyj’s release with Khrushchev at a Moscow meeting of
Communist Party leaders. The premier, however, turned a deaf
ear to the proposal.11 Paradoxically, what ultimately brought the
release of Slipyj was an event that almost led to nuclear war.
For some months before the Council opened, the Soviets had
been stationing fighter planes in Cuba. On October 18, a U.S.
Navy fighter squadron had been moved to the southern part of

10. Stransky, “Foundation of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity,”
73–80.
11. Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca, 238–41; Hebblethwaite, Pope John XXIII, 467.

Florida, from which it could easily attack the Cuban bases.12 Ten-
sions were brewing. Two days earlier, President John F. Kennedy
had been shown evidence that the Soviet Union had installed of-
fensive missiles in Cuba that could easily reach cities in the Unit-
ed States and Latin America. However, he delayed revealing the
presence of missiles in Cuba until he had more concrete evidence.
On October 22, he addressed the people of the United States
on television, showing aerial photographs of the missile sites. He
then announced the beginning of a naval blockade of all ship-
ping to Cuba.13 Life, the popular American weekly pictorial jour-
nal, had been ready to run its cover story on the Council, with
a photographic display of the pageantry taking place inside the
Vatican. Instead, its cover carried a picture of an American ship
bearing down on a Soviet freighter, with the accompanying story
inside coming immediately after the pictures of the opening of
the Council.14 The juxtaposition of the conflicting images cap-
tured the emotions of the day.
The Soviet Union’s real objective was not to threaten an attack
from Cuba on the United States, but to force an Allied withdrawal
from Berlin. Missiles in Cuba were a ploy to test the mettle of the
young American president on the eve of American congressional
elections. Khrushchev also had to prove to his domestic oppo-
nents that he was strong in confronting the West.15
As Kennedy and Khrushchev began their diplomatic jockey-
ing, a group of Soviet and American academics and journalists
was assembling at Phillips Exeter Academy in Andover, Massa-

13. Ibid., October 23, 1962. The text of this address and other key U.S. docu-
ments in the Cuban Missile Crisis are given in Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh,
eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Reader (New York:
New Press, 1992), 150–54.
14. Life, November 2, 1962. The story of the blockade begins on page 34.
15. For a summary of Kremlin motivations, see Michel Tatu, Power in the Krem-
lin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 230–97.

chusetts, for the third in a series of conferences about the issues
confronting statesmen of both nations, especially nuclear weap-
ons. Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review and head
of the American delegation, had initiated the conferences at the
request of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960. On Octo-
ber 22, the group was just getting acquainted when it recessed to
watch Kennedy’s address on television. After taking a vote, they
decided to continue with the conference, despite the tension be-
tween their two nations.
A few days later, the group received a visitor, Felix Morlion,
OP, rector of Pro Deo University in Rome, a think tank for politi-
cians and journalists from around the world, with a bias toward
Europe. A Belgian, Morlion had founded Pro Deo in the 1930s as
an international group of Catholic journalists. During the Second
World War, he moved his headquarters to New York, where he
cooperated with the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner
of the CIA. He came to Andover not as a participant, but as an
observer and emissary. There he raised the possibility of a papal
intervention in the crisis.
With the encouragement of members of both delegations, he
phoned the Vatican and was informed that the pope was deeply
concerned about the crisis, but wanted assurance that his inter-
vention would be acceptable. In particular, Morlion’s instructions
were to ask if the Soviet Union would cease military shipping in
return for the United States lifting the blockade. According to
his later recollection, Cousins then phoned Theodore Sorensen,
general counsel to Kennedy, who later responded that Kennedy
welcomed the papal offer, but that it was imperative not only
that military shipping to Cuba cease, but that the missiles be re-
moved.16 Morlion conveyed this information to the Vatican. A
16. In a letter to the author, Sorensen recalled speaking with Cousins only af-
ter the crisis and had no recollection of a papal intervention in the crisis itself; So-
rensen to Fogarty, New York, December 1, 1994.

member of the Soviet delegation then phoned Moscow and re-
ported that Khrushchev would accept the pope’s proposal to with-
draw military shipping if the United States lifted the blockade.17
In the meantime, direct negotiations between Washington
and Moscow took place on several different levels. In addition to
the official contacts between the two powers, Robert F. Kenne-
dy, the attorney general and the president’s brother, had several
meetings with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, with whom
he was on friendly terms.18 At the same time, Aleksandr Fomin,
the KGB’s station chief in Washington, met with John Scali, a
correspondent for ABC News with personal connections with the
State Department who later became the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations. The choice of such back-door diplomacy showed
that the Soviets were clearly intent on warding off a confronta-
tion.19
One problem for John XXIII was that the Holy See had no
diplomatic relations with either of the superpowers. Khrushchev
had begun to establish a more cordial relationship with the pon-
tiff—always, of course, with the design of driving a wedge within
the Western alliance. As the first Catholic president, Kennedy had
to tread more cautiously with the Vatican. As a candidate for the
presidency, he had to declare his opposition to diplomatic rela-
tions with the Holy See. In March 1962, however, his wife, Jac-
queline, had an audience with the pope. In September 1962, more-
over, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had visited John XXIII.
But these were overtures that fell far short of initiating a perma-
nent relationship. The pope had to rely on less formal signs that
17. Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John,
Nikita Khrushchev (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 13–18. Cousins, however, incor-
rectly gives the date of Kennedy’s televised address announcing the blockade as Oc-
tober 21.
18. Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 65–66, 106–9.
19. Chang and Kornbluh, eds., Cuban Missile Crisis, 81.

any action on his part might bear fruit, and this came from the
Andover participants’ assurance that both Kennedy and Khrush-
chev would welcome a papal intervention. He now began to pre-
pare his speech.
But first, he paved the way. On October 24, he spoke to a
group of Portuguese pilgrims. He concluded the audience with
what appeared to be an afterthought:
The Pope always speaks well of all men of state who are concerned,
here, there, and everywhere, with meeting amongst themselves to
avoid the reality of war and to procure a bit of peace for human-
kind. . . . Nevertheless, let it be well understood, only the Spirit of the
Lord can accomplish this miracle, since, obviously, where the sub-
stance—true spiritual life—is lacking, many things cannot be imag-
ined nor obtained.20
Here was the pope’s first signal to the two leaders. While main-
taining the need for “spiritual life,” the pope nevertheless praised
“all men of state” who sought to avoid war through negotiation.
The pope’s next step was his formal address, dispatched ahead of
time to both the Soviet and U.S. embassies in Rome.
Speaking in French in an unscheduled broadcast at noon on
October 25, the pope made no mention of Kennedy, Khrushchev,
or Castro by name, nor did he mention the Soviet Union, the
United States, or Cuba. It was typical “Pope-speak”—using gen-
eralities rather than specifics—and thus applicable to similar cir-
cumstances. But all the contemporary listeners knew whom he
meant. He began by noting, “While the Second Vatican ecumeni-
cal Council has just been opened, amidst the joy and the hopes
of all men of goodwill, threatening clouds now come to darken
again the international horizon, and to show fear in millions of
families.” He begged “all rulers not to remain deaf to the cry of
mankind,” but to “do everything in their power to save peace.”
“Let them continue to negotiate,” he declared, for “to promote,
20. Zizola, Utopia, 7.

favor, and accept negotiations, at all levels and at all times, is a
rule of wisdom and prudence which calls down the blessings of
heaven and earth.”
An account of his address appeared the next day on the front
page of the New York Times, right under a picture of U.S. Ambas-
sador to the United Nations Adlai E. Stevenson presenting the
Security Council with photographic evidence of the missile sites
in Cuba. The Times also carried the full text of the pope’s speech,
with a translation from the French provided by the Vatican Press
Office.21 The same day, Pravda published the following account
on the page devoted to foreign news:
Save the World Statement by Pope John XXIII
The Vatican. 25 Oct. (TASS) Pope John XXIII in Rome has made a plea
for the defense of peace, “To All Men of Good Will.” Speaking today
in an unscheduled broadcast on Vatican Radio, he said his words
came “from the very depths of a worried and saddened heart.
“Once again,” said the Pope, “threatening clouds are gathering on
the world horizon, bringing fear to countless millions of families.”
In this regard Pope John XXIII repeated his plea to the statesmen
[the address he had given to the extraordinary missions sent for the
opening of the Council]: “Let their reason come alight; let them heed
the cry of distress arising to Heaven from all corners of the world,
from innocent children and the aged, from individuals and all man-
kind: ‘Peace, Peace.’
“Today,” he said, “we repeat the plea of our heart and invoke the
heads of state not to be heedless of the cry from mankind. Let them
do all in their power to keep the peace. Thereby they will be keeping
mankind from the horrors of a war, the frightful effects of which no
one can foresee. Let them go on negotiating.
“To agree to negotiations at any level and at any location, to be
well-inclined to these negotiations and to commence them—this
would be a sign of wisdom and cautiousness that would be blessed
by heaven and earth.”22
21. New York Times, October 26, 1962. 22. Pravda, October 26, 1962.

That Pravda published any of the papal overture was in itself sig-
nificant. It meant that Khrushchev was watching and giving his
approval to the pope’s words.
In the United States, the New York Times briefly noted that
the Soviet press agency TASS had distributed a dispatch on the
papal address, but did not comment on the significance of that
event.23 At the same time, the American newspaper also reported
that the five American cardinals—Spellman of New York, James
Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles, Richard Cushing of Boston,
Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis, and Albert G. Meyer of Chicago—
joined by Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington had issued a
statement calling on American Catholics to observe the following
Sunday, the Feast of Christ the King, “as a day of prayer to be-
seech God’s blessing on our President and Government.”24 Mean-
while, the three Cuban prelates at the Council, bishops Manuel
Rodríguez Rozas of Pinar del Rio, Carlos Riu Angles of Cama-
guey, and José Domínguez y Rodríguez of Matanzas, denied re-
ports in Paese Sera that they had made or intended to make any
statement about the crisis.25
Neither in the records of the White House discussions at this
juncture nor in later American accounts was there any mention
of the pope’s speech or of Pravda’s reaction. Kennedy’s assistants
were perhaps so focused on the military aspect of the crisis that
they were unaware of the papal initiative, despite its wide cov-
erage in the American press. This may account for their failure
to see in Khrushchev’s initial response the possible influence of
the pope’s plea. U Thant, acting secretary general of the United
Nations, had issued a plea calling for the United States not to in-
terfere with peaceful shipping and for the Soviet Union not to at-

24. Ibid.
25. National Catholic Welfare Council News Service (Foreign), October 29, 1962,
Archives of the Catholic University of America.

tempt to ship armaments to Cuba. To this Kennedy agreed.26 On
October 26, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy a personal letter. Stating
his general agreement with U Thant’s plea for negotiations, he
then asked Kennedy to guarantee that neither the United States
nor any other nation would invade Cuba. He further proposed
more general discussions on disarmament.27 But then the Soviet
position seemed to harden.
On October 27, Khrushchev sent a second letter to Kennedy,
broadcast over Radio Moscow ahead of its reception in Washing-
ton. He now introduced the question of Jupiter missiles in Tur-
key, “literally next to us.” While praising Kennedy’s agreement
to accept U Thant’s mediation, the general secretary now pro-
posed the removal of the missiles from Turkey in exchange for
the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Both the Soviet Union
and the United States would then make statements “within the
framework of the Security Council” pledging to respect the sov-
ereignty and borders of, respectively, Turkey and Cuba.
While this second letter seemed to represent the hardlin-
ers in the Kremlin more than Khrushchev himself, there were,
nevertheless, some indications that the general secretary was re-
acting to the papal appeal. Contrary to the usual Soviet policy,
Khrushchev again called for negotiations. Specifically, he stated,
Of course, for this we would have to come to an agreement with you
and specify a certain time limit. Let us agree to some period of time,
but without unnecessary delay—say within two or three weeks, not
longer than a month.
•••
If you are agreeable to my proposal, Mr. President, then we would
send our representatives to New York, to the United States, and
would give them comprehensive instructions in order that an agree-

27. Khrushchev to Kennedy, October 26, 1962, in Chang and Kornbluh, eds., Cu-
ban Missile Crisis, 185–88.

ment may be reached more quickly. If you also select your people
and give them the corresponding instructions, then this question
can be quickly resolved.
Why would I like to do this? Because the whole world is now
apprehensive and expects sensible actions of us. The greatest joy for
all peoples would be the announcement of our agreement and of the
eradication of the controversy that has arisen. I attach great impor-
tance to this agreement insofar as it could serve as a good begin-
ning and could in particular make it easier to reach agreement on
banning nuclear weapons tests. The question of the tests could be
solved in parallel fashion, without connecting one with the other,
because these are different issues. However, it is important that
agreement be reached on both these issues so as to present human-
ity with a fine gift, and also to gladden it with the news that agree-
ment has been reached on the cessation of nuclear tests and that
consequently the atmosphere will no longer be poisoned. Our posi-
tion and yours on this issue are very close together.28
The White House was now thrown into confusion between Khru-
shchev’s two letters.
On October 27, after prolonged discussion, Kennedy opted to
respond only to the first letter and ignore the one containing the
demand that the Jupiter missiles be removed from Turkey. The lat-
ter was a move that Kennedy himself had actually proposed sever-
al months earlier, since the weapons were in fact already obsolete
and could be replaced by Polaris submarines. Once the missiles
were removed from Cuba, the president wrote, the United States
would lift the quarantine and give its assurances against any inva-
sion of Cuba.29
On October 28, Khrushchev accepted Kennedy’s terms, but not
without providing a long list of grievances that Cuba had against
28. Chang and Kornbluh, eds., Cuban Missile Crisis, 197–99. For providing me
with the interpretation that the plea for negotiations was a deviation from Soviet
policy, I am grateful to William Burgess, who also provided the translations from
Pravda.
29. Kennedy to Khrushchev, October 27, 1962, in ibid., 223–25.

the United States. The communiqué was hardly friendly, but it
made no mention of the missiles in Turkey, the removal of which
caused opposition in Turkey. Kennedy acknowledged the mes-
sage, and negotiations began at the United Nations.30 Although
tensions between the two superpowers remained high during No-
vember as the United States negotiated for the removal of Soviet
bombers as well as missiles from Cuba, the crisis had passed. The
world pulled back from the brink of nuclear war.
John XXIII’s plea for negotiations had no perceptible effect
on the conduct of the United States during the crisis, although
Kennedy is reported to have thanked the pope through the U.S.
embassy to Italy.31 But the pope’s initiative did have an effect on
Khrushchev. Although it remains uncertain how much the papal
plea actually influenced the Soviet premier’s response to Kenne-
dy, it did set in motion a series of events that brought the Holy
See and the Soviet Union into more direct contact. Moreover, the
end of the crisis prompted John XXIII to instruct Father Pietro
Pavan, professor of theology at the Pontifical Lateran University,
to draft an encyclical, Pacem in terris, which he issued on April
11, 1963. Following the spirit, if not the actual wording, of his ra-
dio address, the letter was addressed not only to the hierarchy
of the Catholic Church and those in communion with her, but
to “All men of good will.” The pope’s attitude toward establishing
permanent peace, furthermore, did lead to further direct contact
between the Soviet Union and the Vatican.
During the Andover meeting that Cousins hosted, Father
Morlion proposed to the Soviet delegates that they explore com-
munications between the Vatican and Moscow. He informed the
Soviets that Cousins would be acceptable to the Vatican as a medi-
ator if he was also acceptable to Moscow to undertake preliminary
contacts. Late in November, Cousins received a call from Ambas-
30. Khrushchev to Kennedy, October 28, 1962, in ibid., 226–29, 230–32.

31. Zizola, Utopia, 9.

sador Dobrynin to say that Khrushchev would like to discuss the
proposal with him on December 14. Cousins met with Kennedy,
received his approval, and then departed for Rome on his way to
Moscow. In Rome, he was unable to see John XXIII, who was then
suffering from an illness that would soon claim his life. He did,
however, meet with both Archbishop Angelo Dell’Acqua of the
Secretariat of State and Cardinal Bea.32
Cousins’s visit coincided with a delicate problem that fell to
Bea to address. On November 22, several newspapers, includ-
ing La Croix, had published the draft of a statement from fifteen
Ukrainian bishops at the Council stating their regret that the
Russian Orthodox Church should have observers at the Council,
while Slipyj, metropolitan of Lviv, remained a prisoner in Siberia.
Willebrands used a press conference to downplay this first dis-
play of opposition, rather than welcome, for the Russian observ-
ers.33 But the question of Slipyj remained. He was then seventy
years old. Bea suggested that Cousins seek Slipyj’s release as a
sign of the Soviet Union’s desire to improve its relationship with
the West. Bea and Dell’Acqua also proposed that Cousins discuss
with Khrushchev the improvement of religious conditions within
the Soviet Union—not only for Catholics, but for all believers.34
In Moscow, on December 13, Cousins had a cordial meeting
with Khrushchev, who spoke of the similarities between himself
and John XXIII:
We both come from peasant families; we both have lived close to the
land; we both enjoy a good laugh. There’s something very moving to
me about a man like him struggling despite his illness to accomplish
such an important goal before he dies. His goal, as you say, is peace.
32. Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, 20–29. On Slipyj’s release, see Karim

Schelkens, “Vatican Diplomacy after the Cuban Missile Crisis: New Light on the Re-
lease of Josyf Slipyj,” Catholic Historical Review 97, no. 4 (2011): 679–712.
33. Antoine Wenger, Vatican II: The First Session, trans. Robert J. Olsen (West-
minster, Md.: Newman Press, 1966), 174.
34. Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, 29–31.

It is the most important goal in the world. If we don’t have peace
and the nuclear bombs start to fall, what difference will it make
whether we are Communists or Catholics or capitalists or Chinese
or Russians or Americans? Who could tell us apart? Who will be left
to tell us apart?
The Soviet premier then turned to the missile crisis and recalled
that “the Pope’s appeal was a real ray of light. I was grateful for it.
Believe me, that was a dangerous time.”35
But the topic of Slipyj’s release proved more delicate. Khrush-
chev spoke at some length about the religious situation in Ukraine
prior to 1947, especially the competition between the Ukrainian
Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church and the power strug-
gles within each. When Slipyj’s predecessor, Archbishop Andrey
Sheptytsky, died, he said, the circumstances indicated that “his
departure from this earth may have been somewhat accelerated,”
although the archbishop was then seventy-nine. While not direct-
ly implicating Slipyj in his predecessor’s death, the premier did as-
sert that the metropolitan was imprisoned for his collaboration
with the Nazis. He further feared that Slipyj would be used for
propaganda purposes to showcase his putatively harsh treatment
by the Soviet government. After Cousins reminded Khrushchev
that John XXIII had not denounced him or his government, the
premier offered to consider the matter of Slipyj’s release. Cous-
ins and Khrushchev then discussed other issues of concern to the
Vatican, such as the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jewish popu-
lation.36
Cousins concluded his interview with Khrushchev by discuss-
ing the possibility that the United States and the Soviet Union
negotiate a treaty banning any further testing of nuclear weap-
ons. As Cousins made ready to depart, Khrushchev went to his
desk to pen “Christmas greetings” to Kennedy and John XXIII.
35. Quoted at ibid., 44–45.

36. Ibid., 48–50.

To President and Mrs. Kennedy, he simply sent his wishes for the
holiday season. But to the pope, he wrote, “On the occasion of the
Holy Days of Christmas, please accept these greetings and con-
gratulations from a man who wishes you good health and strength
for your abiding quest for the peace and happiness of all man-
kind.”37 Back in Rome, Cousins personally handed the pope the
premier’s greetings. A few days later, John responded to Khrush-
chev’s note:
Thank you for your courteous message of good wishes. We return it
from the heart with the same words that came to us from on high:
Peace on earth to men of good will.
We bring to your attention two documents for Christmas for
this year invoking the strengthening of a just peace among people.
That the good God will hear us and respond to the zeal and
sincerity of our efforts and our prayers. May peace be made in your
strength, O Lord, and abundance in your towers.
Best wishes for the prosperity of the Russian people and of all
the people of the world.38
Had it been made public at the time, this correspondence between

pope and Communist leader would probably have surprised a
world still engaged in the Cold War. It set in motion a series of
events that would not bear full fruit for almost thirty years.
In the meantime, both Italian and American diplomats were
negotiating Slipyj’s release. Cousins had made no reference to
Kennedy’s concern about the metropolitan, but, as he was leav-
ing Rome, Monsignor Igino Cardinale arrived with a Christ-
mas present for the president, a silver icon, which—said Loris
Capovilla, the pope’s secretary and now a cardinal—was “a sign
of gratitude” for the president’s cooperation in obtaining the re-
37. Ibid., 53–57; a facsimile of Khrushchev’s message to John XXIII with an Eng-
lish translation is given opposite in Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, 78. An Italian
translation is given in Capovilla, Giovanni XXIII, 439.
38. John XXIII to Khrushchev, December 21, 1962, in Capovilla, Giovanni XXIII,
438; italics in the original.

lease of Slipyj.39 On January 25, 1963, Semyon Kozyrev, the So-
viet ambassador to Italy, brought Amintore Fanfani, president of
the Italian Council, a message from Khrushchev announcing that
Slipyj was to be released. On February 10, Slipyj, accompanied
from Moscow by Willebrands, arrived quietly in Rome.40
Slipyj’s release was a major step in improving relations be-
tween the Holy See and the Kremlin, as Khrushchev told Fan-
fani.41 A short time later, Khrushchev arranged for his son-in-
law, Alexis Adzhubei, to be assigned as the Rome correspondent
for Izvestia. On March 7, 1963, when John XIII received the Bal-
zan Prize for peace, he received Adzhubei and his wife, Rada, in
a private audience.42 Such overtures, however, did not mean that
Khrushchev was softening his stance on religion. As Adzhubei
later recounted, despite Khrushchev’s opening to the Vatican, at
home he showed no desire of occupying himself with religious
questions. While some Orthodox and Catholic priests were re-
leased from the Gulag, others were imprisoned on accusations of
“anti-Soviet ideology and of negative Western influence.”43
Nonetheless, it was the dawn of a new era. When John XXIII
died in June, in a little-reported event, four British minesweep-
ers and a Soviet freighter in Genoa harbor flew their flags at half-
mast.44 It is most improbable that the captain of the Soviet ship
took this action without the Kremlin’s approval. TASS also praised
the pope’s efforts for peace, especially in his encyclical Pacem in
terris.45 “Good Pope John” had made his mark on the Communist
world.
John XXIII’s willingness to take a risk and to move beyond
39. Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, 66; Capovilla, Giovanni XXIII, 273n.
40. Zizola, Utopia, 146–50.
41. For a summary of all the steps taken for Slipyj’s release, as well as its signifi-
cance, see Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca, 242–45.
42. Capovilla, Giovanni XXIII, 454–55.
43. Quoted at Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca, 250.
44. New York Times, June 5, 1963.
45. Ibid.

the usual channels of communication ran parallel to that of the
bishops in the Council that he had convoked. How decisive a
role he played in the missile crisis is difficult to determine, but
his plea for peaceful negotiations in the midst of a council that
he had conceived to be pastoral seems to have been the catalyst
needed to ward off an impending nuclear holocaust. His inter-
vention in the crisis also did not spell an end to the possibility of
hostilities between East and West. But his policy of being open
to the East— Ostpolitik, as some dubbed it—continued under his
successor, Paul VI.
On June 21, 1963, on the fifth ballot, Giovanni Battista Cardi-
nal Montini was elected pope and took the name Paul VI. In keep-
ing with the custom initiated by Roosevelt, Kennedy appointed
a delegation of four, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Vice Presi-
dent Johnson had led the American delegation to the funeral of
John XXIII. On June 30, the new pope was crowned, the last pope
to observe this rite. On July 2, Kennedy had a forty-minute audi-
ence with him—the first time a sitting president had met a pope
and an indication that the anti-Catholicism that would have sur-
rounded such an action in 1960 had abated.46 Paul, for his part,
continued his predecessor’s policy toward Eastern Europe and re-
cruited for that policy some of the most able Vatican diplomats in
history, notably Agostino Casaroli, who later became secretary of
state under John Paul II.47
But East-West tensions persisted, and Paul VI continued to
seek peace, even as the United States continued the war in Viet-
nam, which the American government saw as a surrogate for the
Soviet Union. Johnson, who became president following the as-
sassination of Kennedy in November 1963, sought to maintain
good relations with the pope and even made a special visit to
46. Ibid., July 3, 1963.

47. Hebblethwaite, Paul VI: The First Modern Pope (New York: Paulist Press, 1993),
492–94.

Paul VI in December 1967 to persuade the pope not to speak out
against U.S. policy in his New Year’s address.48 Paul VI seemed to
respect Johnson’s integrity, but this was not the case with Presi-
dent Richard M. Nixon. Vietnam continued to be the backdrop
for the pope’s strained relations with the United States.
In February 1970, Nixon visited Italian leaders in Rome. He
then planned to see Paul VI, but was informed that the pope was
on retreat. On March 2, 1970, while he was still in Europe, Nixon
made a special trip back to Rome to see the pope. Rumors circu-
lated that the president was about to establish some type of for-
mal relations with the Holy See. Despite assurances from a White
House aide that Nixon was not planning to establish diplomatic
relations, the president reinstituted the office of personal repre-
sentative that had existed from 1939 to 1950 and named Henry
Cabot Lodge, former ambassador to South Vietnam and his run-
ning mate against Kennedy and Johnson in 1960. Lodge present-
ed his credentials to the pope in July 1970.49
In September 1970, Nixon again paid a visit to the pope, but
this time their conversations did not seem cordial.50 Vietnam re-
mained a bone of contention. Sometimes, indeed, the pope seemed
almost friendlier to the Soviet Union than to the United States.
In November of the same year, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet for-
eign minister, had an eighty-minute audience with the pope, the
duration of which prompted Il Tempo to chide the pope for show-
ing more warmth to Gromyko than he had to Nixon earlier in the
year.51
It would be erroneous, however, to conclude that either
John XXIII or Paul VI was soft on communism—and therefore
anti-American. Beyond the quest for peace, both popes had to
48. Joseph A. Califano, “The President and the Pope: L.B.J., Paul VI, and the
Vietnam War,” America, no. 165 (October 12, 1991): 238–39.
49. New York Times, July 4, 1970.
50. Ibid., September 16, 1970; September 27, 1970; September 29, 1970.
51. Ibid., November 13, 1970; November 16, 1970.

consider the situation of the Church in Communist countries.
Both sought to normalize the situation of the Church in those
countries in order to allow the appointment of bishops to vacant
dioceses and the faithful’s ability to worship without persecution.
A prime example of Paul VI’s policy in this regard was the
exit of Cardinal Mindszenty from his refuge in the U.S. embassy
in Budapest, where he had resided since 1956. The cardinal re-
mained the archbishop of Esztergom and primate of Hungary. By
1970, the United States and the Holy See had the same problem
with the cardinal, but from different points of view. The Holy See
wished to regularize the situation of the Hungarian Church and
establish a modus vivendi with the government. The United States
wanted to remove one obstacle toward establishing more cordial
relations with this satellite of the Soviet Union.
After much cajoling, Mindszenty was quietly driven to Vien-
na, from which he flew to Rome on September 19, 1971. Part of
the agreement that he made with the Vatican was that he would
retain the title of archbishop of Esztergom. Initially, he was lau-
datory at the pope’s reception of him and the accommodations
that he was given. Ultimately, however, Paul VI stripped him of
his title and appointed Lászlo Lékái to replace him as archbish-
op. The pope soon named Lékái a cardinal, and Mindszenty left
Rome to live in Vienna, where he published his memoirs, which
included a condemnation of Paul VI. He died in Vienna in 1975.52
On January 6, 1978, President Jimmy Carter, amid some op-
position—including that of Senator Robert Dole—returned the
Crown of St. Stephen to the people of Hungary. A symbol of Hun-
garian sovereignty, the crown had been kept at Fort Knox for
thirty-two years. Carter’s reasoning was that, while the Hungar-
ian government was not perfect in regard to granting rights, it
had improved. To encourage further progress, the administration
decided to return the crown to Hungary. Secretary of State Cyrus
52. Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, 579–82, 685.

Vance accompanied the crown. At its reception in the domed par-
liament building in Budapest was Cardinal Lékái, but not the first
secretary of the Communist Party, the head of government.53
The full impact of the Vatican’s rapprochement with the So-
viet Union and the American parallel policy would not be felt for
another decade, but the groundwork for the eventual fall of the
Soviet Union had already been laid by John XXIII’s willingness to
offer his services to prevent nuclear war and by his openness to
all men of goodwill. Paul VI followed through in this policy, es-
pecially with the assistance of Agostino Casaroli, who frequently
conducted his work informally, if not in secret. What assured the
continuity between the policies of John and Paul was not only
their shared concern for peace, but also the shared view that
peace would ultimately have to be based on the dignity of the hu-
man person and the need for social justice that would ultimately
undermine communism.
53. New York Times, January 7, 1978.

TWO
VATICAN II
AND HUNGARY
• • • Árpád von Klimó
In most Western countries, the Second Vatican Council has been

understood as a major event of the 1960s.1 The Council became
not only a symbol of the renewal and modernization of the Cath-
olic Church, but also a sign of the more general social, political,
and — most of all — cultural changes of the time. Catholics all
over the world began to engage in public debates surrounding the
gathering of their bishops and leading theologians at the Vatican.
How were the documents of the ecumenical council to be
understood? Some believers were confused or even appalled by
ideas intended to open the Catholic Church to a modern world
that the clergy had for decades depicted as a sinful, dangerous
place. Seen against this background, the story of the Second Vati-
can Council has often been narrated as part of the postwar trend
toward further modernization, democratization, and emancipa-
tion of civil societies, as a step toward more “progress.”2 For a
1. I use the term “West” as a synonym for most of Western Europe’s non-
Communist countries, as well countries such as the United States, Canada, and Aus-
tralia—that is, where capitalism and liberal democracy predominated.
2. I would argue that disappointment with the encyclical Humanae vitae (1968),
which banned the use of contraception, can be explained at least in part by expec-
tations that many Catholics in the West had developed because of Vatican II. For
a brief, but precise, description of this disappointment, see DeGroot, Sixties Un-
plugged, 364–69.
50
conservative minority, the Council was just another symptom
of the social disease afflicting the Western world—just another
step toward decadence and further disorientation.3
If we look at the European countries dominated by the Soviet
Union, and Hungary in particular, historians tell the story in a
completely different way.4 There, the Second Vatican Council ap-
peared to have been a rather insignificant event because it did
not seem to have had a strong impact on either church or society.
Most of all, it did not seem to have changed considerably the diffi-
cult situation in which churches and religious communities found
themselves under the dictatorship of successive incarnations of
the Communist Party.5
With the end of the Second World War, before the establish-
ment of the Communist system in Hungary, the Catholic Church
remained a very powerful social institution. It was the country’s
largest landowner, overseeing thousands of schools, controlling
dozens of publishing houses and newspapers, and enjoying the
3. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in 2006 distinguished between two “herme-

neutics” of the Second Vatican Council: one of “discontinuity” and one of “reform.”
While the first would highlight the differences between a preconciliar and a postc-
onciliar Church, the second would emphasize the continuity of the one Church; Mi-
chael J. Lacey and Francis Oakley, eds., The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 357–38. In fact, Ratzinger developed this
reformist interpretation much earlier as a middle-ground alternative to progressive
and traditionalist understandings of the Council; Komonchak, “Modernity and the
Construction of Roman Catholicism,” Cristianesimo nella Storia, no. 18 (1997): 353.
4. A typical example: “To be sure, when all this happened the communist bloc
was never included. Of course the Universal Church was concerned with what hap-
pened in the communist countries, as demonstrated by the visits to these countries
by Franz Cardinal König, as well as by the Vatican’s Ostpolitik. But inside these
countries there was no possibility of taking part in the changes in ecclesiology and
society”; Blum, “Catholic Church in Hungary,” 315.
5. Patrick Michel, Politics and Religion in Eastern Europe: Catholicism in Hungary,
Poland and Czechoslovakia, trans. Alan Braley (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991). From 1944
to 1948, this was the Hungarian Communist Party, merged in 1948 with the Social
Democratic Party to become the Hungarian Working People’s Party. This last organi-
zation was, in turn, replaced in 1956 with the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party fol-
lowing Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of October–November 1956.
VATICAN II AND HUNGARY 51

support of lay organizations and associations counting hundreds
of thousands of members.
And yet, by the early 1960s, only a decade later, the Church
represented but a small, marginalized minority—discriminated
against, continuously defamed in public media, and, although on
a much smaller scale than during the Stalinist terror of the late
1940s and early 1950s, still threatened by laws prohibiting the free
exercise of religious teaching and practice. The Communist party-
state, in the words of Hungarian theologian András Máté-Tóth,
“strictly controlled and limited the movements and public com-
munication of the Hungarian Church in a number of ways.”6 The
State Office of Church Affairs restricted religious ceremonies and
education to the space within churches, censored all religious
publications, and observed all branches of the administration of
the Church with the help of informants tied to the state secu-
rity apparatus. Neither prelates nor regular priests could travel
abroad without having first secured the permission of the State
Office.
Because of this difficult situation, the Hungarian Catholic
Church was unable to engage intensively in the activities and dis-
cussions around Vatican II, let alone lead a passionate public de-
bate about the renewal of Catholicism. Even the fact that a hand-
ful of representatives of the Hungarian Church were allowed to
take part in the sessions in Rome, which came as a pleasant sur-
prise after tough negotiations between the Holy See and the Com-
munist government, does not change an overall negative picture.
The Hungarian delegation left virtually no visible trace at the
Council. If we consult, for example, the monumental History of
Vatican II edited by Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak, a
five-volume compendium of door-stopping girth, we find that it
mentions, in a text of more than 3,000 pages, only two contribu-
6. András Máté-Tóth, “A II. Vatikani Zsinat és a magyar elhárítás,” at http://

internetlap.blogspot.com/2009/12/ii.html; accessed May 2, 2014.
52 ÁRPÁD VON KLIMÓ

tions by Hungarian bishops.7 In other words, the history of the
Council, it seems, would not have to be substantially rewritten if
the Hungarians had not participated at all.
If the impact that the Hungarian delegation had on the Sec-
ond Vatican Council was so negligible, why should we even con-
sider finding out more about it? Surprisingly, despite the weak-
ness of the Hungarian delegation in Rome, the Council, on the
other hand, did indeed have a strong effect on Catholics in Hun-
gary, an effect that has not been studied until recently. This chap-
ter will delineate what we so far know about the history of Hun-
garian Catholicism during and after the Second Vatican Council,
with an overview of the most recent research on the topic.8 The
history of how Vatican II affected the Catholic Church in Hun-
gary will be studied in three different fields: first, within the
context of Vatican Ostpolitik; second, with regard to theological
and administrative changes beginning in the 1960s; and finally,
through some of the activities of independent Catholic religious
movements inspired by the Council.
Vatican Ostpolitik: Better or Worse for

the Church in Hungary?
The Second Vatican Council was part of the larger story of a
church strongly involved in the Cold War in the context of what
has been designated “Vatican Ostpolitik.”9 Ostpolitik was a term
7. Alberigo and Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II.

8. The two most important contributions so far are the dissertation by a historian
and researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, András Fejérdy, Magyarország
és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat 1959–1965 (Ph.D. diss., Magyar Tudományos Akadémia: Törté-
nettudományi Intézet (Hungarian Academy of Sciences: Institute of History, 2011),
and the broader approach examining the complex power struggle between the Catho-
lic Church and the Communist state in the monumental dissertation by Nicolas Bau-
quet, Pouvoir, église et société en Hongrie communiste, 1944–1964: Histoire intérieure d’une
domination (Ph.D. diss., Institut d’études politiques de Paris, 2013).
9. One early use of the term was in Dennis Dunn, “The Kremlin and the Vati-

used by journalists and scholars beginning in the 1970s to de-
scribe West Germany’s policy of détente toward the Soviet Union,
Poland, and other Communist countries. In the context of Ca-
tholicism, it referred to a new, more conciliatory approach that
the Vatican applied in its relationship with Communist countries
beginning during the papacy of Pope John XXIII.
Communist apparatchiks who were responsible for the sup-
pression or marginalization of the activities and influence of
churches in their societies initially regarded Vatican II and the new
conciliatory approach of John XXIII as a significant threat. The
chairman of the Council on Church Affairs at the Council of Min-
isters of the Soviet Union, Aleksei Puzin, feared that John XXIII’s
invitation of non-Catholic Christian leaders to take part in the
Vatican assembly could result in the establishment of a unified,
anti-Communist Christian front.10
However, in 1962, the Soviet, East German, Hungarian, and
Czechoslovak Communist leaderships began to see the Council
as an opportunity to gather more—and, more importantly, bet-
ter—information about the “bulwark of imperialism” in Rome
and, at the same time, to gain more influence on opinion inside
the Catholic camp. Historians like Nicolas Bauquet and Csaba Sz-
abó have recently begun to investigate, based on findings in the
Archives of the Hungarian State Security Service, how Commu-
nist Hungary started to spin a web of spies inside and around the
Vatican beginning in 1962.11 Importantly, both the Vatican and
can: Ostpolitik,” Religion in Communist Lands 4, no. 4 (1976). The standard book was
Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 1917–1979. With regard to the most recent re-
search, see Karl-Joseph Hummel, ed., Vatikanische Ostpolitik unter Johannes XXIII.
und Paul VI. 1958–1978 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999); Cerny-Werner, Vatikanische
Ostpolitik und die DDR.
10. Fejérdy, “A szocialista tömb és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat,” in Felekezetek, egyház-
politika, identitás Magyarországon és Szlovákiában 1945 után., ed. András Sándor Koc-
sis (Budapest: Kossuth, 2008), 212.
11. Csaba Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas
években (Budapest: Szent István Társulat/Magyar Országos Levéltár, 2005). On the

the Communist leaders wanted to use the world meeting to their
advantage. This led to some surprising results for a country like
Hungary, where the encounter between the Church and commu-
nism had been marked by persecution and conflict.
The Persecution of the Catholic Church in Hungary

before the Second Vatican Council
On June 18, 1959, Domenico Cardinal Tardini, secretary of state
of the Holy See, sent letters to all of the world’s Catholic bishops,
asking them to make proposals as to how to redress the most ur-
gent problems facing the Church in order to prepare for the uni-
versal Council. The way in which the Hungarian bishops respond-
ed, or rather did not respond, to this letter tells us a lot about the
situation in which the Hungarian Church found itself in the years
immediately preceding Vatican II.12
Only five of seventeen Hungarian bishops received Tardi-
ni’s letter, and only the eighty-year-old Bishop Lajos Shvoy of
Székesfehérvár managed to send a reply to the Roman commit-
tee responsible for the preparation of the Council.13 Shvoy’s let-
ter included a few proposals focusing on how the Church as an
institution could be strengthened in a hostile environment and
how the rights of the Church could be defended. Bishop Shvoy
also wanted a condemnation of materialism as well as an exten-
sion of the Index of Banned Books to include radio, television,
spy network around and inside the Vatican, see Tamás Majsai, “ ‘Ismereteimet soha,
senkinek nem fedhetem fel,’ ” Beszélő folyóirat , no. 12 (2007).
12. The following is based on Fejérdy, “Magyar javaslatok a II. Vatikáni zsina-
tra,” Vigilia, no. 7 (2009).
13. Lajos Shvoy was born in 1879 in Budapest, where he attended the schools
of the archbishop. He continued his studies at a Benedictine school in Esztergom,
where he also finished his theological studies. After becoming a priest in 1901, he
worked for the Regnum Marianum College and Parish in Budapest. In 1927, he was
nominated bishop of Székesfehérvár. In February 1945, he was arrested by Hungar-
ian fascists and liberated by Soviet troops.

and films. For him, opening up to modern society was not an op-
tion, given the difficult situation of the Church in his country.
Bishop Shvoy contrived to send his response to Rome by having
the letter smuggled out to West Germany and mailed from there.
All other letters sent to Tardini had been intercepted by in-
formants of the Hungarian State Security agency and the State
Office of Church Affairs.14 This latter institution had been found-
ed in 1951 and placed under the Council of Ministers. The State
Office was responsible for the observation, infiltration, and ma-
nipulation of religious institutions. József Prantner, the presi-
dent of the office, noted on one of the intercepted and translated
letters from Cardinal Tardini, “It is not allowed to send any kind
of meaningful answer to this call (neither against nor in favor).”15
With only one proposal, the Hungarian bishops still ranked
above the Czechoslovak and Ukrainian hierarchies, which did not
even send one reply.16 Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority,
or 79.9 percent, of European bishops who had received the letter
sent proposals to the committee in Rome. The American (88 per-
14. For the history of the State Security apparatus in Hungary, see Laszlo Bo-
rhi, “Stalinist Terror in Hungary,” in Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges
and Mass Repression, ed. Matthew Stibbe and Kevin McDermott (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2010), 119–40. On the State Office of Church Affairs in
Hungary in comparative perspective, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Catholicism and Politics in
Communist Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 2:159.
15. Quoted in Fejérdy, “Magyar javaslatok.” József Prantner came from a Swabian
mid-range peasant family in Szekszárd. After middle school, he worked as a rail split-
ter and a stone cutter. In 1930, he joined the illegal Communist Party; three years later,
he was imprisoned for political activities. Thereafter, he worked as a day laborer and
remained under police surveillance until he was drafted for the military labor service
in 1944, from which he escaped, only to be imprisoned again. Liberated in 1945, he
launched a successful career in the Communist Party in the county of Tolna. Starting
in 1951, he was a department chief at the State Office of Church Affairs; among others,
he was responsible for the state-sponsored “Priest Movement for Peace.” After two
years as a high party leader in his hometown, he became the president of the State
Church Office in November 1961, elevated in 1968 to the rank of minister of state.
16. Numbers according to Alberigo and Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II,
1:100.

cent) and African bishops (83 percent) were even more respon-
sive to the Vatican’s call. All told, 77 percent of the 2,594 bishops
from all over the world replied.
The situation of the Catholic Church in Communist Hungary
was very difficult, to say the least. Primate Mindszenty’s 1949 ar-
rest and show-trial conviction, followed seven years later by the
crushing of Hungary’s anti-Soviet revolution, positioned church
and society alike against an inimical state. According to András
Fejérdy, the most complex problem was the right to nominate
Hungarian bishops, which Admiral Horthy’s government had
granted in 1927 to the pope alone as the so-called Intesa semplice.
This was a right that the Communists, however, did not ac-
knowledge.17 Between 1956 and 1959, the Holy See had considered
the survival of the Communist regime questionable and was not
willing to compromise. Under John XXIII, however, the Vatican
came to the conclusion that communism was there to stay, and
there followed growing anxiety that the Communists could form
a national church like in China, which would result in a Hungar-
ian schism.18
In order to prepare for this eventuality, the Vatican planned
to install a “catacomb” hierarchy: bishops consecrated by a secret
envoy of the Holy See. At the same time, Rome was increasingly
interested in gathering firsthand information. The Polish pri-
mate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, had also advised John XXIII
to meet representatives from the “silenced church.” The pope
therefore invited the bishops from Communist countries to meet
17. Fejérdy, “Szentszéki stratégiák a magyarországi püspöki székek betöltése ér-

dékében 1945–64 között” (April 30, 2012), at http://hu.radiovaticana.va/print_page.
asp?c=583487; accessed March 12, 2014. Regarding the background of the Intesa sem-
plice, see Árpád von Klimó, “Impartialität versus Revisionismus? Zum Verhältnis
zwischen dem Heiligen Stuhl und Ungarn in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Der Heilige
Stuhl in den internationalen Beziehungen 1870–1939, ed. Jörg Zeidler (Munich: Her-
bert Utz Verlag, 2010), 311–32.
18. Fejérdy, “Szentszéki stratégiák.”

him personally in Venice, but the Hungarian bishops were not al-
lowed to leave the country for this purpose.
The year 1959 came only three years after the invasion of
Hungary by Soviet troops, who had brutally crushed the coun-
try’s uprising against Stalinism. The Catholic Church in Hungary,
deprived of leadership, was deeply divided.19
The national head of the Church, primate József Cardinal
Mindszenty of Esztergom, had, during those dramatic days in
November 1956, escaped by seeking asylum at the legation of the
United States in Budapest, where he would spend the next fif-
teen years. Thereafter, Mindszenty was unable to communicate
with other bishops or representatives of the Hungarian Church.
Second in line was Archbishop József Grősz of Kalocsa, who had
signed an agreement between the Hungarian Church and the
Communist state in 1950, against the advice of Pope Pius XII and
against the will of Mindszenty. Grősz had nevertheless been ap-
prehended and kept under house arrest until 1956. Two other
bishops, Bertalan Badalik of Veszprém and József Pétery of Vác,
were also in confinement in the late 1950s.
At the same time, the Vatican excommunicated a number of
Hungarian priests who had actively participated in the state-
sponsored “Priest Movement for Peace.”20 In 1959, the Vatican
nominated four Hungarian priests as bishops, but the state did
not acknowledge them until much later. In 1961, the state im-
prisoned more priests and lay Catholics who did not comply with
restrictions on the Church after they had set up youth groups
in which they practiced the faith.21 The conflicts between state
19. The situation is treated in detail in Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköz-
társaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 33–38.
20. John Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 371.
21. Von Klimó, “Katholische Jugendgruppen in Ungarn in der zweiten Hälfte
der sechziger Jahre: Die Gruppen um Regnum Marianum—ein religiöses Netz-
werk?,” in Vernetzte Improvisationen: Gesellschaftliche Subsysteme in Ostmitteleuropa
und in der DDR, ed. Annette Schuhmann (Cologne: Böhlau 2008), 121–37.

and church in these years revolved around the question of which
priests should decide in matters of Church administration: those
loyal to the Communist state or those loyal to the Vatican.
The Church and its administration were ever more deeply
infiltrated by hundreds of state security agents and informants.
András Máté-Tóth counted that, in 1958, 171 out of 4,663 priests
active in Hungary, or 3.7 percent, collaborated with the secret po-
lice and the State Office of Church Affairs, while about three- to
four hundred priests worked illegally.22 According to Stefano Bot-
toni, the Communist state in time successfully managed to create
a loyal clergy by arresting and intimidating priests suspected of
anti-communism and promoting the careers of those willing to
collaborate. He assumes that, from the late 1970s onward, the ma-
jority of priests in Hungary were loyal to the regime or even col-
laborated with the state security apparatus.23 Most secret police
informants, however, were laymen working in the different levels
of Church administration—in parishes and diocesan offices, in
the few remaining Catholic publishing houses and newspapers,
and in seminaries.
The Communist apparatchiks responsible for confessional af-
fairs wanted to make sure that the Church was under total ob-
servation. The secretariat of the Communist Party proclaimed in
1951 that, with the establishment of the State Office of Church
Affairs, “we have created a State organ that is capable of officially
observing the activities of the clergy and at the same time of di-
recting its policies.”24
22. Máté-Tóth, “A II. Vatikani Zsinat és a magyar elhárítás”; Krisztián Ungváry,

“The Kádár Regime and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy,” Hungarian Quarterly, no. 187
(2007): 80–91. “Collaboration” refers to the fact that they wrote reports for the State
Security Agency.
23. Stefano Bottoni, “A Special Relationship: Hungarian Intelligence and the
Vatican (1961–1978),” in NKVD/KGB Activities and Its Cooperation with Other Secret
Services in Central and Eastern Europe 1945–1989: Anthology of the International and
Interdisciplinary Conference (Bratislava: Szerk. AAVV, 2008), 153.
24. Quoted at Bauquet, Pouvoir, église et société, 344.

The Communist era prior to 1962 was characterized by two
distinct periods of confessional policy: between 1948 and 1953,
open terror and extreme violence deployed against Church offi-
cers, Catholic activists, and religious orders; and, between 1956
and 1958, reprisals. The year 1962 brought a new dynamic of pow-
er between the Church and the Communist state. Instead of us-
ing open violence, the Communist apparatus—consisting, on the
one hand, of the State Office of Church Affairs and, on the other
hand, of the state security services—worked together with in-
formants and collaborators inside the Church to create a “culture
of prevention.” Instead of torture and imprisonment, “conversa-
tions” were enough to assure the state’s absolute control over the
former “bastion of imperialism.”25
It was now the clergy itself who guaranteed Communist dom-
ination. This was the devilish consequence of the “soft” dictator-
ship under János Kádár. The 1964 “Partial Agreement” between
the Vatican and the Hungarian Communist government, which
resulted from negotiations started in 1962, marked, according to
Nicolas Bauquet, a major turning point in the history of church-
state relations in Hungary.26 The agreement sanctified close col-
laboration between the Church hierarchy and the Communist
state, particularly in the suppression of dissent.
This image of a church under observation and control, howev-
er, is not the full picture. Since we have almost no primary sources
bearing on the matter other than those produced by the secret
police, we have to emphasize that this image reflects a very spe-
cific, biased perspective on reality.27 Katherine Verdery has rightly
25. Ibid., 627.

26. Ibid., 782; Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hat-
vanas években, 48.
27. Von Klimó, “Nonnen und Tschekistinnen: Vorstellungen der ungarischen
Staatssicherheit von einer katholischen Gegenöffentlichkeit in den frühen fünfziger
Jahren,” in Sphären von Öffentlichkeit in Gesellschaften sowjetischen Typs, ed. Gábor T.

termed the state security forces of the Soviet Bloc “a system pro-
ducing paper.”28
The Hungarian Conciliar Delegation, State Security,

and the 1964 Partial Agreement
When the Vatican finally began to invite Council fathers in early
1962, most questions regarding the Catholic Church in Hungary
were still unresolved, and communication between Rome and
Hungary was still nearly impossible. At this moment, it had been
twelve years since the last bishop from Hungary could officially
visit the Vatican. But John XXIII did not give up hope for the par-
ticipation of as many bishops as possible from the Communist
countries, seeking to reopen the lines of communication and to
assure the truly global character of the Council.29
Most Hungarian bishops received the invitation in January,
though others only months later, including Cardinal Mindszen-
ty—who was still confined to the U.S. embassy.30 Bishop Shvoy
declared that “either all or none of the Hungarian bishops should
travel to Rome.”31 Bishop Endre Hamvas of Csanád, who had pre-
sided over the Hungarian episcopate since 1961, told Shvoy that
Rittersporn, Malte Rolf, and Jan C. Behrends (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003),
307–34.
28. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 24.
29. Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 26.
30. Archbishop Franz König of Vienna visited Mindszenty regularly beginning
in 1963; Maria Pallagi, “ ‘Az osztrák kapcsolat’: Franz König, bécsi bíboros látogatásai
Mindszenty József hercegprímásnál (1963–1971),” Aetas, no. 1 (2010): 93–112. Mind-
szenty was concerned that he would not be able to return to the country if he were
to leave. His difficult case was only resolved in 1971, after complicated negotiations
involving the Hungarian government, the Vatican, and the United States.
31. Shvoy, letter to Bishop Endre Hamvas, July 21, 1962, in Szabó, A Szentszék és
a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 56; see Margit Balogh, “Az
1971. szeptember 9-ei magyar-szentszéki megállapodás,” Századok 147, no. 4 (2014):
875–930.

the decision about who could travel to Rome also depended on
the Hungarian State Office of Church Affairs, which granted or
denied exit permits.32
On June 12, 1962, the Politburo of the Hungarian Socialist
Workers’ Party debated whether or not to allow the participation
of the Hungarian Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council,
to begin only four months later in Rome.33 The Hungarian com-
rades were nervous about their image in the Communist Bloc, so
they waited for the opinions of party leaders from other coun-
tries. Finally, in August, both the Soviet and the Polish Politburo
informed their Hungarian counterparts that they supported the
idea of having a Hungarian delegation present at the Council.34
Since 1958, the Communist leadership—especially in the State
Office of Church Affairs—had nervously observed the change in
the Vatican’s tone under John XXIII regarding the Church’s rela-
tionship to Communist countries. The new pope was interested in
developing more constructive diplomatic relations with the East-
ern Bloc and in contributing to the easing of tensions between
the superpowers. Pope Roncalli made this clear with his encyclical
Pacem in terris (1963), released only a few months after the Cuban
Missile Crisis, which had almost led to nuclear war.35 Addressing
this letter not only to Catholic believers, but to all “men of good
will,”36 Pope John XXIII distinguished between errors (like Marx-
ism and materialism) and the person who errs, reaching out to all
believers and nonbelievers of “good will.”37
32. Hamvas, response to Shvoy, August 18, 1962, in Szabó, A Szentszék és a Mag-
yar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 59.
33. Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas évek-
ben, 21.
34. Ibid., 22.
35. See chapter 1, by Gerald P. Fogarty, in this volume.
36. Peter Steinfels, Pacem in terris Lecture Series Inaugural Lecture, Georgetown
University, October 10, 2003, at http://www.georgetown.edu/content/1242663589823
.html; accessed April 29, 2014.
37. “It is always perfectly justifiable to distinguish between error as such and the

The Communist leadership distrusted this new, global ap-
proach, which seemed so different from Pius XII’s strong anti-
communism because it made it more difficult to defame the Catho-
lic clergy as reactionary.38 Only beginning in 1962 did Hungarian
state officials, as well as some of their comrades in Poland and
the Soviet Union, come to regard the Council as an opportunity
to infiltrate the Vatican and to spread Communist propaganda
within the Catholic world. Nicolas Bauquet interprets this as a
major shift within Hungarian Communist functionaries’ percep-
tion of the outside world—specifically, the capitalist West. In
other words, they started to understand the territories and soci-
eties of Western Europe—Italy in particular—not only as threat-
ening, but also as full of opportunities to gather information and
to support Communist parties based there.
A number of agents of the secret police began to learn for-
eign languages, receiving training for new, international careers
as spies. Some of these were specialists who had worked with the
State Office of Church Affairs.39 The comrades leading the strug-
gle against the Church formulated a number of goals for a few
Hungarian bishops and a number of other informants and spies
to achieve.40 Among those goals were: (a) gathering information;
(b) improving the image of the Communist countries and estab-
lishing “useful contacts” in the West; (c) “repelling the conserva-
person who falls into error—even in the case of men who err regarding the truth or
are led astray as a result of their inadequate knowledge, in matters either of religion
or of the highest ethical standards. A man who has fallen into error does not cease
to be a man. He never forfeits his personal dignity; and that is something that must
always be taken into account”; John XXIII, Pacem in terris, no. 158.
38. At the same time, we should not forget that Pius XII had started to distance
himself from the capitalist West, particularly after Stalin’s death in 1953, calling for
a “coexistence in truth” to replace the existing “climate of fear”; quoted in Frank J.
Coppa, The Life and Pontificate of Pope Pius XII (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Uni-
versity of America Press, 2013), 218.
39. Bauquet, Pouvoir, église et société, 618.
40. A detailed account of these goals is in Fejerdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni
Zsinat, 137–68.

tive-integrist wing” of the Church; and (d) supporting Commu-
nist-friendly “positive forces.”
After the decision to allow a few representatives of the Church
to participate in the ecumenical council in Rome, the Department
for Agitation and Propaganda of the Hungarian Politburo wanted
to ensure that Bishop Hamvas was not traveling alone “in order to
prevent him from exercising the hostile pressure that we expect
from him. If more than one person will be allowed to travel, we
have to make sure that the reactionary wing of the bishops is iso-
lated.”41 The Communists were concerned that the Council would
publish a statement condemning communism or perhaps even in-
clude such a text in one of the official declarations.
To make sure that the “reactionaries” were isolated, the first
delegation to represent the Hungarian Catholic Church in Rome
consisted of only ten persons, including Bishop Hamvas and
Bishop Sándor Kovács of Szombathely as Council fathers. Mean-
while, the “reactionary” Bishop Shvoy was denied an exit permit.
Accompanying the two bishops was a whole delegation, of which
all but two of its members are confirmed as having reported to
the state security agency: Pál Brezanóczy (codename “Pál Kékes”)
and Kálmán Papp, as theological consultants; Miklós Esty (“Pat-
kay”), the lay president of the Saint Stephen Society, and Rev. Ist-
ván Hamvas (“Kecskeméti”) as attendants; the journalist Víd Mi-
helics (“Béla Molnár”), editor of the Catholic monthly Vigília; and
the three theologians Polikárp Radó, László Semptey (“Hivő”),
and Imre Timkó (“János Kiss”).42
We now know most of the secret-police aliases of this first
Hungarian delegation, and we have access to the reports that they
41. Quoted in Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hat-

vanas években, 22.
42. Bishop Kovács studied theology in Vác and Vienna and was ordained in
1915. In March 1944, he became bishop of Szombathely and saved Jewish refugees;
Bottoni, “Special Relationship.” The list of participants is in Fejérdy, Magyarország és
a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 218–21.

sent back to headquarters in Budapest. The operation of Hungar-
ian state security during the First Session of Vatican II was closely
coordinated with the Hungarian embassy in Rome. Altogether,
twenty secret agents supervised the operation. Most were Hun-
garians, but they were also joined by specialists from other Com-
munist countries, and even a few Italians.
Some Vatican circles warmly welcomed the Hungarian delega-
tion because they regarded its presence as a valuable opportunity
to finally get information and insights into the situation of one of
the “silenced” churches behind the Iron Curtain, twelve years af-
ter the last representative of the Hungarian Catholic Church had
been allowed to visit Rome. On July 3, 1963, newly elected Pope
Paul VI personally received the delegation. The pontiff expressed
his wish to come to a final resolution of the case of Cardinal
Mindszenty, mentioning that President Kennedy supported him
in the matter. According to the state security informant Pál Bre-
zanóczy, the pope had literally said, “Mindszenty makes big head-
lines in the news, but the situation of being an embassy’s guest is
not healthy.”43 The statement, if it is accurate, indicates that Paul
VI was interested from the beginning in achieving some form of
normalization regarding the situation of the Church in Hungary.
When the Second Session started in September 1963, Agostino
Casaroli, the Vatican’s special envoy to the Communist world, had
already begun negotiations with the Hungarian government, fo-
cusing particularly on the nomination of new bishops and on the
problem of bishops not recognized by the state. Western media—
for example, the Catholic Herald of London—reported a relaxation
of relations between the Hungarian Church, the Vatican, and the
Communist government. The Herald’s readers learned on July 12,
1963, “Reports from Budapest indicate that the life of the Church
43. Quoted in Máté-Tóth, “A II. Vatikani Zsinat és a magyar elhárítás.” The re-
port is taken from the “Canale” file, published in Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Nép-
köztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 127.

sprang into a new phase of vitality from the start of the Vatican
Council. Many priests are back on the job as the result of an am-
nesty. Bishops were allowed to go to the Council’s First Session.
Deputy Premier Gyula Kallai is reported to have said that Hungary
will approve the appointment of bishops to vacant sees.”44
This was probably too optimistic, but the Hungarian state me-
dia, too, attempted a more open approach—however cautiously
—to this global assembly of the Catholic Church. On October 12,
1962, a report of Radio Free Europe found that “Radio Budapest
dealt with the opening of the Vatican Council in several broadcasts.
Besides quoting a few sentences from the speech of the Pope, it
broadcast also a special commentary from TASS which mentioned
the person of the Pope without any acerbity. The Homeland Ra-
dio quoted on 11 October an interview with Bishop Hamvas . . . in
which the Bishop expressed his pleasure at being able to attend
the Ecumenical Council. . . . All Budapest newspapers reported the
events of the journey of the Hungarian churchmen to Rome.”45
The second Hungarian delegation to Vatican II comprised
sixteen persons. This time, the group included five bishops, five
Church administrators, three theologians, two Catholic lay repre-
sentatives, and one doctor. Half of the delegation reported to the
state security services.46 One agent reported that the Hungarian
bishops had gained the reputation among other attendees of the
Council and within some Vatican circles of being “senile” and very
narrowly focused on Hungarian matters. Some of them could not
speak foreign languages and had difficulty following what was go-
ing on in Rome.47
44. “Hungary Talks to Resume Soon,” Catholic Herald, July 12, 1963.
45. “Situation Report: Hungary, October 12, 1962,” HU OSA 300–8–47–92–78
(electronic record), Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute,
Publications Department: Situation Reports, Open Society Archives, Central Euro-
pean University, Budapest.
46. See the list in Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 282–83.
47. Máté-Tóth, “A II. Vatikani Zsinat és a magyar elhárítás.”

The Third Session started on September 14, 1964, the same
day that the Vatican and the Hungarian People’s Republic signed
the Partial Agreement. The parties had achieved a compromise
of sorts: the Vatican accepted the nomination of new bishops fa-
vored by the Communist government, and the Hungarian regime
agreed to the installation of a few bishops and priests it had pre-
viously blocked. The four new bishops and two of the formerly
banned bishops took part in the new fourteen-member Hungar-
ian delegation.
In 1974, an internal Radio Free Europe report assessed that
the Hungarian government was much more content with the 1964
agreement than the Vatican because the Church in Hungary was
still under state control, while the Communist state had only of-
fered a few concessions.48 The Hungarian Church historian Máté
Gárdonyi interprets Vatican Ostpolitik and the 1964 Partial Agree-
ment as a strategy that was solely concerned with the survival of
the Church, entailing acceptance of the bitter pill of bishops and
priests who collaborated with the Communist state.49
The 1964 session of the Council brought discussions of Sche-
ma XIII, a document that dealt with the relationship between
the Church and the modern world. The Hungarian delegation—
partly influenced by the state security services—worked out a
statement acknowledging that there were still problems for the
Church in Communist countries, but that believers profited from
the social progress that the Communist regime had introduced
and that this progress should also be brought to other parts of
the world.
During the last session in the fall of 1965, Bishop Brezanóczy,
48. “1956 Digital Archive,” OSA Archive, http://osaarchivum.org/files/hold-

ings/300/8/3/text_da/35–5-224.shtml.
49. Máté Gárdonyi, “Túlélés—együttműködés—ellenállás: A katolikus egyház
stratégiai a ‘népi demokráciákban,’ ” in Csapdában: Tanulmányok a katolikus egyház
történetéből 1945–1989, ed. Gábor Bankuti (Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok
Történeti Levéltára, 2010), 31–42.

who was the leader of the “Movement of Priests for Peace,” an
organization created by the Communist secret police, “spoke in
the name of the Hungarian bishops.” What he proposed was the
establishment of “a central body for coordinating action taken by
the world-wide church on behalf of peace.”50
Both of the bishops’ statements were in accordance with
Communist propaganda, but they also corresponded to the spir-
it of the times in the West. For the last sessions of the Second
Vatican Council, the State Office of Church Affairs instructed its
agents in the Hungarian delegation to focus on improving and
deepening their relations with the Vatican and with representa-
tives of churches in Western countries.
To sum up the research that has been done so far, based most-
ly on archival materials from the state security services in Hun-
gary, the following picture emerges: the participation of Hungar-
ian clergy in the international event was strongly observed and
orchestrated by the State Office of Church Affairs and the secret
police. However—and this is a crucial problem—we have almost
no documents from other sources, and we do not have access to
all Hungarian Church archives or to Vatican archives for these
years. The image that remains for historians of the Hungarian
delegation and its activity during Vatican II therefore reflects the
security apparatus’s very particular worldview.51
The Communist state representatives responsible for control
of the Catholic Church regarded their activities during the Coun-
cil as a successful operation against “clerical reaction.” They were
content that no anti-Communist statements had been published
and that they had gathered information about the Vatican and
50. Gilles Routhier, “Finishing the Work Begun,” in History of Vatican II, ed. Al-
berigo and Komonchak, 5:175.
51. A good introduction to the difficulties of interpreting the files of the Com-
munist state security apparatus is in Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal His-
tory (New York: Random House, 1997).

the Catholic Church.52 The Communist state also made sure that
most of the Council’s documents were not published in Hungar-
ian until 1975.53
The final part of this chapter will sum up what has been stud-
ied so far with regard to changes in Church administration, theol-
ogy, and practice. It will also look at a different aspect of Hungar-
ian Catholicism during the time of the Second Vatican Council:
the independent Catholic and—later—ecumenical “base commu-
nities” and their interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.
After the Council: What Did the Council

Change in Hungary?
Some critical theologians have expressed the opinion that the
dictatorship, with the support of a puppet Church, systematical-
ly blocked the application of the reforms of the Second Vatican
Council in Hungary.54 This critique is a bit overstated, exaggerat-
52. Stefano Bottoni writes, “It was during the II Vatican Council that the Hun-
garian intelligence officers, learning from their errors, laid the foundations for fur-
ther operative work against the Vatican”; Bottoni, “Special Relationship,” 155.
53. This is a list of what had been published: Rendelkezés a szent liturgáról [Dis-
position on the Holy Liturgy], 1964; Határozat a világiak apostolkodásáról [Resolution
on the Lay Apolostolate], 1966; A püspök pásztori tisztségéről [On the Pastoral Office
of the Bishops], 1967; Az isteni kinyilatkoztatásról [On the Manifestation of God],
1967; A papság képzéséről [On the Education of the Priesthood], 1967; A keresztény
egységre törekvésről [On the Efforts of Christian Unity], 1967; Az Egyház viszonya a
nemkeresztény vallásokhoz [The Church Confronts the Non-Christian Religions],
1967; Lelkipásztori rendelkezések az Egyházról a mai világban [Pastoral Directions for
the Church in Today’s World], 1967. See Károly Mészáros, Konkordancia a II. Vatikáni
Zsinát dokumentumaiból (Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 1971); József Cserháti and
Árpád Fábián, eds., A Vatikáni Zsinat tanítása: A zsinati dokumentumok, (1975; 2nd ed.
Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 1977).
54. Andreas [András] Szennay, “Kirche in Ungarn,” Theologisch-praktische Quar-
talschrift 139, no. 2 (1991): 128–33; Johannes Gönner, Die Stunde der Wahrheit: Eine
pastoraltheologische Bilanz der Auseinandersetzungen zwischen den Kirchen und dem
kommunistischen System in Polen, der DDR, der Tschechoslowakei und Ungarn (New

ing the actual power of the state apparatus, and it rests on the
assumption that the documents released by the Council can be
understood in one sense only.
In the long run, the marginalization of most alternative ideas
and religious activities by the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party
and its repressive apparatus had unintended consequences. Be-
ginning in the 1960s, especially younger generations felt more
and more that the official ideology provided by communism did
not offer them any answers to the problems of everyday life, in-
stead proving to be empty slogans. In the 1980s, a Communist
party secretary complained about growing “materialism” among
workers and adolescents and about their lack of “idealism.”55 This
we can only call an irony of history, since the aim of Communist
education since 1948 had been the struggle against clerical “ide-
alism” in favor of the “materialist world view.”
It is true, however, that a fully engaged reception of the Coun-
cil, its deliberations, and the subsequent theological and pastoral
debates was very difficult in Communist Hungary.56 First of all,
the state censored all information about the Council. It allowed
publication in Hungary of John XXIII’s 1962 message to the Hun-
garian believers, but not Paul VI’s in 1964.57 It took until 1975 for
almost all documents of the Council to become available in Hun-
gary, translated in the Benedictine Abbey of Pannonhalma. On
the other hand, many priests and Catholic laymen could read the
documents in Latin or German.
Considering the difficult situation of Catholic believers in
York: Peter Lang, 1995); Gábor Adriányi, “Ungarn,” in Kirche und Katholizismus
seit 1945, vol. 2, Ostmittel-, Ost- und Südosteuropa., ed. Erwin Gratz (Paderborn:
Schöningh, 1999), 245–70.
55. Eszter Bartha, Alienating Labor: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capi-
talism in East Germany and Hungary (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 227.
56. The following summarizes the findings of Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Va-
tikáni Zsinat, 243–51.

general under any Communist dictatorship, access to these docu-
ments was surely not the main obstacle to a lively debate about
Vatican II. Rather, it was everyday discrimination against reli-
gion in schools, workplaces, and the public sphere. Despite these
difficult conditions, a debate on the Council documents did in-
deed take place in Hungary. Mihály Kránitz described in an ar-
ticle how Hungarian theologians discussed ideas of the Domini-
can- and Jesuit-driven so-called nouvelle théologie and how Karl
Rahner, who visited Hungary several times after 1968, contrib-
uted to a better knowledge of themes discussed during the Coun-
cil.58 The priest Tamás Nyíri, a Catholic philosopher who taught
at the University of Budapest beginning in 1968, was very active
in spreading news about the Council and its teachings in Hunga-
ry, as was József Cserháti, the bishop of Pécs who had attended
the last three sessions of the Council.59
Only by the end of the 1970s had the Hungarian Church finally
applied most of the administrative and liturgical changes that
the Council had initiated. Some changes—like new administra-
tive structures and the renewal of the liturgy—could be imple-
mented more easily than others. The Hungarian bishops’ confer-
ence established, among others, a National Liturgical Council
(Országos Liturgikus Tanács) in 1964, and the renewal of liturgi-
cal forms was put into effect during the 1970s.60 More problemat-
ic because of the difficult political circumstances was the imple-
mentation of other decisions taken at Vatican II. In a meeting on
December 10, 1970, the Hungarian bishops concluded that “the
pastoral instructions regarding means of mass communication
cannot, because of the conditions of our country, be realized.”61
58. Mihály Kránitz, “La teologia cattolica ungherese dopo il Concilio Vaticano II,”
Gregorianum 91, no. 3 (2010): 510–25.
59. Gábor Zsille, “A párbeszéd embere: Nyíri Tamás halálának évfordulójára,” Új
Ember, no. 60 (2004).
61. Quoted in Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 246. This refers to the

The most difficult question concerns the impact that the Coun-
cil had on believers, since we have very few studies of religious life
in Hungary since the 1960s. There were two movements perse-
cuted by the Communist state that attracted a considerable num-
ber of mostly younger Catholics and managed to survive in small
groups throughout the Kádár era (1956–89). One of these two
movements was Regnum Marianum; the other one was founded
by the Piarist father György Bulányi.62 Bulányi claimed that he was
strongly inspired by the documents of Vatican II. In a letter writ-
ten to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on Good Friday 1986, Bulányi
recalled, “I read and translated the documents for my friends in a
great, fever-like hurry. My heart was filled with joy when I read in
Lumen gentium the following lines: ‘Just as Christ carried out the
work of redemption in poverty and persecution, so the Church is
called to follow the same route so that it might communicate the
fruits of salvation to men.’ ”63
In particular, it was the mention of poverty and persecution
in Lumen gentium that excited Bulányi, who had begun to found
a movement of small, secret communities of Catholic believers in
the late 1940s. He then continued this illegal work for decades, de-
spite the fact that he was imprisoned several times in the interim.
The network of small communities that Father Bulányi found-
ed under the name of Bokor (Hungarian for “bush”) was the most
successful illegal religious movement during the Communist peri-
od.64 After the prohibition and persecution of countless Christian
decree Inter mirifica, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/

documents/vat-ii_decree_19631204_inter-mirifica_en.html; accessed January 2, 2014.
62. Máté-Tóth, Bulányi und die Bokor Bewegung: Eine pastoraltheologische Würdi-
gung (Vienna: Ungarisches Kirchensoziologisches Institut, 1996). On Regnum Mari-
anum, see von Klimó, “Katholische Jugendgruppen,” 121–37. For a memoir of one of
the priests active in the movement, see János Dobszay, Így vagy sehogy: Fejezetek a
Regnum Marianum életéből (Budapest: Regnum Marianum, 1991).
63. Quoted at Máté-Tóth, Bulányi und die Bokor Bewegung, 14.
64. József Illyés Szabolcs, New Catholic Movements in Hungary: Praxis of a
Movement-Theory (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 2008).

groups, there was a great demand for religious communal life, as
well as a large number of offerings, since thousands of monks and
nuns had been driven from their cloisters and now had to earn
their keep as humble workers. Many of them continued to live
communally or gathered small groups of the faithful around them,
sharing religious ideas and practices.
Because these new groupings were isolated from the outside
world and had scant access to religious literature, they developed
a degree of autonomy and independence that soon alienated them
from a Church hierarchy that placed a premium on obedience and
control.65 That was, among others, a reason that both the Hungar-
ian Church and the Vatican censured Bulányi during the 1980s—
and why he had to exchange letters with Joseph Ratzinger, the
prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Despite the sometimes hostile stance adopted by the Church
hierarchy toward Bokor and its harassment and persecution by
state authorities, the movement grew in the 1960s and 1970s to
encompass several thousand members who met in small groups
of twelve. Bulányi continually reinterpreted his philosophy of
mission in light of Council documents. When Cardinal Ratzinger
asked him to sign a document, he signed it. But he added the sen-
tence that no one should “be forced to act in a manner contrary to
his conscience,” citing Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Free-
dom, Dignitatis humanae.66
What made life in these groups particularly attractive was
the fact that their members—priests and laymen, men and wom-
en—were all on an equal footing, speaking critically and openly
with one another. They were able to lead, in their view, lives that
were informed by Christian values such as the dignity of the hu-
man person, praying, and reflecting on the Bible together.67 At
65. This is the interpretation from Máté-Tóth, Bulányi und die Bokor Bewegung.
66. Renata Ehrlich, “Die real existierende Kirche in Ungarn,” Orientierung , no. 56
(1992): 13–14.
67. András Jobbágy, Religious Policy and Dissent in Socialist Hungary, 1974–1989:

the center of these groups was the communal teaching and learn-
ing of theological and practical Christian wisdom based on their
own Bible study and on writings by Father Bulányi.
For many Hungarians in the wake of Vatican II, an alternative
lifestyle that was radically informed by religious faith allowed an
escape from both the tristesse of the dictatorship and the tutelage
of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The communal learning formed a
voluntaristic counter-pedagogy to the ubiquitous impositions of
Communist ideology and indoctrination. On the one hand, the
members found security and certain protections against a system
that was perceived as threatening and repressive. At the same
time, the egalitarian, open, and critical forms of activity that they
had undertaken were akin to the anti-authoritarian values that
the West was discovering in the 1960s, a period that spawned
similar pacifistic, egalitarian, anti-capitalist, and cultural-critical
movements and cells.68 When one looks at the flourishing of new
movements like Bokor, it becomes clear that the Second Vatican
Council had a positive, as well as a negative, influence on Hungar-
ian Catholicism.
The Case of the Bokor-Movement (Ph.D. diss., Central European University, 2014),
41–55.
68. Von Klimó, “Zwischen Beat und Kommunismus: Katholische Jugendgrup-
pen in Ungarn 1968,” in Die letzte Chance? 1968 in Osteuropa: Analysen und Berichte
über ein Schlüsseljahr, ed. Angelika Ebbinghaus (Hamburg: VSA, 2008), 108–20;
see also Péter Apor, “Autentikus közösség és autonóm személyiség: 1989 egyik
előtörténete,” AETAS-Történettudományi folyóirat, no. 4 (2013): 22–39; and Kinga
Povedák, “Catholicism in Transition: The ‘Religious Beat’ Movement in Hungary,” in
Christianity in the Modern World: Changes and Controversies, ed. Giselle Vincett and
Elijah Obinna (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014), 139–56. For a broader study of the
1960s, see DeGroot, Sixties Unplugged.

THREE
VATICAN II
AND YUGOSLAVIA
• • • Ivo Banac
The Second Vatican Council was not only a turning point in the
history of the Roman Catholic Church, in Yugoslavia no less than
elsewhere, but an important influence that contributed to a dé-
tente between the Yugoslav party-state and its principal ideolog-
ical adversary. It is telling that Glas Koncila (Voice of the council),
the most important Croatian and Yugoslav Catholic newspaper,
which was launched in October 1962 as an occasional stenciled
bulletin with the title Glas s Koncila (Voice from the council),
originally was meant to inform the priesthood of the archdio-
cese of Zagreb “about the most important work and events at
the Council.”1 In its first issue, which avoided all domestic news
except for the announcement of the departure of Council fa-
thers for Rome, the editors included an understated expression
of gratitude for the “cooperation, proposals, and suggestions” of
potential collaborators.2 This was the beginning of the revival of
a once-mighty Croatian Catholic press, which had been devastat-
ed by the Communists after 1945.
The Catholic Church in Yugoslavia, notably in the preponder-
antly Catholic northwest (Slovenia and Croatia), but also in Voj-
1. Stjepan Bakčić, “Dragi svećenici!,” Glas s Koncila (Zagreb), October 4, 1962.

2. “Obavijesti,” Glas s Koncila (Zagreb), October 4, 1962, 23.
75
vodina and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with their significant Cath-
olic population, was hit hard by the Communist revolution that
immediately followed the Second World War.3 The Communists
executed at least five hundred Catholic priests and religious; de-
stroyed most Catholic institutions; banned practically all Catholic
publications; excluded religious instruction from schools; confis-
cated Church property; and, in 1946, arrested Archbishop Alojzije
Stepinac of Zagreb, the most senior Catholic prelate in Yugosla-
via, sentencing him to sixteen years of hard labor. After the 1948
break with the Soviet Bloc, the Yugoslav Communist leadership
in fact intensified the persecution of the Catholic Church, which
they viewed as their most determined internal enemy. In the early
1950s, the authorities promoted several regime-identified priests’
associations.4
3. On the Communist revolution in Yugoslavia, see Woodford D. McClellan,
“Postwar Political Evolution,” in Contemporary Yugoslavia: Twenty Years of Socialist
Experiment, ed. Wayne S. Vucinich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1969), 119–53. On the Christian churches in Yugoslavia after World War II,
see Stella Alexander, Church and State in Yugoslavia since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979); see also Miroslav Akmadža, Katolička Crkva u komunističkoj
Hrvatskoj 1945–1980 (Zagreb and Slavonski Brod: Despot Infinitus and Hrvatski in-
stitut za povijest, 2013); Akmadža, Katolička crkva u Hrvatskoj i komunistički režim
1945–1966 (Rijeka: Otokar Keršovani, 2004); Jure Krišto, Katolička crkva u totalita-
rizmu 1945–1990: Razmatranja o Crkvi u Hrvatskoj pod komunizmom (Zagreb: Globus,
1997); Radmila Radić, Verom protiv vere: Država i verske zajednice u Srbiji 1945–1953
(Belgrade: Inis, 1995); Akmadža, Oduzimanje imovine Katoličkoj crkvi i crkveno-državni
odnosi od 1845. do 1966. godine: Primjer Zagrebačke nadbiskupije (Zagreb: Tkalčić, 2003);
Akmadža, “Položaj Katoličke crkve u Hercegovini u prvim godinama komunističke
vladavine,” in Hum i Hercegovina kroz povijest: Zbornik radova s međunarodnog znanst-
venog skupa održanog u Mostaru 5. i 6. studenoga 2009, ed. Ivica Lučić (Zagreb: Hrvats-
ki institut za povijest, 2011), 2:491–508; Stjepan Kožul, Stradanja u Zagrebačkoj nad-
biskupiji za vrijeme Drugoga svjetskoga rata i poraća (Zagreb: Tkalčić, 2004).
4. On these see Velimir Blažević, “Kontroverze oko osnivanja i djelovanja udru-
ženja katoličkih svećenika ‘ Dobri pastir,’ ” Bosna Franciscana (Sarajevo) 10, no. 17
(2002): 244–67; Akmadža, “Staleško društvo katoličkih svećenika Hrvatske u službi
komunističkog režima,” Tkalčić 7, no. 7 (2003): 47–156; Kolar, “Priestly Patriotic As-
sociations,” 231–56; Stipan Trogrlić, “Istarska svećenička udruženja—Zbor svećenika
sv. Pavla za Istru i Društvo sv. Ćirila i Metoda u Pazinu (1945–1952),” Croatica chris-
tiana periodica (Zagreb) 32, no. 61 (2008): 123–50.
76 IVO BANAC
Despite their checkered and controversial experience, aimed
at undermining the authority of the Catholic hierarchy, these as-
sociations, notably in Bosnia and Herzegovina, actually contrib-
uted to the normalization of religious life and eased the excessive
pressures on lay believers. When the Yugoslav bishops’ conference
(BKJ) sanctioned membership in these associations in September
1952, the Yugoslav secret police (UDB-a) initiated interrogations
of a large group of bishops. Then, at the end of November, at the
height of internal Yugoslav liberalization following the Sixth Con-
gress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), when
Pope Pius XII announced the cardinals for the upcoming consis-
tory, among them the imprisoned Archbishop Stepinac, Yugosla-
via broke diplomatic relations with the Holy See on December 17,
1952. This was the lowest point in the encounter between church
and state in Yugoslavia.
A growing issue in this acrimonious relationship was the role
of some 250 Catholic priests (and a few bishops) in the political
emigration, notably in the Croat diaspora. According to Commu-
nist sources, half a million Yugoslavs, mainly Croats, emigrated
from Yugoslavia after the Second World War.5 From the stand-
point of the regime, “the postwar Catholic clerical emigration
was from the very beginning the most reactionary, most orga-
nized, and most active.”6
Among the centers of émigré life, Belgrade was particularly
bothered by the Pontifical College of St. Jerome in Rome, noted
for the anti-regime activities of Rev. Krunoslav Draganović and
several Croat priests. By his own admission, Draganović attract-
ed attention immediately after the war through his efforts on be-
half of “over 50,000 people,” among them war criminals, to leave
5. Većeslav Holjevac, Hrvati izvan domovine (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1967), 338.
6. Informacija, Archives of Bosnia and Hercegovina (ABH, Sarajevo), Republička
komisija za odnose s vjerskim zajednicame (RKVP [Republic Commission for Rela-
tions with Religious Communities] 1968).
VATICAN II AND YUGOSLAVIA 77

Italy for the overseas countries.7 The postwar refugee wave was
over by the end of the 1950s: as a result, first the bishops and
then the student-clerics from Yugoslavia started residing in the
college, and Draganović was obliged to leave the St. Jerome. At
the time of the first sessions of Vatican II, when several Croat
bishops had quarters in the college, he was succeeded by other
priests equally unpalatable to the regime.
The Yugoslav Communists saw the election of John XXIII to
the papal throne as a “consequence of a temporary preponderance
of those forces in the Church that are in favor of accommodation
to the contemporary circumstances in the world.” Moreover, they
expected that this would “abet an increasingly stronger differen-
tiation in the ranks of the lower clergy and especially, although in
a slow and a limited way, in the ranks of the episcopate.”8 In line
with this they saw the representation of the Yugoslav episcopate
to the federal government (SIV) of October 3, 1960, as a “major
change in the position of the Catholic Church toward the state.
For the first time, the episcopate expressed its readiness to regu-
late the relations with the state based on the constitution and the
laws.”9
In fact, the bishops demanded the end of atheist propaganda
in the schools and the workplace, the removal of various obsta-
cles to religious practice in state institutions, the return of na-
tionalized Church properties, permission to build new places of
worship and start new publications, and various other demands
that the authorities had no intention of accepting. Nonetheless,
these could be discussed at length, with the aim of establishing a
“corresponding modus vivendi.” To that end, Edvard Kardelj, the
deputy chair of the SIV, responded to the BKJ presidency on No-
7. Akmadža, ed., Krunoslav Draganović: Iskazi komunističkim istražiteljima (Za-

greb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2010), 222.
8. Razvoj odnosa izmedju SFRJ-Vatikana-RKC od 1960. godine, 1, ABH, RKVP
1962.
9. Ibid., 5.
78 IVO BANAC
vember 3, 1960, with an affirmative letter in which he noted that
the “normalization of relations with the Catholic Church is a pro-
cess that demands time,” but ought to commence immediately
in “discussions between the representatives of the SIV and the
representatives of the episcopate.” This was vetoed by the Holy
See. Bishops could individually discuss various concrete issues
with the authorities, but a precondition for the normalization
of church-state relations was the resumption of diplomatic rela-
tions with the Vatican through the instrument of a concordat.10
In this oppressive context, fraught with tensions and bitter
memories, the Second Vatican Council and the person of Pope
John XXIII opened unforeseen possibilities for Church renewal
and a new engagement with the repressive regime, which could
not ignore the import of the Council. The Council convened at
the high point of the Cold War, but also in the final phases of the
modernist paradigm, with its stress on progress and human rea-
son. This perhaps suggests an explanation as to why the latter-
day critics of the Second Vatican Council hold it culpable for ex-
cessive optimism and openness. It is, indeed, difficult nowadays
to conjure all the revivalist effects of the Council, especially in the
East European “Churches of Silence.” The bishops from Yugoslavia
were perhaps not among the movers and shakers at the Council—
Vatican observer Xavier Rynne was aware that the “nervous man-
ner” of some of them had a tragic source in the persecution that
they had experienced in Communist prisons11—but their contri-
butions were important in their respective areas of competence.
Croatian Council fathers, especially Stepinac’s successor, Arch-
bishop Franjo Šeper, whom Paul VI named cardinal at the end of
the Council in 1965, were members of various conciliar commis-
sions. Šeper himself served on the Preparatory Commission for
10. Ibid., 5–7.

11. Rynne [Francis X. Murphy], Letters from Vatican City: Vatican Council II (First
Session): Background and Debates (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 129.

the Discipline of the Sacraments and on the Preparatory Cen-
tral Commission, and he was elected a member of the Theologi-
cal Commission at the Council. At the Third Session, speaking
on the issue of migrations, he warned that the glorification of a
nation, insistence on racial purity, and autonomy of culture were
obstacles to human universalism and certainly did not represent
a greater good than the solidarity of humankind.12 Cardinal Šeper
also argued for a Christian understanding of materialist athe-
ism. He warned that there were individuals in the Church who,
through their revulsion at the modern world, gave occasion to
atheism; he insisted that it must be clearly proclaimed that their
rigid and immobile conservatism is alien to the true spirit of the
Gospels.13
It is important to note that even the exceptionally conser-
vative Council fathers among the Croat bishops—for example,
Frane Franić of Split-Makarska—were great exponents of ecu-
menism. They warned that the excessive latinization of the Cath-
olic Church was responsible for the longevity of the schism with
the Eastern Orthodox churches.14 In the spirit of the call made by
Paul VI for mutual forgiveness among Christians, Bishop Alfred
Pichler of Banja Luka (Bosnia) addressed the Serbian Orthodox
believers in a Christmas message in 1963 in which he condemned,
in a clear allusion to the Croat Ustašas of the wartime period, the
“wayward people,” who deemed themselves Christians, but who
“killed other people, also Christians, because they were not Cro-
12. “Gloria nationis, puritas stirpis, autonomia culturalis, et similia, non sunt
summum bonum, quod in detrimentum solidarietatis generis humani qua talis con-
servari deberet!”; quoted in Nikola Dogan, “Franjo Šeper i Gaudium et spes,” in Veri-
tatem facientes in caritate: Zbornik radova Međunarodnoga simpozija o kardinalu Franji
Šeperu povodom 20. obljetnice smrti, ed. Željko Tanjić (Zagreb: Nadbiskupski duhovni
stol, 2003), 204n25.
13. “Proclamemus clare conservatismum illum rigidum et immobilismum . . . a
vero spiritu Evangelii alienum esse”; quoted in Dogan, “Franjo Šeper i Gaudium et
spes,” 209n38.
14. Rynne, Letters from Vatican City, 209.
80 IVO BANAC
ats and Catholics.”15 He begged “our Orthodox brethren to forgive
us just as crucified Christ forgave all.”16 Pichler found a ready in-
terlocutor in Andrej Frušić, the Orthodox bishop of Banja Luka,
who allowed the Franciscans of the nearby Petrićevci monastery
to hold Mass in the Orthodox church of Slatina. After the de-
structive earthquake that greatly damaged northwestern Bosnia
in 1969, Frušić on occasion turned over his Banja Luka cathedral
to Bishop Pichler.
Tomislav J. Šagi-Bunić, the most important Croat theologian
of the conciliar period, recorded four crucial conciliar insights
about the Church, all tied “with growing consciousness about the
centrality of Eucharistic liturgy. These are the insights that the
Church is the People of God, that the Church is a mystery, then
the growing consciousness about the importance of the local Church
in relation to the universal Church, and the insight about the
cruciality of the concept of communion.”17 This is why the Coun-
cil opted for the vernacular liturgy, greater participation of the
laity in liturgy and the life of the Church, and the autonomous
rights of Eastern churches in communion with Rome (Orienta-
lium ecclesiarum).
Twenty years after the Council, Šagi-Bunić held that, in the
meantime, a “new world had come into being that is best re-
flected in the deep schism and misunderstanding between the
old and the young.” He attributed this schism to the growth of
the media (notably TV) that divided the old world of ideas and
logical discursive thought, to which the conciliar generation be-
15. The Ustaša collaborationist regime, which was responsible for major crimes
against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, sought to legitimize itself in wartime Croatia
through a show of fidelity to the Catholic Church; on this subject, see Tomasevich,
War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 517–68.
16. Quoted in Tomo Vukšić, “Međucrkveno i međunacionalno pitanje u djelu
i misli biskupa Alfreda Pichlera (I),” Crkva u Svijetu (Split) 39, no. 1 (2004): 143–44.
17. Tomislav J. Šagi-Bunić, “20 godina poslije II Drugog vatikanskog koncila,”
in Jeka jednoga Koncila, ed. Vlado Košić and Antun Peranić (Zagreb: Kršćanska
Sadašnjost, 1984), 47; italics in the original.

longed, from the new generation that lives “in the world of im-
age and the domination of associational thought.”18 Be that as
it may, the Council made possible for the Catholics of Yugoslavia
the revival of a religious life in which the renewed Church press
played the main role. Živko Kustić, a longtime editor of Glas
Koncila, noted that “We availed ourselves of the Council’s com-
mencement so that we could have a newspaper at all, since the
beginning of the Council somehow corresponded chronologically
to somewhat changed relations between the socio-political state
community and the Church. Until then, it was practically impos-
sible for our Church to have its own newspaper that would be
printed in a state printing press, our printing offices having been
sequestered, and that would be distributed with the knowledge
and permission of the state authorities.”19
In addition to conciliar liturgical renewal—the introduction of
Croatian and Slovenian vernaculars, the turning of the altars to-
ward the faithful—the revived Church press was part of the “new
face of the Church,” which the Communist authorities decided to
tolerate. This included not only Glas Koncila, but also Glasnik sv.
Antuna Padovanskog (Herald of St. Anthony of Padua), the jour-
nal Služba Božja (Divine service), and other journals and bulletins.
Kustić himself felt that the “authorities somehow understood that
it does not pay or that it cannot be managed to keep the Catholic
community completely tied up in the area of public communica-
tions, leading to the introduction of newspapers that expressed
the conciliar moment of the Church.”20 Still, Kustić felt that this
was not the decisive aspect in the renewal of Church press:
Struggle for the liberty of the Church, the same struggle that was
fought in the postwar decades without the benefit of Church press,
18. Šagi-Bunić, “20 godina poslije II Drugog vatikanskog Koncila,” 38.

19. Živko Kustić, “ ‘Glas Koncila’ u pokoncilskom vremenu,” in Jeka jednoga Kon-
cila, 121.
20. Ibid., 122.
82 IVO BANAC
the struggle to prevent the Church from becoming again a hand-
maid of the state, the struggle to prevent the priesthood from be-
coming a more or less well-paid and self-satisfied profession, the
struggle to have the clergy serve the people and not become an ap-
pendage of the ruling class—everything that in Central America can
be called revolutionary or under the imprint of the Second Vatican
Council—all of that here was post-revolutionary, that is, under the
imprint of Stepinac.21
The Communist authorities permitted the conciliar renewal

under the impression that it favored those forces in the Church
that accepted the long-term perspective of Communist rule. In
an initial internal assessment of the Council, the official state
analysts concluded that
the first part of the Council’s sessions to a certain extent acted posi-
tively on a few of the bishops in Yugoslavia. Some returned “disap-
pointed” from the Vatican, and a few openly attacked the policy of
Pope John. Individual bishops from Asia, Africa, and even from cer-
tain European countries, and moreover some Vatican functionaries
and even the late pope, exercised a positive influence on the bishops
from our country in the sense of favoring a more tolerant relation-
ship toward the state, and some even reproached them their less-
than-objective view on the position of the RCC [Roman Catholic
Church] in Yugoslavia. One Indian bishop openly told them that the
age of “crusades” and “martyrdom” was over and that the Catholic
Church above all must turn to “pastoral work.”22
The Church leaders were aware of the officials’ need to find

out how the Council would benefit them. In an imaginary con-
versation with “Him” (obviously, a Party functionary), the anon-
ymous author in Glas Koncila satirized the eagerness of the au-
thorities. “He” is reassured that the angel of the Lord has stirred
the waters (Jn 5:4), and thereby set the whole Church into mo-
21. Ibid., 125.

22. Razvoj odnosa izmedju SFRJ-Vatikana-RKC od 1960. godine, Belgrade, No-
vember 19, 1963, 9–10, ABH, RKVP 1963.

tion.23 In fact, the effects of the Council tested the authorities’
capacity for investment in conciliar normalization. Destroyed
churches left unattended since the war were being reconstructed
and new churches built, notably in the repressed parts of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, the Dalmatian hinterland, Kosovo, and Vojvo-
dina, but also in the industrial zones of planned secularization.24
In addition, conciliar programs engaged the laity in Church
affairs,25 promoted the liturgical participation of the congregants
through the introduction of reformed rites,26 and emboldened
demands for greater concessions. An example was the episcopal
letter of May 21, 1965, in which the BKJ demanded the upholding
of constitutional guarantees of freedom of worship and human
rights.27 Cardinal Šeper, for his part, in his Christmas message
after the closing of the Council in December 1965, insisted that
the authorities must show more understanding for the believers
in the new suburbs of major cities, such as Novi Zagreb, south of
Croatia’s capital, “where there is not even the smallest chapel.”28
Moreover, Glas Koncila started publishing a satirical column,
23. “Voda je zatalasana,” Glas Koncila, January 12, 1964.

24. For some typical cases from the period before the reestablishment of dip-
lomatic relations with the Vatican, see D-J, “Ljubuški ima opet svoju crkvu,” Glas
Koncila, February 23, 1964; “Gradi se crkva u Žeravcu,” Glas Koncila, March 20, 1964;
-ak-, “Čitluk—selo u Hercegovini,” Glas Koncila, November 14, 1965; “Obnova crkvi
u Dalmatinskoj Zagori,” Glas Koncila, May 10, 1964; “Medulin oživljava,” Glas Kon-
cila, June 7, 1964; “Nova župna crkva u Prištini,” Glas Koncila, August 16, 1964; J. I.,
“Subotica dobila novo sjemenište,” Glas Koncila, July 11, 1965; -ak-, “U gradu bez cr-
kava i džamija,” Glas Koncila, June 13, 1965; V., “Pula dobila novu župu,” Glas Koncila,
June 13, 1965.
25. Franjo Šeper, “Položaj i zadaci laika u Crkvi,” Glas Koncila, March 20, 1964.
26. “Počinje se provoditi liturgijska obnova,” Glas Koncila, November 22, 1964;
“Obnosa mise—zašto i kako,” Glas Koncila, February 28, 1965.
27. “Zajednička poslanica biskupa Jugoslavije,” Glas Koncila, September 5, 1965.
In it, the bishops stressed that the “law guarantees freedom of conscience and free-
dom of religion, but certain elements through impermissible procedures misuse
their position and in various ways exert pressure on the conscience, thereby creat-
ing a psychosis of fear, which is contrary to law”; ibid.
28. “Božićna poruka i čestitka kardinala Šepera,” Glas Koncila, December 25, 1965.
84 IVO BANAC
“Letter of a Village Parish Priest,” in which the various foibles of
the regime were exposed to ridicule.29 All the same, the state au-
thorities were convinced that they had the upper hand after the
Council, whose logic, they thought, pushed church into accom-
modation with state.
Although concessions to religion in Communist party states
were not always a sign of reform, Yugoslavia in the early 1960s
was spared Soviet criticism on this account, as the Soviet leader-
ship—certainly at the end of the Khrushchev era and the first
Brezhnev years—was itself responding positively to the Vatican’s
new Ostpolitik. Nevertheless, Tito’s constant tension with the
Soviets and the Soviet model, since the reconciliation of 1955, in-
cluded a degree of defensiveness about Yugoslavia’s closeness to
the West. (In 1955, Tito told Khrushchev that the West “demand-
ed the establishment of a multiparty system [in Yugoslavia] and
a détente [with the opposition]: for example, in the case of St-
epinac—cardinal and archbishop, whom we had in prison.”)30
Just as Hungary was negotiating an agreement with the Holy
See in September 1964, Yugoslavia was in the midst of an internal
conflict over a series of reforms, economic and political, that had
commenced in 1961.31 Moreover, at the Eighth Congress of Yu-
goslavia’s ruling League of Communists in 1964, after the initial
failure of economic reforms, the leadership was divided over a
series of administrative issues that reopened the ever-dangerous
29. A typical example was the lampooning of a noted journalist who over-
reached in an attempt to explore theological dilemmas that might result for the
Church, should space exploration discover extraterrestrial intelligent life; Don Jure,
“Tete Luce i Marsijanci,” Glas Koncila, September 5, 1965.
30. Tok konferencije jugoslovenske i sovjetske delegacije, 69. Archives of Yugo-
slavia (AJ), Belgrade: KPR I-3-a SSSR. Tito added that, in a 1950 draft, the U.S. am-
bassador conditioned American aid on the release of Stepinac: “I responded in the
following way: ‘Tell your government . . . if the American leaders put Stepinac on one
side and the Yugoslav people on the other, then we require no help.’ He transmitted
this message, and we got help.”
31. See chapter 2, by Árpád von Klimó, in this volume.

nationality question at the apex of power. Two blocs emerged—
unitarist-centralists and federalists—who contended for influ-
ence over a variety of issues, including Church policy. Whereas
the former favored a strongly centralist state, united in a project-
ed integral Yugoslav identity, the latter proposed to empower the
six federal republics and seven constituent national groups. The
former were partisans of strong-arm governance, which the lat-
ter eschewed in favor of more conciliatory methods, even toward
traditional opponents, including the religious communities.
The unitarist-centralists had a natural leader in Aleksandar
Ranković, the vice president of Yugoslavia and the member of
the party’s secretariat responsible for internal security and gen-
erally for the Serbian Party organization. Slovenian and Croatian
Communists—men like Edvard Kardelj and Vladimir Bakarić—
stood at the head of the federalist bloc. The conflict was fought
over a series of issues, from the construction of a new model of
social self-management and genuine federalism (“federalizing
the federation,” in Bakarić’s parlance) to the market approach in
planning and a distancing from the USSR.32 A dire economic situ-
ation complicated matters, especially with the drop in industrial
production in 1965 that resulted in previously unknown levels of
unemployment. This forced the government to permit the export
of labor “on temporary work abroad,” especially to Western Euro-
pean countries.
Under the circumstances, the Yugoslav leadership did not wish
to create the impression that the détente with the Church and a
planned resumption of relations with the Holy See were signs of
weakness. As a result, the first contacts with the Vatican were in-
32. This refers to the Yugoslav ideological model of Communist rule, nominally
through a devolving system of self-management in the workplace and in the pub-
lic sphere more generally. For a favorable interpretation of the system, which was
seen as a democratic alternative to Soviet Bloc “real socialism,” see Ellen T. Comisso,
Workers’ Control under Plan and Market: Implications of Yugoslav Self-Management
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979).
86 IVO BANAC
formal and remained at the level of the Yugoslav embassy council-
or in Rome (Nikola Mandić) and the secretary of the Congregation
for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs (Agostino Casaroli). The
Yugoslav side sought confirmation of its political legitimacy and
the end of Church sponsorship of oppositional and émigré groups.
The Vatican wanted freedom of contact with the Church hierarchy
in Yugoslavia, freedom of conscience for all citizens, and undis-
turbed religious instruction.
The negotiations were intensified by the end of the Council
and became official, but not immediately successful, in January
1965, after the arrival of the Vatican delegation headed by Casa-
roli to Belgrade. Although the Yugoslav government wanted ac-
commodation, its repeated tests of strength with the Church
exposed its weakness. Accusations that the Church was playing
with nationalism in August 1965—when 60,000 pilgrims came
to the Marian celebration in Sinj, central Dalmatia—underscored
the official disappointment that only 8,000 had turned up at a
festivity attended by Tito in the same town only a week earlier.33
Despite the government’s initial attempts to involve the Cro-
atian bishops, the bishops ultimately did not become a party to
the negotiations, instead taking advantage of the Yugoslav au-
thorities’ desire for direct contact with the Vatican. Both sides
were prepared for prolonged discussions, but were unwilling to
entertain undue concessions. The compromise that was reached
satisfied the starting positions of both sides. The Protocol on the
Discussions between the Representatives of the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and the Representatives of the Holy See,
as it was officially dubbed when it was signed in Rome on June 25,
33. “Najveća manifestacija vjere u našoj zemlji poslije rata,” Glas Koncila, August
22, 1965. In his sermon during the pilgrimage, according to Glas Koncila, Cardinal
Šeper “greeted the people of Sinj, the Cetina frontier, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovi-
na, and the whole Croatian homeland. . . . The Cardinal stressed that we are a people
who call Mary our queen. . . . We are Mary’s people and must remain such in the
future”; ibid.

1966, was less formal than an agreement, did not define the legal
position of the Church in the state, and mainly affirmed the let-
ter of Yugoslavia’s constitutional (but not real) norms in relations
with religious communities. All the same, through it the Yugoslav
government guaranteed to the Church a free exercise of religious
rites, the consistent application of laws safeguarding the freedom
of conscience and freedom of religion, and the competency of the
Holy See in the pursuit of its jurisdiction over the Catholic Church
in Yugoslavia in questions of ecclesiastical character and in con-
tacts with the Yugoslav bishops.
For its part, the Holy See confirmed the religious and eccle-
siastical character of priestly service and excluded its misuse for
purposes that might be political in character, condemned every
type of political terrorism, and expressed its readiness to apply
canonical sanctions in cases of priests who, in the estimation of
Yugoslav authorities, were participating in such activities. The
signatories also agreed to exchange representatives, with this
function to be performed by the apostolic delegate in Belgrade,
who would have diplomatic authority.34 This function was filled
in September 1966 by Msgr. Mario Cagna. When he was named a
pronuncio in 1970, the relations were elevated to the ambassado-
rial rank.
The signing of the protocol was conducted at the height of
the Ranković affair, between two key events: the session of the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s Executive Committee (June 16,
1966), which formed the commission to investigate the charges
against Ranković and the UDB-a brass for various offenses and
abuses of office, including spying on Tito himself; and the ple-
nary session of the SKJ Central Committee (the Brioni plenum,
July 1–2, 1966), at which Ranković was condemned politically
and deprived of office, the UBD-a declared responsible for vari-
ous “deformations” and “chauvinist practices” against non-Serbs.
34. Službeni List SFRJ: Međunarodni ugovori (Belgrade), November 7, 1966.
88 IVO BANAC
(It was revealed after the Brioni meeting that the UDB-a kept 1.3
million personal dossiers in Croatia alone, and 172,274 in Bosnia
and Herzegovina.)
The fall of Ranković was a major victory for the federalist bloc,
leading to a sense, especially in Serbia, that it represented a reck-
oning with the Serb cadres. Ranković had favored concessions to
the Holy See during the negotiations, especially in matters involv-
ing the Pontifical College of St. Jerome in Rome. For example,
the Yugoslav government demanded that the college be opened
to non-Croat bishops and to members of Yugoslav-sponsored
priests’ associations, seeking also the exclusion of émigré priests,
the naming of a rector who would be a government-approved Yu-
goslav subject, and the flying of the Yugoslav flag on state holi-
days. Nonetheless, Ranković’s fall was interpreted as the result of
his supposed resistance to the protocol. After the fall of Ranković,
notably in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, where
secret police repression was pronounced, the signing of the proto-
col was regarded as more evidence of relaxation.
The gains for more rights in Yugoslavia were not interpreted
so generously by the emigration. The Yugoslav authorities, as
early as 1961, saw every Vatican move against the émigré priests
as a victory: “The essential moment was reached when the Vati-
can saw that the state reacts sharply to the influence of hostile
emigration on the Church at home and when it was clearly stated
that the rejection of the hostile emigration . . . is a condition for
normalization of church-state relations. This was best expressed
in the stand that was taken toward Draganović and in the chang-
es that were applied to date in the College of St. Jerome, from
which the individual émigrés are being gradually excluded. [The
new] rector Kokša established relations with our embassy and re-
quested a permanent Yugoslav passport.”35
35. ABH, RKVP 1961, Referat o odnosima sa RKC razmatran na sjednici Savezne
komisije za vjerska pitanja 9. decembra 1961. godine, 6.

In response, Draganović and other émigré-priests started
criticizing not only the Holy See, but also the Yugoslav bishops.
The leading Croat émigré quarterly Hrvatska revija (Croatian re-
view, based in Buenos Aires), published a disturbing article in
June 1963 in which the author, identified only by the pseudonym
“Vigilantibus iura,” offered evidence of regime pressures against
the bishops: “Formerly the bishops were humiliated by a Serbi-
anized foreigner [Ambassador] Mihajlo Javorski, and now the
honors belong to a Communist from Croatia, [Ambassador Ivo]
Vejvoda, whereas the notorious S. Aleksić [also on the staff of the
Yugoslav embassy in Rome] continues his sordid business as in
the Javorski days. Aleksić lacks all manners: he thinks nothing
of reproaching Archbishop Šeper, in the presence of the Ambas-
sador, that he has met with such and such immigrant who is not
in Belgrade’s graces.”36 Indeed, in a note from the secretary of the
Yugoslav embassy in Rome recording Šeper’s conversation with
Ambassador Vejvoda in September 1963, there is a reproach that
“the writing of the Argentinian review Hrvatska revija . . . [proves]
that some bishops transmit directly or indirectly the contents of
conversations with the Ambassador and the authorities at home
to the political emigration . . . that then profanes them in the ser-
vice of anti-Yugoslav political propaganda[; this] cannot be toler-
ated by our side.”37
Still, Vigilantibus iura targeted first of all the Vatican itself,
which “cares little for the peoples that at the moment have no state
of their own.” The author accused the Vatican—indeed, Paul VI
personally—of avoiding the use of Croatian names and turning
St. Jerome “into a branch office of Communist Yugoslavia,” with
the aid of which the enemy “is smothering the martyr cry of per-
36. Vigilantibus iura [Ivan Tomas, Krunoslav Draganović, and Krešimir Zorić],
“Hrvati na II. Vatikanskom koncilu,” Hrvatska Revija (Buenos Aires) 14, no. 2
(1964): 156.
37. Zabeleška o poseti nadbiskupa Šepera Ambasadi i o razgovoru sa ambasado-
rom Vejvodom—26.XI.1963. g., 3., ABH, RKVP.
90 IVO BANAC
secuted Croatia.” He called on the Croat bishops “not to trample
on our centuries-old traditions or rights in the name of any pol-
itics, Godless or Godly . . . because there will always be bishops
where there are believers and priests, but what is the use of shep-
herds and teachers where there is no faithful fold?”38
This was to no avail. After the signing of the protocol, Paul VI
named Vladimir Vince, a priest from the diocese of Đakovo who
was acceptable to the Yugoslav authorities, the head of the pas-
toral service for the Croats in exile. After his death, this post was
held by Msgr. Vladimir Stanković, who was in part resident in Yu-
goslavia.
It can be argued that the protocol changed nothing. In fact,
it changed everything. True, after the authorities approved the
building of the new Franciscan Church of the Holy Cross, the first
church of any kind in the suburb of Novi Zagreb, the City Com-
mittee of the Zagreb party organization had to quiet the protests
in the party base with the explanation that there were no legal
means available to prevent construction, with the understanding
that “administrative measures” were still possible. But even Car-
dinal Šeper, who was unhappy that the protocol hardly touched
the issue of religious instruction in schools, never doubted that
it improved relations between church and state.39
Separate from both the Church hierarchy and the party-state,
there existed a broad society that was swept forward thanks to
the messages of the Council, the reform of the political system,
and the value—however symbolic—of the protocol. This was evi-
dent in many changes, both large and small—from the enormous
increase of the Church press (8.5 million copies in Croatia alone
in 1966) to the issuing of very large editions of Christmas car-
ols on phonograph records by Jugoton, the state recording firm,
38. Vigilantibus iura, “Hrvati na II. Vatikanskom koncilu,” 168–70.

39. Akmadža and Franjo Šeper, Mudrošću protiv jednoumlja (Zagreb: Tkalčić,
2009), 243–44.

from the printing of the Zagreb Bible (in 1968, in a first edition of
60,000 copies, by the state publishing house Stvarnost) to Mali
Koncil (Small Council), a newspaper for children (in regular edi-
tions of 100,000 copies).40 Kršćanska Sadašnjost (Christian Con-
temporaneity)—the Center for Conciliar Research, Documenta-
tion, and Information—became the key intellectual institution
in these endeavors. From the end of the 1960s to the beginning
of the 1970s, the Church was in the thrall of its great construc-
tion projects: the building of new churches and sacral objects and
the redecoration of old church premises in cooperation with some
leading artists, such as Ivo Dulčić, Djuro Seder, and Josip Biffel.
The most important effect of the Council and the relaxation
in relations with the state was a wholehearted surge in the en-
gagement of lay churchgoers, especially the student youth, on the
wave of the 1968 student revolt, but without the burden shared
by the Second World War generation. The Institute for the Theo-
logical Culture of Laity—founded in 1968 at the Catholic Theologi-
cal Faculty in Zagreb—as well as a number of church choirs and
religious instruction groups in various Zagreb churches played an
enormous role in this process. Some, led by prominent instruc-
tors, were particularly distinguished: Ivan Cvitanović and Živko
Kustić (St. Peter in Vlaška ulica), Tadej Vojnović (St. Francis on
the Kaptol), Josip Ćurić (the Shrine of the Most Precious Heart
in Palmotićeva ulica), Franjo Jurak and Josip Frkin (Bl. Marko
Križevčanin), Žarko Kraljević (Mary Help of Christians at Knežija),
Ivan Čagalj (St. Joseph, Trešnjevka), and Tomislav Šagi-Bunić
(St. Michael in Dubrava).
The most important places of student socialization were the
academic church of St. Catherine in Zagreb’s Upper Town and
the chapel of Wounded Jesus on the then-Republic Square (now
Josip Jelačić Square), where Josip Turčinović, a prominent theo-
40. The chief editors were Jure Kaštelan, a prominent poet and party member,
and Bonaventura Duda, a Franciscan friar and Bible scholar.
92 IVO BANAC
logian, famously preached. The Movement of Croat University
Students (Pokret Hrvatskih Sveučilištaraca, 1970–71) was the
principal agent of democratization for Croatian society during
the reform movement of 1967–71, and it cannot be conceived
without the infrastructure provided by the Church. This topic
is still largely unexplored in historical research. To this must be
added the summer youth camps on the Adriatic, which were or-
ganized by Josip Ladika, the chief administrator of Glas Koncila,
as well as a number of groups that functioned in other major cit-
ies such as Split (St. Francis, the Assumption of the Blessed Vir-
gin Mary, Pojišan) and Rijeka (Synaxis Youth Community, led by
Tihomir Ilija Zovko, OP).
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the youth groups were formed
somewhat earlier, after Ignacije Gavran translated the Catholic
catechism from German in 1963. A notable gathering point was
the Church of St. Anthony at Bistrik in Sarajevo, where Bono Lekić
and Ljubo Lucić were especially active. Students of the Franciscan
Theological Faculty in Sarajevo, members of the “Jukić” Assembly
of Franciscan Seminarians, responded to the student movement,
founding the journal Jukić (editor: Mile Babić) already in 1968.
The confluence of these tendencies helped to create vast ex-
pectations in all segments of society. This was especially the case
given their convergence with the beginning of the reform move-
ment in Croatia, after the Croatian party organization dismissed
its unitarist fraction. The so-called “Croatian Spring” thus fol-
lowed the Tenth Plenum of the Croatian party’s central commit-
tee in January 1970. The election of Ivan Zvonimir Čičak, himself
a leading participant in the Catholic student groups, to the post
of student-rector of the University of Zagreb in December 1970
was the first victory of a declared Catholic by secret ballot since
the introduction of Communist power in 1945.41
The “mass movement,” as the Communist authorities dubbed
41. Tihomir Ponoš, Na rubu revolucije: Studenti ’71 (Zagreb: Profil, 2007), 75–78.

the 1967–71 Croatian equivalent of the Prague Spring, would
have been impressive even without the Catholic surge. But mass
gatherings such as the Thirteenth Marian Congress in Marija
Bistrica (August 1971), with more than 100,000 pilgrims in at-
tendance, provided the sort of mass phenomenon in this period
of relative freedom that felt especially threatening to the Com-
munist nomenklatura.42
At the height of the Croatian “mass movement,” in March
1971, Tito paid an official visit to Italy and to the Holy See. In Ti-
to’s conversations with Paul VI, the pope promised him that “the
Church for its part will avoid every sharpening in relations or the
introduction of unnecessary problems. [The Vatican] will draw
attention only to those questions that are of essential import
and whose resolution must be sought . . . by way of agreement
in the spirit of mutual understanding.”43 The Yugoslav govern-
ment was aware that the Holy See “mainly refrains from inter-
ference with state organs when it comes to practical questions
in the life of the Roman Catholic Church in Yugoslavia.”44 These
are the words of an official memorandum entitled, “The Interna-
tional Position and the External Policy of the Vatican,” prepared
especially for Tito’s visit. But the Yugoslavs were also adamant
that, should the Holy See insist, any demands for the “Catholic
education of youth” in Yugoslavia would be rejected as “contrary
to our social and constitutional order.”45
In terms of generational memory, the reform era of 1967–71
will remain the only period under communism when there ex-
isted considerable autonomous space, free of official domination.
For the first time since 1945—at least in Croatia—the ruling
Communists tried to legitimate their political monopoly in na-
42. “Marijanski kongres u Mariji Bistrici,” Glas Koncila, August 22, 1971.
43. Zabeleška o razgovoru Predsednika Republike sa Papom Pavlom VI 29. mar-
ta 1971. u Vatikanu, 3. AJ, KPR I-2/48–2.
44. Medjunarodni položaj i spoljna politika Vatikana, 5, AJ, ibid.
45. Ibid., 8.
94 IVO BANAC
tional colors, attempting to nationalize their history. Croat party
leaders like Savka Dabčević-Kučar and Miko Tripalo became na-
tional leaders, symbolically upsetting hierarchical relations in
the SKJ and the Yugoslav federation. The reopening of the na-
tional question—the place of Croats, Slovenes, and others in Yu-
goslavia, in the economy, and in the country’s international rep-
resentation—triggered a series of other questions, notably those
connected with the autonomy of culture and identity, as well as
the freedom of personality and belief. Ultimately, the suppressed
question of pluralism and democracy, too, rose to the fore.
The Croatian Spring of the early 1970s did not bypass the
conciliar Church. The important question of the Church’s role in
national identity, which had been present in various discussions
since the nineteenth century, at this point received new inter-
pretations. Tomislav Šagi-Bunić promulgated the incarnational
approach. According to this influential theologian, Christianity
incarnated itself in the pre-Christian forms of Croat natural re-
ligion, thereby becoming a part—though not a decisive part—of
the Croatian nation, since
to be a Catholic and to be a Croat is not the same, something that
we should have learned and assimilated not only because there ex-
ists a Muslim religious community of our language and kind, but
also because we have among us a significant number of people with-
out any religion. God in His Providence permitted that we, Croats
and Serbs, having accepted the novelty of atheism in our midst, be
forced to realize that it is indeed not the same to be a Croat and
to be Catholic or to be Serb and to be Orthodox, since nobody can
claim, even in jest, that our atheists are not Croats and Serbs.46
Šagi-Bunić did not negate the national character of the

Church. As he put it, although Christianity is “an entirely differ-
ent kind of communal living from that of national communalism,
46. Šagi-Bunić, “Ekumenska problematika kod nas,” Poslušni Duhu (Zagreb) 1,

no. 3 (1966): 79.

this does not mean that Christians can be outside their ethnos
and nation, that they can be without interest or responsibility
for their terrestrial homeland.” At the same time, he made plain
the expressly anti-Christian nature of selfish nationalism, which
“certainly must be condemned,” especially as “it cannot be in har-
mony with the Christian attitude to life.”47 Moreover, Šagi-Bunić
advocated a politically powerless Church, responsible to the peo-
ple, not to the authorities. He most decisively rejected the idea
that the Catholic Church, as a church, could be responsible for the
safeguarding of the Croatian nation. According to him, the nation
was not a transcendental value, nor would there be national man-
sions in the Father’s house. In the opinion of Živko Kustić, Šagi-
Bunić’s understanding “about the relationship between church
and nation, about the rootedness of the Church in the national
soul, about how the Church must not be chauvinistic or nation-
alistic, but must be national, about how the Church has responsi-
bility for the destiny of the nation, about how the Church is less
concerned with the state and far more with the people” repre-
sented ideas that would later be celebrated by John Paul II. Yet
these ideas were “coming out on the pages of Glas Koncila by Dr.
T. Šagi-Bunić at least five, six, and more years before Pope Wojtyła
started expressing them.”48
Perhaps it is only natural that Šagi-Bunić’s incarnational view
developed in the era of optimism preceding Tito’s coup against
the reform-minded Croatian party leadership. That coup took
place at the Twenty-Second Session of the SKJ Central Commit-
tee, which convened at Tito’s hunting resort Karađorđevo (Vojvo-
dina) in December 1971. Duly condemned for “nationalist devia-
tions,” the reformers were obliged to resign from the leadership
and party membership. There ensued a purge of several thousand
47. Šagi-Bunić, Crkva i domovina (Zagreb: Kršćanska Sadašnjost, 1970), 19, 21.
48. Kustić, “ ‘Glas Koncila’ u postkoncilskom vremenu.”
96 IVO BANAC
members of the Croat Party organization, encompassing arrests
and severe sentences for notable figures from cultural and eco-
nomic life, as well as the leadership of the student movement.
The wave of repression, the most intensive since the purge of
the pro-Soviet Cominformists in 1948–50, introduced the long
years of “Croat silence.” These were, nonetheless, occasionally
brightened by a few hopeful events, including the election of Kar-
ol Wojtyła to the papacy (1978), Tito’s death (1980), the beginning
of the Kosovo crisis (1981), and perestroika in the USSR (1985). The
dénouement of the Yugoslav crisis cannot be understood without
recognition that, through this long period of agony, the Catho-
lic Church was the only autonomous institution at the disposal
of society—especially in Croatia. It was, moreover, the only space
that the regime did not control.
After the Karađorđevo meeting, the Church was faced with
the official accusation that it gave aid and comfort to the “na-
tionalists.” Individual issues of Catholic journals and newspapers
were banned on various—often banal—charges, as in the case
of the benign calendar Istarska Danica (Istrian morning star) for
1972, because of an article by a prominent literary historian, Ivo
Frangeš, entitled “Croatia and Istria are one.” The official Zagreb
daily Vjesnik (Herald) repeatedly attacked Franjo Kuharić, the
archbishop of Zagreb since 1970, for his supposed departures
from the principles of Vatican II. Glas Koncila calmly recorded the
course of the anti-Church campaign “in light of the new develop-
ments,” occasionally using all sorts of allusions about the ongo-
ing repression. On the millennial anniversary of the veneration
of St. Blaise, the patron of Dubrovnik, in February 1972, Isaiah’s
words were intoned: “Comfort, comfort my people . . . speak ten-
derly to Jerusalem, and announce to her that her time of forced
labor is over.”49
49. Kustić, “ ‘Oj, Dubrovniče, sveto rodu mjesto,’ ” Glas Koncila, February 20, 1972.

The Second Vatican Council and its immediate effects coin-
cided with an abrupt end to ambitious reformist aspirations in
post-revolutionary Yugoslavia. A brief period of ten years (1962–
72) was an era of a great surge of hope, followed by dismal disap-
pointments. Out of it emerged a transformed Catholic Church,
the only free institution in the predominantly Catholic parts of
Yugoslavia, no longer persecuted but under constant watch—
with state conventions as guarantees of its special status, with
renewed press that was admittedly self-policed, but nevertheless
a powerful alternative to party-state fantasies. Tested in hope
and disappointment, the Church would become the only tolerat-
ed opposition in the last two decades of Yugoslavia’s decline. Its
real test would come after the collapse of Yugoslav communism
in 1990–91 and the series of wars that ensued. State agony gave
way to the agony of a Church that was trying to become conciliar
under the least hospitable circumstances.
98 IVO BANAC
FOUR
VATICAN II
AND
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
• • • James Ramon Felak
The year 1962 was a crucial year in the two-millennium history of

the Catholic Church. That October, Pope John XXIII opened the
Second Vatican Council. In tune with the pope’s calls to “read the
signs of the times” and apply “the medicine of mercy rather than
of severity,” the Council over the next four years promulgated
comprehensive reform over a broad spectrum of Catholic con-
cerns. The overall goal of those reforms is captured by the Ital-
ian word aggiornamento: updating. The means included, among
others, liturgical reform, greater pastoral sensitivity, a larger role
in the Church for lay people, increased collegiality, greater open-
ness to modern methods of scriptural study, respect for freedom
of conscience, and dialogue with past opponents (non-Catholic
Christians, members of other religions, nonbelievers).
The Church would henceforth seek constructive ways to adapt
to modern society and culture rather than treat them in a purely
adversarial way. It would seek renewal by revisiting its founda-
tional documents, above all the Gospels and the writings of the
fathers of the Church, in an approach termed ressourcement.1 It
1. See, for example, Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle théologie—New Theology:

Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (New York: T. and T. Clark, 2010).
99
would eschew a ghetto mentality, seeking to share “the joy and
hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time.”2
From the perspective of the Vatican II reformers, after decades—
or even centuries—of a winter characterized by dogmatism, de-
fensiveness, clericalism, and traditionalism, the Church was expe-
riencing a long-overdue springtime.
But 1962 was also an important year in the history of the
Czechoslovak Communist Party—paradoxically, for quite similar
reasons. That year saw the first indications of reform that would
accelerate through mid-decade and culminate in the blossoming
of the so-called Prague Spring, an attempt by reform-minded
Czech and Slovak Communists to effect an aggiornamento in their
own movement, to create a “socialism with a human face.” Like
the Catholic Church, they, too, launched a comprehensive pro-
gram of reform in an effort to bring their party up to date. Pur-
suing a Communist version of ressourcement, they scraped away
the Stalinist accretions to Communist thought and policy of the
preceding generations and sought in Lenin and Marx—even the
younger Marx—a revitalization of Communist ideals.
As Vatican II did for the laity, Czechoslovakia’s reform Com-
munists sought a greater dignity and role for the citizenry. This
meant, above all, everyone outside the ranks of the Communist
Party of Czechoslovakia, cutting across broad strata of Czecho-
slovak society. Like the Council fathers, reform Communists were
open to new ideas, including those that came from outside the
system and its institutions. They sought a greater emphasis on
dialogue, both within the Communist Party and with those out-
side of it. The new emphasis in the party was less on hierarchy
and more on collegiality, again paralleling the aspirations of the
Council. Finally, as with Vatican II, Czechoslovakia’s reform was
2. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, December 7, 1965, http://www.vati

can.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_
gaudium-et-spes_en.html; accessed January 2, 2014.
100 JAMES RAMON FELAK

elite-driven, with new forces among the party leadership emerg-
ing in the course of the 1960s to challenge the old guard.
This chapter explores the Catholic Church in the Czech lands
during this period, when Vatican II and its immediate aftermath
overlapped with the Prague Spring and its antecedents. It will look
at the effects of both Council and Prague Spring on the develop-
ment of Czechoslovak-Vatican relations during this period; at the
role of Czech Catholics at the Council; at the emergence of Catholic
activism during the explosion of reformism in 1968 and the ensu-
ing concessions by the regime; at the implications for the Church
when a Soviet-sponsored invasion crushed the Prague Spring in
August 1968 and then imposed a hard-line “normalization” regime;
and at the contributions of certain key Czech Catholic intellectuals
to issues connected with the Council, especially how best to “ac-
culturate” Catholicism to a Czech environment. Because the center
of gravity of the Prague Spring was in the Czech lands, especially
in the capital city of Prague, and because ecclesiastically Slovakia
was another world from the Czech lands in terms of the role and
history of the Church, as well as piety and religious identification,
this chapter will concentrate on the Czech Catholic Church.3
Czechoslovak Bishops at the Council

Before this chapter reflects on the transformation of Czech Ca-
tholicism in the 1960s, two important historical features of con-
3. Slovakia had a much higher level of religious belief and confessional affiliation
than did the Czech lands; within the latter, Moravia significantly surpassed Bohemia.
For example, according to a poll taken in autumn 1968, 71 percent of Slovaks identi-
fied themselves as religious believers, compared with 13 percent of Czechs from a poll
taken in 1974; Kieran Williams, “The Prague Spring: From Elite Liberalisation to Mass
Movement,” in Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist
Rule, ed. Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 109. Those in-
terested in Slovakia during this period should consult Jozef Jurko, Druhý vatikánsky
koncil a Slovensko (Bardejov: Bens, 1999). For an outstanding study of the role of Slo-
vak Communists in the Prague Spring, see Scott A. Brown, “Socialism with a Slovak
Face: The Slovak Question in the 1960s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2010).
VATICAN II AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA 101

fessional life in Czechoslovakia need to be explained. First, with
respect to confessional life, the Czechoslovak regime was the most
repressive in the region during the Communist period. Bishops,
priests, and members of religious orders were interned or impris-
oned in large numbers. The state exercised tight control over re-
ligious media and publishing, educational institutions (including
seminaries), and contacts with coreligionists abroad. The state’s
refusal to consent to episcopal appointments that it deemed un-
favorable meant that as many as ten of Czechoslovakia’s thirteen
dioceses remained without a bishop for much of the Communist
period.4
Second, because the predominant Czech national historical
narrative viewed the Catholic Church negatively, the Czechs pre-
sented for Catholicism a challenge unparalleled among their
neighbors. Whether it was the burning at the stake by the Cath-
olic Church in 1415 of the great Czech religious reformer Jan
Hus; the successful defense of their homeland by Hussite war-
riors against papal and imperial crusades in the 1420s and 1430s;
the equation of Catholicism with Austrian domination of the
Czechs in the wake of the crushing defeat of a Bohemian Prot-
estant revolt at White Mountain in 1620; the anti-Catholic spirit
of František Palacký’s monumental history of Bohemia from the
period of national revival; or Czechoslovakia’s founder Tomáš G.
Masaryk’s identification of the Czech nation with a Protestant
spirit and his own personal abandonment of Catholicism for a
liberal Protestantism—Czech nationalism was inextricably en-
tangled with suspicion, if not outright hostility, toward the Cath-
olic Church.5
4. For a detailed discussion of the repressive nature of Czechoslovak Commu-

nist religious policy, see Sabrina Petra Ramet, “The Catholic Church in Czechoslo-
vakia 1948–1991,” Studies in Comparative Communism 24, no. 4 (December 1991):
377–93.
5. Of the series of intellectuals-writers-activists over the centuries who have
held dominant positions in the Czech national pantheon, most were associated

The years of the Second Vatican Council saw the resumption
of negotiations between the Holy See and the Czechoslovak re-
gime after a ten-year hiatus. By the early 1960s, it was clear that
Communist regimes were here to stay, and the Church’s accep-
tance of this fact, along with John XXIII’s new openness toward
the Soviet Bloc and outreach to Communists, paved the way for
the possibility of rapprochement in what had long been a tense
relationship.6 The Vatican was also hoping that at least one bish-
op from Czechoslovakia would be permitted to attend the Coun-
cil, while the Czechoslovak regime was hoping to enhance its in-
ternational prestige by mending fences with Rome. The two sides
met six times between March 1963 and February 1965, alternat-
ing the venue between Prague and Rome.7
Though the talks covered a range of issues—the reform of
seminary education, religious education in the schools, the word-
ing of the loyalty oath required of clergy, the release and return
to service of imprisoned priests, and the fate of Czechoslovakia’s
then-suppressed religious orders—the question of bishops dom-
inated the negotiations in a number of respects. First, in 1963,
some bishops were still imprisoned or interned. A number of dio-
with Protestantism and/or anti-clericalism, from Hus through exiled Protestant

leader Jan Amos Komenský, the historian Palacký, the anti-clerical journalist Karel
Havlíček Borovský, and down to President Masaryk. For the connections made by
Czechs among these figures, see Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of
Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp.
26–28, 32, 52, 123, 193, 218.
6. Among other actions, John XXIII abandoned the anti-Communist rhetoric
common under Pius XII, pleased Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev with his appeal
for a peaceful settlement to the Berlin Crisis in 1961, and received Khrushchev’s
daughter and son-in-law, an editor of the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, with warmth
and hospitality, on a short visit to the Vatican in March 1963; Michael P. Riccards,
Vicars of Christ: Popes, Power, and Politics in the Modern World (New York: Crossroad,
1998), 180–81.
7. For a discussion of these negotiations and their results, see Stanislav Balík
and Jiří Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu 1945–1989 (Brno: Centrum pro
studium demokracie a kultury, 2007), 41–44.

ceses—including Prague—were without a bishop or even an apos-
tolic administrator. The regime asserted its influence in the dioc-
esan offices through state-appointed Church secretaries (církevní
tajemníci), who controlled the administration of the dioceses—an
arrangement opposed by the Church—and through those priests
who joined the pro-Communist organization for clergy, the
Mírové Hnutí Katolického Duchovenstva (MHKD, Peace Move-
ment of Catholic Clergy). The government wanted such priests,
especially those currently serving as vicars capitular, to become
the new bishops of the vacant dioceses, something the Church
stubbornly resisted.8
The talks bore some fruit right from the start. In 1963, im-
prisoned and interned bishops were released. The loyalty oath
was modified to make it more palatable to the Church, and most
imprisoned priests received amnesties; many even received per-
mission to return to active service. On the other hand, there was
little or no movement to accommodate Church concerns with
respect to state control of seminary education, the return of re-
ligious instruction to schools, or the appointment of bishops to
vacant dioceses.
In the most prominent issue on the table, what to do about
the archdiocese of Prague, a compromise was reached. Josef Be-
ran, deposed as archbishop by the regime, imprisoned in 1949,
and recently made a cardinal by Paul VI, was allowed to travel to
Rome to be inducted as cardinal, provided that he did not return
to Czechoslovakia. In a related compromise, the regime approved
his replacement, Josef Tomášek, but only as an apostolic admin-
istrator—not (yet) an ordinary bishop.
Tomášek was also the only Czech prelate whom the regime
allowed to attend Vatican II, along with three Slovak bishops
8. A vicar capitular was a priest chosen by the local cathedral chapter to admin-
ister a diocese in which there was a vacancy for the position of bishop. In Czecho-
slovakia, some vicars capitular, though not all, were in the collaborationist camp.

(of a total of fifteen consecrated bishops in the country). They
were accompanied by a dozen collaborationist clergy selected by
the government to keep an eye on the bishops—though the in-
formants’ success in this task was debatable.9 Czechoslovakia’s
Council fathers spoke little at Vatican II, though Tomášek ad-
dressed the assembly on the topic of Catholic-Orthodox unity
during the Second Session, proposing the creation of a special
assembly of Catholic and Orthodox bishops to prepare for future
unification of the churches.10 The speech was received favorably
by Orthodox observers from the Soviet Union and led to the
Russian Orthodox patriarch awarding the entire Czechoslovak
delegation with a commemorative medal for making the great-
est contribution toward the rapprochement of Christians at the
Council.11
Czech and Slovak participation at the Council was not limited
to the official delegation from Czechoslovakia. Three exiled bish-
ops, including Cardinal Beran, also took part. Despite the com-
promise settlement of the question of leadership of the Prague
archdiocese, the Beran issue remained an irritant in church-state
relations, especially because Beran spoke at the Council in ways
critical of Communist regimes. He took part in the debate over
the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis huma-
nae), speaking out on September 20, 1965, in defense of freedom
of conscience.12
His speech called for the Council to proclaim emphatically its
9. Stanislav Balík, “The Second Vatican Council and the Czechoslovak State,” Re-
ligion, State and Society 41, no. 1 (2013): 10, 11. The entourage was impeded by being
housed apart from the bishops, either on a different floor or in a different building.
10. Ibid., 12.
11. Tomášek’s speech also helped to get him appointed to the Vatican’s Sec-
retariat for the Unity of Christians: Bohumil Svoboda, Na straně národa: Kardinál
František Tomášek v zápase s komunistickým režimem (1965–1989) (Prague: Vyšehrad,
2006), 31.
12. Beran’s speech is quoted at length in Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v
Československu, 46.

support for freedom of conscience and to demand that govern-
ments stop suppressing religious freedom. He then recounted
a litany of unacceptable transgressions against religious faith
and its practitioners that fit the Czechoslovak experience well:
priests and laity in prison for religious activity; bishops and
priests prevented from carrying out their duties; restrictions on
the Church’s internal government and communications with the
Holy See; obstacles to men seeking the priesthood; prohibitions
against religious orders; and obstacles to professing, propagat-
ing, and educating children in the faith.
While a Catholic “traditionalist”—in the pre–Vatican II sense
—would have agreed with Beran’s highlighting of the ways in
which an oppressive regime sought to suppress the Church, his
speech was in fact far from traditionalist. First, in defending free-
dom of conscience, Beran attacked not only those regimes that
tried to suppress religion, but also those that mandated a partic-
ular form of belief. The latter brought with it the temptation to
lie and dissimulate, as well as—Beran argued—“the hypocrisy of
ostentatiously pretending a faith hurts the Church more than the
hypocrisy of hiding one’s faith.” Second, putting a Czech twist on
his position, he noted that the Church in the Czech lands seemed
to be continually suffering from what had been done in the past
in its name—above all, the execution of Jan Hus and the imposi-
tion of Catholicism on the Czech nation by the Habsburgs during
the Counter-Reformation.
At least in part because of Beran’s speech at Vatican II, the
Czechoslovak government did not resume talks with the Holy
See until May 1967.13 At those talks, Prague continued to press
for the elevation of “progressive” clergy to bishoprics, which the
13. Prague was also upset by speeches at the Council on September 26, 1965, by
exiled Slovak bishops Pavel Mária Hnilica and Michal Rusnák. Hnilica, among other
things, identified atheism as the chief contemporary problem, and Rusnák spoke of
the repressive measures taken against the Church by Czechoslovakia’s Communists;
Balík, “The Second Vatican Council and the Czechoslovak State,” 12.

Church staunchly resisted. The government, meanwhile, blocked
the implementation of many conciliar reforms, refusing to per-
mit the establishment of a conference of Czechoslovak bishops
or the introduction of the office of deacon. It also maintained
existing restrictions on Catholic publishing, seminary educa-
tion, and lay involvement in the Church. The talks ended in an
impasse in early June. Meanwhile, the Prague Spring was on its
way. As it burst into bloom in early 1968, it would have signifi-
cant repercussions for the Church in the Czech lands.
The Prague Spring

With the profound political changes underway in the early months
of 1968—the replacement in January of the Stalinist Antonín No-
votný by the reformist Alexander Dubček as first secretary of the
Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the
promotion of reformers within the party and state apparatuses,
the drafting of a reformist agenda culminating in the proclamation
of the Action Program in April—a space emerged for the Church
to advance certain demands. Now there was a regime that was far
more willing to accommodate them than at any previous time dur-
ing the Communist period. On March 21, the newspaper Lidové
Noviny published an open letter to Dubček signed by eighty-three
former political prisoners, who had been sentenced to a combined
734 years of incarceration (plus one life sentence) and had collec-
tively served 472½ years of their sentences. The letter stated clear-
ly Catholic grievances against the regime’s past policies toward the
Church, asserting that the regime would need to revoke its words
and revise its policies in order to gain the trust of Christians.
Still, the letter breathed with a conciliar spirit. Its authors ex-
pressed a readiness to forgive and an openness to cooperation.
They noted that “informed and honorable Marxists” are ashamed
at the way the regime has been contradicting the Charter of Hu-

man Rights in its treatment of religious believers and called for
“a genuine dialogue with Marxists, which is happening already
abroad. Paul VI, the Council, modern theologians, and a series
of progressive Marxist theoreticians invite us to this. We regard
the dialogue of an open Christianity with an open Marxism and
with other humanistic systems as a hope for humanity and for
the future of our Republic. We must indeed speak only as inde-
pendent Christians, and we need conditions for the spreading of
a modern postconciliar Catholicism among believers.”
On the same day on which this letter appeared in the press,
a petition signed by masses of Czechoslovak citizens was deliv-
ered to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, categorizing
the numerous crimes perpetrated by the regime against Catho-
lics since the 1950s and calling for a number of changes and re-
forms.14 The grievances included the internment or imprison-
ment of bishops and priests; restrictions placed on episcopal
authority; show trials against Church leaders and members of re-
ligious orders; the liquidation of all religious orders in April 1950;
the break in ties with the Holy See; the imposition on dioceses
of “Church secretaries” who were openly hostile to the Church
and interfered with its operations; severe limitations on religious
education in the schools; and the placing of obstacles in the path
of young men seeking a priestly vocation. At this point, eight of
the country’s thirteen dioceses were without a bishop.
The letter called for a number of changes. These included
the appointment of bishops to vacant sees; the abolition of the
institution of Church secretaries; an amnesty for clergy and la-
ity imprisoned for carrying out their religious obligations; per-
mission for priests to take up their priestly offices; abolition of
the numerus clausus for admission of candidates to seminaries;
14. For the text of the letter, see Svoboda, Na straně národa, 61–63. Svoboda
puts the number of signatures at 300,000, Cuhra and others at 100,000; see Jaro-
slav Cuhra, Církevní politika KSČ a státu v letech 1969–1972 (Prague: Ústav pro sou-
dobé dĕjiny AV ČR, 1999).

renewal of male and female religious orders and amends for the
harm done to them; restoration of the Greek Catholic Church to
legal existence; permission of the unhindered religious education
of children; and the enabling of the Church to exercise its con-
stitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech, of the press, and
of assembly.15 The petition also called for the dissolution of the
MHKD, given its complete lack of moral and legal justification
to speak for the Church. Its authors noted that the organization,
discredited from the start, was a product of the repressive poli-
cies of the 1950s and now an anachronism, lingering on as one of
the greatest obstacles to mutual understanding between church
and state.
The barrage of Catholic demands continued. On March 25,
Tomášek presented to the government a letter outlining the bish-
ops’ proposals with respect to relations between church and state.
They called for the opening of discussions between Czechoslova-
kia and the Holy See that would lead to an agreement on mutual
relations (that is, a concordat) and the institution of a number
of domestic reforms. These included the restoration of open com-
munication with the Holy See; the filling of vacant dioceses; the
reactivation of the bishops’ conference; freedom for bishops to
exercise their functions to the fullest degree; the subordination
of priests only to their bishops and not to state functionaries;
permission for lay participation in all aspects of the life of the
Church; the restoration of the life of the religious orders; the re-
newal of the Greek Catholic Church; the freedom of religious edu-
cation inside and outside of school; free access to the press, radio,
and television; and the freedom to carry out pastoral work in hos-
pitals, prisons, and social welfare institutions.16
15. The Greek Catholics, also known as Eastern Rite Catholics, Byzantine Cath-
olics, or—pejoratively—Uniates, are a semi-autonomous community within the
greater Catholic Church that adheres to many of the traditions of Eastern Christian-
ity while remaining in communion with the pope.
16. For a list of these demands, see Svoboda, Na straně národa, 65.

In keeping with the significant changes taking place in the
Communist regime as it launched its “Socialism with a Human
Face” project, the government was substantially accommodating
to many—though not all—Catholic demands. The Action Program
issued in April by the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of Czechoslovakia, in calling for the “implementation of the con-
stitutional freedoms of assembly and association” for voluntary
social organizations, specified, “Freedoms guaranteed by law are
applicable . . . to citizens of individual creeds and religious denomi-
nations.”17
As a concrete sign that the regime was taking its own rhetoric
seriously, personnel changes ensued in the government offices re-
sponsible for policy toward the churches. On March 25, 1968, the
sociologist Erika Kadlecová, a Communist with a reputation for a
willingness to accommodate religion, replaced the old-school Karl
Hrůza as head of the Secretariat for Church Affairs at the Minis-
try of Culture.18 Less than two weeks later, on April 5, the min-
ister of culture himself, Karl Hoffman, was replaced by Miroslav
Galuška.
Over the course of the next several months, the height of the
Czechoslovak reform era, the regime made a number of conces-
sions to the Church. Some formerly interned bishops were al-
lowed to take up their offices; female religious orders were allowed
to accept novices and resume some of their activities; the MHKD
was dissolved; the Catholic charitable organization Caritas was re-
established; the Catholic press was revived; and religious instruc-
tion was revitalized.19 In addition, the Greek Catholic Church was
17. “The Action Programme of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,” in
Czechoslovakia’s Blueprint for “Freedom”: Dubček’s “Unity, Socialism and Humanity”
(Statements—The Original and Official Documents Leading to the Conflict of August,
1968), ed. Paul Ello (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis, 1968), 120.
18. Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 44.
19. Tomášek replaced the editorial board of the newspaper Katolické Noviny,
dominated until then by pro-regime clergy, and its circulation increased from
35,000 to 135,000; see Svoboda, Na stranĕ národa, 66, 72.

relegalized; a new organization called the Dílo Koncilové Obno-
va (Work of Conciliar Renewal), or DKO, was founded; and the
Church allowed freer interaction with theological and cultural de-
velopments in the West.20 While most of these demands and their
fulfillment would also have suited a pre–Vatican II Church, several
were particularly appropriate for the Church as it emerged from
the Council.
Despite these accommodations, significant differences re-
mained between church and state. The system of Church secre-
taries stayed in effect, maintaining the government’s capacity to
meddle in Church affairs; male religious orders continued to be
suppressed; and the problem of filling vacant dioceses with can-
didates acceptable to both the Church and the regime was left
unsolved. The Prague Spring did not see a resumption of nego-
tiations between the government and Rome, though there were
some stirrings in this direction from March 1968 onward.21 It
may seem surprising that the Vatican did not try to seize the mo-
ment and pursue an agreement with the reformist regime, espe-
cially given that it had negotiated regularly with the hardliners
previously in power throughout the 1960s.
In the end, the resumption of talks did not take place until
1971, by which time most of what the Prague Spring had accom-
plished had been rescinded. Agostino Casaroli, the later cardinal
and secretary of state of the Holy See who, as a Vatican diplomat
in the 1960s, had negotiated with the Czechoslovak government
over the Beran case, ascribed the lack of Vatican-Czechoslovak
negotiations during the Prague Spring to several considerations.
20. Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 44–45; for example, the
Prague archdiocese established a lecture series called Living Theology, which ac-
quainted the younger generation with the theological thinking and developments
in the Church outside Czechoslovakia. A similar series was then established in Brno;
Svoboda, Na stranĕ národa, 73.
21. Karel Kaplan, Tĕžká cesta: Spor Československa s Vatikánem 1963–1973 (Brno:
Centrum pro studium demokracia a kultury, 2001), 53

From the Vatican’s perspective, Czechoslovakia now had a new set
of personnel with whom it was not yet familiar, including Kadle-
cová, who sought to improve the Church’s situation in Czechoslo-
vakia on her own initiative through work with the domestic Cath-
olic leadership. From the regime’s perspective, religious affairs
were not the highest priority at a time when a multitude of issues
were on the table and in flux. There was also the consideration that
renewing good relations with the Vatican might irritate the Soviet
Union and fuel suspicions of a “counter-revolution” in Czechoslo-
vakia. Finally, one should not forget the Vatican’s tradition of cau-
tion when dealing with an ambiguous and changing situation.22
The crushing of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact tanks and
troops in August 1968—followed by the transition into the period
of “normalization,” in which the hard-line regime was reinstated
under the leadership of one-time reformer Gustav Husák—ground
to a halt many of the reforms underway in church-state relations.
A number were, in fact, revoked over the next few months or years.
Very few of the ecclesiastical reforms of the Prague Spring period
were maintained.23 The personnel changes of spring 1968 were un-
done by summer 1969, with Miroslav Brůžek replacing Galuška as
minister of culture in July and Hrůza, the man Kadlecová had re-
placed in March 1968, getting his old job back from her in June.24
22. These reasons, including the explanations given by Agostino Casaroli in his
memoirs, are discussed in František X. Halas, “Vztah státu a církve v československu
totalitního období ve svĕtle vzpomínek kardinála Casaroliho,” in Koncil a česká
společnost: Historické, politické a teologické aspekty přijímání II. Vatikánského koncilu
v Čechách a na Moravě, ed. Petr Fiala and Jiří Hanuš (Brno: Centrum pro studium
demokracie a kultury, 2000), 62–64.
23. One reform that was maintained was the relegalization of the Greek (or
Eastern Rite) Catholic Church. Forcibly incorporated into the Eastern Orthodox
Church in the spring of 1950 and surviving secretly, at least in spirit, into the 1960s,
it was legalized by a government resolution of June 13, 1968, and resumed operation
in the summer of 1968 as a religious institution based almost exclusively in eastern
Slovakia. For more on this issue, see Michal Barnovský, “Legalizácia Gréckokatolíck-
ej cirkvi v Československu roku 1968,” Historický Časopis 47, no. 3 (1979): 447–65.
24. Kaplan, Tĕžká cesta, 54.

The Catholic press and Catholic associations were brought under
strict state control, as were all other manifestations of civil society
in the country. The regime quickly established a new organization
of pro-Communist clergy to replace the defunct MHKD. The new
organization was named Pacem in Terris, for Pope John XXIII’s cel-
ebrated encyclical.25
Lasting Reforms
The Prague Spring, short-lived though it was, gives an indica-
tion of the influence of Vatican II on Catholicism in Czech lands.
The DKO, which emerged as a result of both the Council and the
Prague Spring, replaced the pro-regime MHKD, which dissolved
itself on March 25, 1968.26 Though the organization was original-
ly intended to include only clergy, the laity soon became involved
in laying the groundwork; already before the DKO’s founding
congress in Velehrad in mid-May, laymen had made their mark.
At Velehrad, Czech and Slovak branches of the DKO were set up,
with Tomášek as chairman of the organization’s statewide pre-
sidium, which included laypeople.
Opening the May congress, Tomášek stated, “The purpose of
the DKO is to help the constituted Church hierarchy toward the
fulfillment of the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council in our
country.”27 The DKO’s goal was thus to bring together the hitherto-
scattered attempts to effect conciliar reforms in Czechoslovakia’s
Catholic Church and to prepare the ground for the eventual imple-
mentation of conciliar teachings via parish and diocesan councils,
pastoral councils, and other new institutions.
25. Sabrina P. Ramet, Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-
Central Europe and Russia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 124.
26. On the DKO, see Cuhra, “Dílo koncilové obnovy v kontextu státnĕ-církevní
politiky pražkého jara,” in Koncil a česká společnost, 112–24; Svoboda, Na stranĕ náro-
da, 66–71, 75–77; Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 289.
27. Svoboda, Na stranĕ národa, 69.

In the action program proclaimed at the congress, it noted
the “insufficiently realized conclusions of the Council,” includ-
ing the insufficient striving for ecumenical dialogue and dia-
logue with nonbelievers. It listed among its tasks “the develop-
ment and spread of the theology of the Council at all levels of the
Church’s operation.”28 This included an emphasis on the Church
as the people of God, a bigger role for the laity, and the desire
to harmonize the execution of legitimate Church authority with
initiatives from below. Among its activities, it hoped to hold
“modernized” worship services for youth, educational lectures,
and public discussions and seminars.
At first, some Church circles were suspicious of the new orga-
nization. Václav Vaško recounts the initial resistance to the DKO
from the seminarians at Litomĕřice, who suspected the new or-
ganization of being a continuation of the MHKD and presuming
to speak in the name of the Church. Vaško explained to them
that the DKO’s intent was not to speak for the bishops, but rath-
er to press the government into allowing the bishops to take up
their leadership responsibilities in the Church. Among those con-
vinced by Vaško was the future archbishop of Prague, Miloslav
Vlk, who invited Vaško to speak at Litomĕřice, which he did to
a full house of seminary students who then took the DKO’s pro-
gram as their own.29
The regime, for its part, had mixed feelings about the DKO.
On the one hand, some Communist authorities anticipated that
the DKO, inspired as it was by a modern theology, would take a
positive stance toward Czechoslovakia’s social system, and that
a progressive wing in the movement could play the role formerly
played by the MHKD.30 On the other hand, the government ex-
28. Ibid., 67.

29. Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 362n18; the original
source is Václav Vaško’s memoir, Ne vším jsem byl rád (Kostelní Vydří: Karmelitánské
nakl., 1999).
30. Cuhra, “Dílo koncilové obnovy,” 119–20.

pressed concern over the organization’s growth, initiative, and
“activization of the Church,” and it continued to postpone of-
ficial approval. That approval never came. By October 1968, the
Interior Ministry had rejected legalization, and on November 17
the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslova-
kia designated the organization as hostile to socialism. The DKO
lived on until 1970 without legal authorization and then contin-
ued on in the fantasies of the security police, who later created
the myth that the organization had been a radical, extremist,
militant force that opposed the regime and terrorized priests
sympathizing with the government.31
Another change resulting from the confluence of the Prague
Spring and Vatican II was the reopening of the seminary at Olo-
mouc.32 Shut down in 1950 by the Communists, who allowed only
the seminary in Litomĕřice to remain in operation, calls for its res-
toration emerged as early as March 1968, as Catholics needed more
seminary seats in order to address a growing shortage of priests.33
The government took its time in authorizing the reopening, but
the Ministry of Culture finally gave its approval in early Septem-
ber 1968 in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion. Technically,
the seminary was not a new institution, or even the revival of an
older one, but rather, as its official name implied, “the Cyrillo-
Methodian Faculty in Prague with its seat in Litomĕřice, branch
in Olomouc.” Though the seminary had inadequate space and
faced both the municipal government’s hostility and the Culture
31. Ibid., 123.

32. Miloslav Poisl, “Obnova Cyrilometodějské bohoslovecké fakulty v Olomouci
a vliv II. Vatikánského koncilu na teologické vzdělání,” in Koncil a česká společnost,
138–47; Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 289.
33. In 1948, there were 2,934 priests in the Czech lands; this number had
dropped to 1,978 by 1968; Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 122.
The numbers for Moravia-Silesia, where Olomouc is located, were 2,041 in 1948 and
1,011 in 1968. In 1968, 26 percent of the parishes in Moravia-Silesia were without
priests; Poisl, “Obnova Cyrilometodějské bohoslovecké fakulty v Olomouci a vliv II.
Vatikánského koncilu na teologické vzdělání,” 139.

Ministry’s opposition to granting it full independence, its opera-
tion was not halted until June 1974.
In its short six-year existence, the seminary at Olomouc made
important contributions to the Catholic Church in Moravia. Over
one hundred students completed their theological education there
and went on to priestly vocations, including a number of impor-
tant Moravian leaders and teachers in the Church. The influence
of the Second Vatican Council was discernible. Teachers at the in-
stitute displayed a sincere interest in the Council and in new ideas
regarding ecumenism and modern theological impulses.34
A key feature of the Czechoslovak aggiornamento was the fact
that laypeople, including women, were able to study theology at
Olomouc during the first two years of the institute’s existence in
a critical and modern atmosphere.35 Nevertheless, Olomouc was
no conciliar paradise. Certain topics (such as clerical celibacy) and
behaviors (going to the cinema) were off-limits, and the spiritual
formation of the clergy followed a traditional model.36
An important way in which Vatican II made itself felt in
Czechoslovakia from 1965 onward was via liturgical reform.37 Un-
like most of the other Church reforms, this one began in early 1965
when the Statewide Liturgical Commission was set up. Czechoslo-
vakia’s bishops issued a pastoral letter on liturgical reform along
with a directive on March 7, 1965, the First Sunday of Lent. The
letter—addressed to clergy—supported folk singing at Mass, the
liturgical training of believers, the introduction of the vernacular
into the liturgy, and the adaptation of liturgical space. The direc-
tives included a simplified rite and changes and additions to the

35. Poisl, “Obnova Cyrilometodějské bohoslovecké fakulty v Olomouci a vliv II.
Vatikánského koncilu na teologické vzdělání,” 143.
36. Ibid., 144–45.
37. For a discussion of liturgical reform, see František Kunetka, “Liturgická
reforma II. Vatikánského a její realizace v moravských diecézich,” in Koncil a česká
společnost, 148–65.

Mass, such as intercessory prayers and lay reading of the scrip-
tures.
As implementation of liturgical change proceeded, there was
considerable controversy over what proportion of the Mass to
leave in Latin. This subject bred a stormy discussion at the No-
vember 9, 1967, meeting of the Czech Liturgical Commission. A
small group of enthusiastic priests and laity did the actual work
of preparing and implementing the reforms, which were received
for the most part by congregations without controversy and even
with a certain interest. Liturgical reform thus proceeded apace
right from 1965. The Prague Spring seems to have had little bear-
ing on it, though “normalization” brought more priests into the
process from Pacem in Terris, a group not known for its eager-
ness for reform.
The issue of language also proved crucial. First, vernacular lit-
urgy had a special place in Czech historical memory. In the ninth
century, the Church in the Moravian state, to which the “Apostles
to the Slavs” saints Cyril and Methodius ministered, adopted the
Slavonic liturgy for a time.38 That liturgy was later abandoned for
an exclusively Latin liturgy.39 In the fifteenth century, the Hus-
site movement promoted worship, preaching, and singing in the
Czech language, which carried on in Czech Protestantism through
the sixteenth century, until its suppression after Bohemia’s defeat
at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620.40 Given these precedents,
the postconciliar reforms could be seen as a continuation, or even
38. For a discussion of Church Slavonic in medieval Moravia, see Jean W. Sed-
lar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 1994), 144–45.
39. At the meeting of the Czech Liturgical Commission on April 22, 1965,
Tomášek advocated the Czech-language liturgy, stating, “Let us recall the great bat-
tle in our land for the Slavonic liturgy in the past; therefore we must be in the front
lines of those who want the implementation of the vernacular”; Tomášek, Koncil a
česká společnost, 156.
40. On the Hussite promotion of the Czech language, see Sedlar, East Central
Europe in the Middle Ages, 444–46.

a vindication, of past efforts to foster worship in Bohemia in a
Slavic language.
Vatican II led to further action on a liturgical issue whose
resonance in Czech history matched that of vernacular worship:
the reception of the Eucharist “in both kinds.” A defining feature
of the fifteenth-century Hussite movement was the demand for
the laity to receive during the Eucharist both bread and wine:
the Body and Blood of Christ.41 This so-called Utraquism was a
practice of the early Church, but by the Middle Ages, the wine/
Blood was reserved for the clergy alone in the Western Church, a
distinction challenged first by Hussites and then by Protestants
a century later. As with the promotion of vernacular worship, the
communion in both kinds for the laity, permitted thanks to Vati-
can II, could be perceived as a vindication of the Hussites. Argu-
ably, it also removed an obstacle standing between Czech patrio-
tism and Catholicism.
Perhaps no change in Czechoslovakia better represented both
the spirit of the Council and the spirit of the Prague Spring than
the development of dialogue both between Catholics and Prot-
estants and between Catholics and Marxists. Indeed, the DKO’s
action program criticized the Church of the past for “insufficient
efforts at ecumenical dialogue and dialogue with nonbelievers.”42
Czech Protestants took an interest in the reforms in the Catholic
Church, and several Czech Protestants attended the Council as
observers—most famously, the Czech Brethren’s Josef Hromád-
ka, who reported on the Council in the journal Křesťanská Revue.
As Czechoslovakia’s regime began to liberalize, ecumenical dia-
41. The second part of the Four Articles of Prague issued by the Hussite lead-
ership in October 1420 read, “That the Holy Sacrament of the body and blood of
Christ under the two kinds of bread and wine shall be freely administered to all true
Christians who are not excluded from communion by mortal sin”; quoted in Jaro-
slav Krejčí, “A Culture of Ecumenical Convergence? Reflections on the Czech Experi-
ence,” Religion, State and Society 20, no. 2 (1992): 248.
42. Svoboda, Na stranĕ národa, 67.

logue grew, and it became a regular part of Church life in the sec-
ond half of the 1960s.43
The apogee came in the ecumenical seminars held from 1967
to 1969 at the Protestant seminary in Prague-Jircháře. These
were initially sponsored by Protestants, but Catholics soon be-
gan to participate avidly, helping to organize the events. Instruc-
tors from the Catholic seminary at Litomĕřice sometimes took
part. These periodic meetings, some lasting as long as two weeks,
attracted on average between fifty and a hundred participants—
both Catholic and Protestant—and produced a core group of
around three hundred Czech Christians interested in theological
reform. The program consisted of a short prayer, followed by a
lecture and then a discussion. Topics included the thought of im-
portant foreign Catholic theologians such as Yves Congar, Hans
Küng, and Karl Rahner. Growing out of the networks established
at Litomĕřice were joint efforts at the translation of important
texts, reading groups centered on patristic writings, and work
with youth.
Dialogue with Marxists also proceeded in the years immedi-
ately following the Council, which overlapped with those lead-
ing up to the Prague Spring.44 Both reform movements fed off
of each other. Some reform-minded Marxists began to take an
interest in both the Council and in the Jircháře seminars. One of
them was the sociologist Erika Kadlecová, who established ties
with the younger Catholic generation—and, soon thereafter, be-
came the Prague Spring’s head of the Secretariat for Church Af-
fairs at the Ministry of Culture. For their part, some Catholics,
too, experienced a growing interest in Marxism. For example,
the émigré theologian Karel Skalický explained that the Prague
Spring prompted him to take a deeper interest in Marxism both
43. On this ecumenical dialogue, see Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v
Československu, 286–88.
44. On Catholic-Marxist dialogue, see ibid., 288.

in theory and practice, to develop a better understanding of the
situation in which Czechoslovakia found itself.
By the early 1970s, so-called normalization had undone nearly
all of the reforms of the Prague Spring, including the ones connect-
ed with religion. The Catholic Church once again faced repression
and harassment akin to what it had encountered in the pre–Prague
Spring period. Only some Czech Catholics embraced the teaching
of the Council with enthusiasm. Many pastors and laity, it seems,
saw the reforms as a luxury for churches operating in free societ-
ies, not pertinent to a situation in which the Church was fighting
to survive and thus needed to rely on older tried and tested val-
ues.45 This reluctance was aided by the regime’s refusal to allow the
collected conciliar documents to be made available in Czech until
the early 1980s (apart from a small run in an ecclesiastical journal
of the clergy).46 Contacts with Catholics and other Christians out-
side the Soviet Bloc were also impeded. Finally, there was the cau-
tion of clergy simply not wanting to draw to themselves the atten-
tion of the regime. However, despite these formidable obstacles,
Vatican II continued to exercise at least some influence on Catho-
lics in the Czech lands during the final two decades of Communist
rule in Czechoslovakia.
Reconciling Postconciliar Life with “Normalization”

Even after the Prague Spring’s suppression, Council-inspired cat-
echetical materials were both published legally and smuggled
into Czechoslovakia from the West, chiefly from West Germany.
Czechs adopted and adapted Western theological works for use
in clerical and catechetical formation.47 In 1974, Caritas officially
45. Ibid., 301.

46. Petr Fiala and Jiří Hanuš, “Průběh a význam koncilních změn v katolické
církvi v českém a moravském prostředí,” in Koncil a česká společnost, 176.
47. For a discussion of the influence of Western—mostly German—publica-

published Naše víra (Our faith), which was actually a translation
of the Frankfurt Catechism for Adults. Its subtitle, Sborník úvah o
katolické víře (Collection of considerations regarding the Catholic
faith), implied that the faith was not carved in stone but needed
ongoing consideration.
A chapter entitled “Delicate Chapters from Church History”
criticized the Church for its treatment of Jan Hus and the Hus-
sites, the suppression of Protestantism after the Battle of White
Mountain, and the trials of wizards and witches. It also mentioned
the “unworthy” popes of the Middle Ages. Unlike preconciliar
handbooks, which tended to blame others for these tragic events,
Naše víra thus took a more positive attitude toward non-Catholics.
For example, in a subchapter on Jan Hus and the Hussites, it ac-
knowledged Hus’s “moral fervor,” his attempts to reform bad con-
ditions in the Church, and his personal integrity and prayer life.48
If official Catholic publishing under “normalization” could
draw from West German theological works, the same was true for
the samizdat, or underground, Catholic press. Thus, the long-term
influence of the Council came to the Czech lands via theological
handbooks from West Germany distributed in Czech translation.
Used in the underground teaching of theology, they had an influ-
ence on Czech Catholic elites. These handbooks, nicknamed the
Blue, Red, and White Books, were adapted to the Czech situation.
The Red Book analyzed the Church’s place in the world in light
of conciliar teaching, asserting the need for ongoing reform in
the Church, admitting the Church’s liability for past wrongs, and
presenting the Church not as a “perfect society,” but as “the peo-
ple of God” on pilgrimage. The Blue Book, among other things,
took a historical, ressourcement-inspired approach in examining
Jesus Christ in historical context, devoting attention to early
tions on Catholicism in the Czech lands, see Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v

Christian interpretations of his message and to the teaching of
the Church fathers. The White Book, the most theologically ad-
vanced, was geared toward graduate-level students of theology;
it discussed the Church’s situation in the Communist world. It
gave a positive appraisal of steps taken by John XXIII, Paul VI,
and the postconciliar Church to develop better relations with the
Communist world, noting how these developments had improved
the situation of Christians living under Communist rule. Though
they were translations of works published abroad, these text-
books were used by various study circles of Catholic activists and
at dozens of underground seminaries. They had a lasting impact
on Czech religious formation.
Samizdat material produced both at home and abroad by Czech
Catholic thinkers and activists reflected conciliar values. The émi-
gré theologian Skalický, for example, played a key role in one of the
most interesting and fruitful postconciliar initiatives for Czech Ca-
tholicism—the reinterpretation of the Czech Catholic past in ways
that reconciled Czech nationalism with Catholicism, thereby over-
coming traditional Czech prejudices against the Church. Though
living in exile in Rome, Skalický brought a Vatican II–inspired per-
spective on Czech history to the dissident community in his na-
tive land via smuggled publications and Vatican Radio broadcasts.
Working at the Christian Academy in Rome, Skalický produced an
important study of the “phenomenology of the Czech historical-
national consciousness” in September 1976.49 Through a kind of
“historical-cultural geology,” he identified six “strata” of Czech his-
tory, which he connected with experiences of freedom in Czech na-
tional memory. He cited the traditions of Cyril and Methodius, of
the medieval ruler St. Václav, of the Hussites and Bohemian Breth-
ren, of St. Jan Nepomucký and the Catholic Reformation, of the
national revival and Tomáš Masaryk, and even the Socialist tradi-
49. Tomáš Halík, Víra a kultura: Pokoncilní vývoj českého katolicismu v reflexi
časopisu Studie (Prague: Zvon, 1995), 101–3; Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v

tion as manifested under Dubček. Each tradition, in Skalický’s es-
timation, represented a different kind of freedom for the Czechs,
such as linguistic, cultural, religious, civil, and social.
Having demonstrated the great heterogeneity and complexity
of the Czech national-historical consciousness, Skalický argued
that what holds these varied elements together and gives them
continuity is Jesus Christ. Skalický’s attempt to produce a way of
thinking about the Czech past and present integrating a variety
of otherwise disparate currents can be seen as an example of the
sort of broad dialogue with all components of society demanded
by Vatican II. More specifically, by attempting to synthesize Cath-
olic and Protestant traditions, he advanced the ecumenical mis-
sion of the Council.
Back home, the most significant and prominent Czech Catho-
lic theologian was Josef Zvěřina, released in 1965 from a lengthy
prison term. His short samizdat work of 1980, Malý hovor katolick-
ého teologa o TGM, was another indication that the spirit of Vati-
can II was stimulating new thinking about the Czech past. Seventy
years earlier, Tomáš Masaryk had been a fervent critic of the Cath-
olic Church of his time, accusing it of superficiality, pharasaism,
an anti-scientific attitude, counterproductive moral and political
activity, and entanglement in the “theocratic” Austrian state.50
Zvěřina lamented the Church’s inability at that time to accept Ma-
saryk’s valid rebukes, responding to them with repentance and
purification, while addressing his unjustified rebukes with an hon-
est, straightforward dialogue.51 Instead, the Church replied with
calumny, anger, and anti-Semitism, as well as political and judicial
interventions.
The Church of Vatican II, however, was a different story. It
was slowly ridding itself of much of what had bothered Masaryk,
transforming itself into a Catholic Church that Czechoslovakia’s
50. Josef Zvěřina, “Malý hovor katolického teologa o TGM,” in Teologické texty;
časopis pro teoretické a praktické otázky teologie, no. 4 (1997): 130–32.
51. Ibid., 131.

founder could have respected. This was a Catholic Church in the
process of renewal, seeking unity with other Christians and a
positive presence in the world. It had become a church in pursuit
of “humility, patience, mutual respect, and altruistic service.”52 In
this way, Zvěřina sought to reconcile one of the greatest figures of
modern Czech history with the Church from which he had apos-
tatized as a young man. Zvěřina’s success would remove a crucial
barrier separating Czech liberal nationalism from Catholicism.
The intensified concern for human rights that began to char-
acterize the postconciliar Church throughout the world was not
without its impact in the Czech lands. Lay Catholics such as math-
ematician and activist Václav Benda and priests such as Zvěřina
and Václav Malý became prominent figures in the Charter 77 hu-
man rights movement.53 Malý was also a cofounder of the Com-
mittee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (Výbor na Ob-
ranu Nespravedlivě Stíhaných, or VONS). Almost by definition,
human rights advocacy in the Czech lands entailed dialogue and
cooperation with non-Catholics and nonbelievers, keeping in tune
with the spirit of the Council.
Such cooperation dated not only to the Prague Spring, but even
back to the early 1950s, when Catholics, Protestants, and Marxists
had bonded while together in Stalinist-era prisons.54 Even though
Archbishop Tomášek at first distanced himself and the Church
from VONS, by the mid-1980s he, too, was speaking out on behalf
of religious freedom and human rights in Czechoslovakia.55 To this
end, he was influenced and inspired by the example and encour-
52. Ibid., 132.
53. For a discussion of Catholics and Charter 77, see Luxmoore and Babiuch, “In
Search of Faith, Part 2: Charter 77 and the Return to Spiritual Values in the Czech
Republic,” Religion, State and Society 23, no. 3 (1995): 291–304.
54. Ibid., 297.
55. For an explanation of Tomášek’s initial reluctance to support Charter 77 and
his subsequent change of heart, see František Tomášek, Kardinál Tomášek: Svědectví
o dobrém katechetovi, bojácném biskupovi a statečném kardinálovi, ed. Jan Hartmann
(Prague: Zvon České katolické nakladatelství, 1994), 63–71.

agement of Czech Catholics such as Zvěřina, as well as the Catholic
Church’s Polish pope: John Paul II.56
From 1985 to 1989, the Church in the Czech lands (and even
more so in Slovakia) experienced a revitalization. This is clear. In
a mass pilgrimage to Velehrad in 1985, hundreds of thousands
of Czech and Slovak Catholics expressed their support for the
Church and—at the same time—displeasure with regime poli-
cies. A petition by Moravian shopkeeper Augustin Navrátil gar-
nered more than half a million signatures, as well as the support
of Archbishop Tomášek, in its demands for religious rights and
freedoms. One can look also to the courageous candlelight pro-
test for religious freedom in Bratislava on Good Friday 1988;
to the events connected with the impending canonization of
Blessed Agnes of Bohemia; and to the underground Church that
survived and in some ways even thrived during the period of
“normalization.”57 While these developments were not directly
tied to the Council, most of them reflected its spirit in their con-
cerns for religious freedom and human rights and in their lay
activism. Navrátil’s petition, for example, included among its de-
mands Vatican II–inspired calls for independent lay associations
and parish councils.58
56. Already since at least 1977, while he was still archbishop of Kraków, Karol
Cardinal Wojtyła had been urging Tomášek to take a tougher stance toward Czecho-
slovakia’s repressive regime. Just three weeks after his accession to the papacy,
John Paul publicly remarked that he wanted to give the “Silenced Church” a voice;
Cuhra, Československo-vatikánská jednání 1968–1989 (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé
dějiny AV ČR, 2001), 118–19; Svoboda, Na straně národa, 118.
57. Most or all of these developments are covered in Balík and Hanuš, Katolická
církev v Československu, 29–36; Janice Broun and Grażyna Sikorska, Conscience and
Captivity: Religion in Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Cen-
ter, 1988), 85–98; Ramet, “Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia,” 388–90. For a focus
on Slovakia, see David Doellinger, “Prayers, Pilgrimages, and Petitions: The Secret
Church and the Growth of Civil Society in Slovakia,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal
of Nationalism and Ethnicity 30, no. 2 (June 2002): 215–40.
58. For the English-language text of Navrátil’s petition, see Broun and Sikorska,
Conscience and Captivity, 319–21.

Conclusions
Coming a few years after Vatican II, but trying to do much the
same for Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime as the Council had
done for the Church, the Prague Spring gave reform-minded Com-
munists the opportunity to enact a “socialism with a human face.”
This then became the context in which the Church in the Czech
lands could implement its own changes based on the Council. The
brief blossoming of reform communism presented Czech Catho-
lics with greater access to Western theological currents; increased
opportunities for dialogue with non-Catholics and nonbelievers,
including Marxists; lay access to seminary education; and greater
freedom overall for the Church to operate.
Though the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 meant that
these changes would be short-lived, both for the reform Commu-
nists and for the Church, Vatican II’s influence continued under
“normalization,” albeit in a different, attenuated form. The legacy
of the Council lived on in Catholic human rights activism, coop-
eration with non-Catholic dissidents, and certain lay initiatives.
It also gave support to those currents in Czech Catholic thought
that sought to reconcile Catholicism with an often anti-Catholic
Czech national tradition, thereby removing obstacles standing be-
tween Czech patriotism and the Church. A particularly crucial ve-
hicle for this reconciliation was the vernacular liturgy. While the
springtime of Czech communism indeed gave way to the bleak
winter of “normalization,” the parallel and interrelated spring-
time of Czech Catholicism did not disappear entirely. Instead, it
sustained itself in new ways during the closing years of Commu-
nist rule over the Czech lands.

FIVE
VATICAN II
AND POLAND
• • • Piotr H. Kosicki
Five decades after the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic

Church’s place in Polish public life remains bitterly contested.
Polish commentators—Catholic and secular alike—regularly ques-
tion whether Vatican II had any practical impact on Poland.1 The
few Catholics who style themselves as reformist “children of
Vatican II” must fight tooth and nail to make themselves heard.2
Opponents of the Council’s reforms—including the excommuni-
cated “Lefebvrist” Society of St. Pius X—have seen to the trans-
lation and circulation in Polish of their diatribes against Vati-
can II.3 Even the Polish episcopate seems uncertain about the
conciliar legacy: in 2014, its deputy head equated Catholic re-
formism with “the uncompromising, public discrediting of those
who stand in defense of the truth”—in other words, the road “to
relativism.”4 Polish commentators seem right to wonder if the
1. See, especially, the May 1999 special issue of the Znak monthly devoted to
the legacy of Vatican II for Poland; “Co Sobór zmienił w Polsce? Ankieta ‘Znaku,’ ”
Znak, no. 528 (1999): 31–136. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the
French, Italian, and Polish in this chapter are the author’s.)
2. Zbigniew Nosowski, ed., Dzieci Soboru zadają pytania: Rozmowy o Soborze
Watykańskim II (Warsaw: Biblioteka WIĘZI, 1996).
3. Marcel Lefebvre, Oni Jego zdetronizowali: Od liberalizmu do apostazji, tragedia
soborowa, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: Te Deum, 2002).
4. Marek Jędraszewski, “Obecność Kościoła w życiu publicznym” (June 12,
127
fiftieth anniversary of Gaudium et spes, Apostolicam actuositatem,
Dignitatis humanae, and the Council’s other revolutionary teach-
ings carries any meaning in the homeland of Pope John Paul II.
The reason for this state of affairs is an astonishingly low
awareness of both Poland’s role at Vatican II and the Council’s
importance for Poland. In fact, historians have barely touched
the topic. As of the Council’s fiftieth anniversary, only one mono-
graph has appeared—in any world language—on any aspect of
the subject.5 Several journals and memoirs of signature Council
participants—Dominican theologian Yves Congar, Jesuit theolo-
gian Henri de Lubac6—have been translated into Polish; a hand-
ful of Polish bishops have published brief commentaries on the
Council.7 Poland’s reformist laity has been writing about Vatican
II since its convocation, but its writings fall mostly within the
realms of philosophy and theology, not history.8 Although the
2014), http://archidiecezja.lodz.pl/new/?news_id=73d36718fd6f4ad368f76e32de053
36f; accessed June 14, 2014.
5. That lone monograph chronicles some of the bishops’ activities in Rome:
Piotr Rutkowski, Polscy biskupi jako ojcowie Soboru Watykańskiego II (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, 2014). The best
available overview of the broader subject is Piotr Mazurkiewicz, “Recepcja Soboru,”
in Kościół i religijność Polaków 1945–1999: Praca Zbiorowa, ed. Witold Zdaniewicz and
Tadeusz Zembrzuski (Warsaw-Poznań: Instytut Statystyki Kościoła Katolickiego
SAC/Pallottinum, 2000), 19–44.
6. Yves Congar, Rozmowy Jesienne, trans. Maria Deskur (Warsaw: Wydawnic-
two Księży Marianów, 2001); Henri de Lubac, Medytacje o Kościele, trans. Izabela
Białkowska-Cichoń (Kraków: WAM, 1997).
7. Bohdan Bejze, Kronika Soboru Watykańskiego II (Częstochowa: Niedzie-
la, 2000); Jerzy Stroba, Zadania wyznaczone przez Sobór Watykański II (Poznań:
Księgarnia św. Wojciecha, 1988).
8. While the weekly journal Tygodnik Powszechny featured continuous cov-
erage of the conciliar sessions while they were in progress, the monthlies Więź
(Bond) and Znak (Sign) regularly presented discussion forums and thought-pieces
reflecting on both the Council’s broader significance and its specific consequences
for Poland. Więź, for example, published the following “themed” issues during the
Council years: “The Council” (April 1962); “The Council and Us” (February 1963); “The
Spiritual Testament of John XXIII” (June 1963); “Tradition and Reform in Polish
Catholicism” (July–August and September 1963); “Problems of Ecumenism” (Janu-
128 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

sixteen documents produced by Vatican II were published in a
bilingual Polish-Latin edition in 1968, these texts were censored;
secret police insured that the volume would not reach a wide au-
dience. It was not until 1986 that the average Polish reader was
able to obtain the conciliar documents in his own language.9
Even the Polish presence at Vatican II has gone virtually un-
documented. Although brief mentions appear in various Eng-
lish-, French-, and Italian-language histories, only since the 2005
death of John Paul II have a small handful of published primary
sources (diaries, correspondence, speeches) appeared in Polish.
The most important of these is a collection of the future pon-
tiff’s speeches and working documents for the Council, pub-
lished in a single volume alongside a monograph-length account
of Wojtyła’s participation in the Council.10 A similar volume has
recently appeared documenting the conciliar engagement of Po-
land’s longtime Communist-era head bishop (1948–81), Stefan
Cardinal Wyszyński.11
Unlike the Hungarian or Czechoslovak presence at the Coun-
cil, the Polish presence was substantial: twenty-six bishops during
the First Session, sixty-one in total over the course of the Council’s
four sessions—as well as a lay auditor and close to a dozen jour-
nalists. Communist Poland was, in demographic terms, an over-
whelmingly Catholic country, more confessionally homogeneous
than at any other time in modern Polish history.12 Yet demograph-
ary 1964); “The Decisive Phase of the Council” (October 1964); “The Vocation and
Liberty of the Laity” (March 1965); and “The New Consciousness of the Church”
(September 1965).
9. Julian Groblicki and Eugeniusz Florkowski, eds., Sobór Watykański II: Konsty-
tucje, dekrety, deklaracje; Tekst łacińsko-polski (Poznań: Pallottinum, 1968).
10. Robert Skrzypczak, Karol Wojtyła na Soborze Watykańskim II: Zbiór wystąpień
(Warsaw: Centrum Myśli Jana Pawła II, 2011).
11. Stefan Wyszyński, Stefan Kardynał Wyszyński Prymas Polski, Ojciec Soboru
Watykańskiego II 1962–1965: Wybór dokumentów, ed. Stanisław Wilk and Anna Wójcik
(Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013).
12. On the implications for Catholic life of postwar Poland’s relative confessional
VATICAN II AND POLAND 129

ics did not automatically mean that the Poles would be able to
make themselves seen and heard in Rome. As Jan Grootaers has
argued, “Polish participation in Vatican II had its own particular
qualities. The ‘reception’ of the Council was, likewise, also neces-
sarily very different.”13 Two factors ultimately gave Poland a voice
at Vatican II: a handful of bishops with just enough visibility and
political capital to be serious movers and shakers in Communist
Poland and a well-established, reform-minded laity with the expe-
rience needed to have an impact both at home and abroad.14
Though no one could have known it at the time, the Polish
conciliar delegation included a future pontiff, Karol Wojtyła.
The future John Paul II participated in the first two sessions as
Kraków’s auxiliary bishop, then in its final two sessions as met-
ropolitan of the same archdiocese. Twenty years later, as pontiff,
he famously insisted, “For me the Second Vatican Council has
always been—in a particular fashion during these years of my
pontificate—the constant reference point of every pastoral ac-
tion, with conscious commitment to translate its directives into
concrete, faithful action, at the level of every church and of the
whole Church.”15
This chapter will offer a broad overview of the intertwined
stories of Poland’s place at Vatican II and of Vatican II’s impact
on Poland. It draws both on existing scholarship and on a large
and ethnic homogeneity, see Kosicki, “Masters in Their Own Home or Defenders of
the Human Person? Wojciech Korfanty, Antisemitism, and the Illiberal Rights-Talk
of Polish Christian Democracy,” Modern Intellectual History (2015) FirstView, DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1479244314000857.
13. Jan Grootaers, Actes et acteurs à Vatican II (Leuven: University Press/Uitge-
verij Peeters, 1998), 326.
14. Kosicki, “Between Catechism and Revolution: Poland, France, and the Story
of Catholicism and Socialism in Europe, 1878–1958” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univer-
sity, 2011).
15. John Paul II, January 25, 1985, quoted in Peter Hebblethwaite, “John Paul II,”
in Modern Catholicism: Vatican II and After, ed. Adrian Hastings (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 448.

set of primary sources (published and unpublished). The principal
chronological focus will be the years 1958–68. In practice, howev-
er, the chapter will touch on the entire Communist period, from
1944–45 through the appointment in August 1989 of Poland’s first
non-Communist postwar prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki—
a longtime leading lay activist, who had been in Rome in 1963 for
the funeral of Pope John XXIII.
Both participation in the Council and the subsequent imple-
mentation of conciliar reforms were substantially conditioned by
the dilemmas of life in Communist Poland: diplomatic double-
speak, secret police agents, and the need for what George Orwell
once described as “ideological translation.”16 As the diary of Pol-
ish Catholic journalist and politician Janusz Zabłocki reminds
us, the Polish experience of Vatican II was also inextricably em-
bedded within the life-and-death stakes of Cold War geopolitics:
of the menace that engulfed the world, the average Pole had no idea.
And so it goes, that as a result of the constant threat of nuclear ho-
locaust, we have simply become accustomed to it, and subsequent
events in this area cease to make an impression on us. All the more
so, because the censors filter information, and it is usually difficult
to decode their true meaning. The day that will be the last day of
mankind on earth, may thus find us dreaming beautiful dreams,
with no sense of danger whatsoever. Maybe it’s better this way,
since we have no control over our fate in any case?17
Yet, despite the profound constraints imposed by the geogra-

phy of the Iron Curtain, the Council had a revolutionary impact
on Poland, encouraging some of the most important episcopal
initiatives of the Communist period and laying the groundwork
for an eventual partial normalization of diplomatic relations
16. On the influence of the Communist security apparatus on the Catholic

Church in Poland, see Paweł Skibiński, “Infiltracja komunistycznych służb specjal-
nych w polskim Kościele—co już wiemy? Informacja na temat stanu badań,” Teolo-
gia Polityczna, no. 1 (2003–4): 57–70.
17. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:440.

between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of Poland. The
Council also triggered an efflorescence of independent activism
by the Polish Catholic laity. Finally—and perhaps most impor-
tantly from the standpoint of the universal Church—it made an
international player of Karol Wojtyła, the future John Paul II.
Poland: How “Silent” prior to Vatican II?

When Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, primate of Poland, was taken
into custody by functionaries of the Polish secret police on Sep-
tember 25, 1953, it seemed that the last bastion of Catholic au-
tonomy behind the Iron Curtain had fallen silent. By this time,
Josif Slipyj, Alojzije Stepinac, Josef Beran, and József Mindszen-
ty had all been in prison for years.
In Poland, Stalinism’s attack on the Church had seemed more
a creeping infiltration than a frontal assault.18 After an uneasy,
but overall amicable, first two years of coexistence, the relation-
ship between the Polish episcopate and Poland’s postwar Com-
munist establishment became more strained—but still tenable.19
Although clergy who had been active in interwar public life or
had fought in the wartime resistance were persecuted, impris-
oned, or killed as part of an ongoing “civil war” between Com-
munist authorities and remnants of the Home Army,20 episcopal
authorities pursued a path of accommodation, even signing a
memorandum of understanding with the government in April
1950. It was not until 1951 that the first high-profile arrests and
show trials began within the Polish Church.21 Unlike in the oth-
18. The Polish historian Jan Żaryn has described the approach as “salami tac-
tics”; Żaryn, Kościół a władza w Polsce (1945–1950) (Warsaw: DiG, 1997), 151.
19. Antoni Dudek and Ryszard Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce (1945–1989)
(Kraków: Znak, 2003), 9–62.
20. On the “civil war,” see John Micgiel, “ ‘Bandits and Reactionaries’: The Sup-
pression of the Opposition in Poland, 1944–1946,” in The Establishment of Commu-
nist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, 93–110.
21. See, for example, Jan Śledzianowski, Ksiądz Czesław Kaczmarek—biskup

er Communist-run countries with significant Catholic popula-
tions, Poland’s primate never stood trial after his arrest in 1953,
which—unlike for Stepinac, Mindszenty, or Beran—was kept of-
ficially secret, with state authorities announcing only that they
had “suspended him in his functions.”22
To the extent, then, that the Catholic Church in Poland was a
“Church of Silence” in the postwar decade, this was far less true
than in any of the other countries discussed in this volume. Not
only did the clergy and bishops have more maneuvering room
than their counterparts elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain, so did
the Polish laity. Catholic charities and student associations were
active until 1949; then they were co-opted, their more recalcitrant
membership arrested.23 The high-circulation Catholic journal Ty-
godnik Powszechny (Universal weekly), founded in April 1945 on
the authority of Kraków archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha, ap-
peared without interruption until March 1953, when editors re-
fused to print an obituary for Joseph Stalin.24 The Catholic Uni-
versity of Lublin—the only nonpublic university behind the Iron
Curtain—never closed its doors, though its faculty, students, and
staff faced significant pressure, and state agencies regularly im-
posed politically motivated quotas, caps, and taxes.25
Life in Stalinist Poland was difficult—occasionally bloody, or
even lethal—for members of these organizations. Yet there was
never any question of eliminating the Catholic Church from Pol-
ish public life. Even the agenda of “nationalizing” the Church was
kielecki 1895–1963 (Kielce: Kuria Diecezjalna, 1991), 225–70; Żaryn, “Ostatnie wyg-
nanie biskupa Stanisława Adamskiego (1952–1956),” Więź, no. 474 (1998): 164–72.
22. On state policy toward Primate Stefan Wyszyński, see Bartłomiej Noszczak,
Polityka państwa wobec Kościóla rzymskokatolickiego w Polsce w okresie internowania
prymasa Stefana Wyszyńskiego 1953–1956 (Warsaw: IPN-KŚZpNP, 2008).
23. Andrzej Friszke, Między wojną a więzieniem 1945–1953 (Warsaw: Biblioteka
WIĘZI, 2015), 134–204.
24. Christina Manetti, “Catholic Responses to Poland’s ‘New Reality,’ 1945–
1953,” East European Politics and Societies 26, no. 2 (2012): 296–312.
25. Noszczak, Polityka państwa wobec Kościoła rzymskokatolickiego, 266–300.

pursued with considerably less vigor than in other countries.26
True, the State Office of Confessional Affairs, established in
1950, worked together with secret police to create a movement
of “patriot priests” who put loyalty to party and state before God
and pope.27 In 1954, the Ministry of Education replaced the theol-
ogy faculty of Jagiellonian University and the Catholic theology
faculty of Warsaw University with a state-run Academy of Catho-
lic Theology in the north of Warsaw. By that time, the emerging
party-state had seized over 144,000 hectares of Church land.28
Yet the Communist establishment seemed unable to commit
to a consistent strategy of ecclesiastical cooptation and nation-
alization. Competition from the independent Catholic Univer-
sity of Lublin undercut the Warsaw academy from the start, and
the “patriot priests” met with antagonism not only from Polish
clergy, but also from another philo-Stalinist Catholic group, the
PAX Association. Founded by one-time interwar fascist leader
Bolesław Piasecki, PAX in the postwar decade became the clarion
voice on behalf of Polish Catholic collaboration with Marxism.
Though tainted by its associations with the secret police and by
its leadership’s profits from the state seizure of other Catholic as-
sets, PAX nonetheless became an incubation site for some of the
future leaders of the Polish laity.29
PAX also developed extensive contacts across the Iron Cur-
tain with Western Europe’s self-styled “Catholic socialists” and
“progressive Catholics.” In Belgium, in France, and in Italy, PAX
had a devoted following that it used to spread the word, even
26. Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic
Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2002), 232–34.
27. Jacek Żurek, Ruch “Księży Patriotów” w województwie katowickim w latach
1949–1956 (Warsaw-Katowice: IPN-KŚZpNP, 2009).
28. Dariusz Walencik, Nieruchomości Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce w latach 1918–
2012: Regulacje prawne—nacjonalizacja—rewindykacja (Katowice: Drukarnia Archidi-
ecezjalna, 2013), 376.
29. On PAX, see Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, 77–180.

after the arrest of Primate Wyszyński, that the Catholic Church
had never fared better in Poland than it did in the early 1950s.30
This strategy relied on its cross–Iron Curtain partners’ unswerv-
ing faith that state socialism better served the goals of Catholic
social teaching than any other political order ever could. With
the condemnation of PAX’s weekly journal Dziś i Jutro (Today
and tomorrow) by the Holy Office in June 1955, many—though
not all—of its Western European partners began to call this as-
sumption into question. Yet PAX’s emissaries were sufficiently
well-read and outspoken, its influence sufficiently extensive, that
well into the 1960s it would continue to shape the reception of
Polish Catholicism in the wider world, including at the Second
Vatican Council.
The one area in which postwar state policy succeeded in set-
ting the Church in Poland at loggerheads with the Holy See con-
cerned postwar Poland’s new borders. Following Stalin’s seizure on
behalf of the USSR of the eastern third of interwar Polish territory
(roughly demarcated by the old Curzon Line), the Allies assembled
at Potsdam in August and September 1945 granted Poland occupa-
tion rights to Pomerania, Silesia, and the Baltic corridor, all held
by Germany before World War II.31 Pope Pius XII refused to rec-
ognize these border transfers, and—though the Holy See granted
the Polish episcopate in 1951 the right to nominate “temporary”
apostolic administrators—the Vatican held into the 1970s that the
relevant dioceses belonged to German bishops.32
30. Kosicki, “Soviet Bloc’s Answer to European Integration,” 1–36.

31. On these border changes, see, for example, Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruc-
tion of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2003), 73–89, 154–201; Hugo Service, Germans to Poles: Com-
munism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
32. Jan Krucina, ed., Kościół na Ziemiach Zachodnich (Wrocław: Wrocławska
Księgarnia Archidiecezjalna, 1971); Andrzej Ranke, Stosunki polsko-niemieckie w pol-
skiej publicystyce katolickiej w latach 1945–1989 (Toruń: Europejskie Centrum Eduka-
cyjne, 2004).

Meanwhile, a consensus rapidly developed in Poland across
confessional and political lines that Poland had a sovereign right
to its new western territories. This was perhaps the one issue
on which Communists and nationalists, émigrés and repatri-
ates, bishops and party officials could all agree: that the Vatican
should transfer diocesan jurisdiction to Poles. Pius XII’s failure to
do so put successive primates—first August Hlond, then Stefan
Wyszyński—in the difficult position of holding the same line as
the Communist regime, but having to justify the opposite line
taken by the pope.
Wyszyński’s response, in particular, was to undertake his own
initiatives. The provision in the 1950 church-state memorandum
of understanding to which the Holy See objected most was the
Polish bishops’ pledge to lobby the Holy See for recognition of
Polish jurisdiction over the formerly German dioceses.33 Yet this
was not a sign of a Church of Silence,34 but rather of endogenous
pressures within the Church, pitting Polish bishops won over
by raison d’État against a Holy See convinced that Poland’s pres-
ence in the territories was simply a transitional “occupation.” As
Peter C. Kent has suggested, “The Polish church had left the Vati-
can the choice of either disavowing the Polish hierarchy or ac-
cepting the agreement. The Secretariat of State chose the latter
course and retained a stony public silence.”35 Wyszyński himself
was quite clear about this: “I, too, know canon law and interna-
33. Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 205–8. The offending point in the
Church-State Accord was the third of nineteen: “The Polish episcopate deems that
economic, historic, cultural, and religious laws, as well as historical justice, demand
that the Recovered Territories belong to Poland once and for all. Proceeding from
the assumption that the Recovered Territories constitute an inseparable part of the
Republic, the episcopate will turn to the Holy See with the request that the apos-
tolic administrations currently in residence be recognized as permanent ordinary
dioceses.”
34. Pace, among others, Richard F. Staar, “The Church of Silence in Communist
Poland,” Catholic Historical Review 42, no. 3 (1956): 296–321.
35. Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 250.

tional law, and I see no obstacles that would make the Church’s
nominations contingent on international treaties. Why should
6.5 million people have to wait uncounted years for this blessing?
How can this be justified?”36
Likewise, with respect to the patriot priests’ association, Wy-
szyński chose to interpret very liberally the Holy Office’s 1949 de-
cree threatening Catholics with excommunication for cooperation
with communism. The primate condemned patriot priests only
in 1953, following their open revolt against bishops (himself in-
cluded) persecuted by the state. Asked once how he justified con-
cluding agreements with Communists and their sympathizers,
the primate replied, “one cannot reach an understanding with the
devil, but with people—of course one can.”37
The balance sheet for the Catholic Church under Polish Stalin-
ism is, therefore, mixed. On the one hand, the bishops of Katowice
and Kielce and top figures within the Cracovian curia were tor-
tured and subjected to show trials, the country’s primate arrested
and kept under lock and key for three years.38 On the other, re-
signed to Poland’s overwhelmingly Catholic population and unable
to choose one consistent strategy of cooptation, postwar Commu-
nists never succeeded either in cutting the Catholic Church in Po-
land off from the Vatican or in alienating Poles from the Church.
For evidence one need look no further than Częstochowa on Au-
gust 26, 1956, when the episcopate’s temporary head, Łódź bishop
Michał Klepacz, left the primate’s seat empty when over a million
Poles gathered to launch a ten-year campaign of spiritual prepara-
tion for the millennium of Polish Christendom.39 One month later,
Wyszyński had left custody, and by the end of the year the episco-
36. Quoted in Peter Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, vol. 3, Czasy Prymasowskie,

1956–1961 (Warsaw: Książka Polska, 1994), 63.
37. Ewa K. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński: Biografia, 2nd ed. (Kraków: Znak,
2013), 123.
38. Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce, 80.
39. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 244–51.

pate had reached a new agreement with the new leadership of the
Polish United Workers’ Party.
De-Stalinization as Aggiornamento?
De-Stalinization led to a brief efflorescence of civic associational
life in Poland. Known anti-Communists were out of the picture,
but revisionist Marxists and so-called “open” Catholics were al-
lowed to form—albeit on a limited scale, with invasive oversight
by the Office of Confessional Affairs—their own discussion clubs,
journals, newspapers, youth groups, publishing houses, and even
trading companies. In the Catholic sphere, this shift broke PAX’s
monopoly on Catholic activism, consigning PAX definitively to
the dustbin of unprincipled collaborationism.
The result was a whole network of lay Catholic activists oper-
ating according to what one of their leaders, Stanisław Stomma,
described as “neopositivism”: a willingness to accept Communist
authorities in the name of raison d’État, so that Catholics could
build from the ground up their own sphere of livelihood.40 The
resurrection of journals suppressed under Stalinism—Tygodnik
Powszechny, as well as the Znak (Sign) monthly—went hand in
hand with the creation of multiple Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs
spread across the country, a publishing house called Znak, a
monthly called Więź (Bond), and a trading company to fund their
operations. The Polish Communists’ de-Stalinizing general secre-
40. It was the literary critic and satirist Stefan Kisielewski who coined the term
“neopositivism,” but Stanisław Stomma emerged as its principal theorist and practi-
tioner; Stomma, “ ‘Pozytywizm’ od strony moralnej,” Tygodnik Powszechny, April 14,
1957. The term was a clear reference to the nineteenth-century positivism that lay at
the roots of “organic work” pursued by Polish cultural and literary authorities after
the failed uprising of 1863–64 against Russian imperial authority. Positivism’s fun-
damental goal was to train the best and brightest of future generations in what it
meant to be Polish while awaiting freedom, rather than have them die in a failed up-
rising along the way; Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Ap-
proaches to Western Civilization (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1996).

tary, Władysław Gomułka, even suggested that the new move-
ment—known as ZNAK—run a handful of parliamentary candi-
dates in the January 1957 elections. All of these Catholic activists
won election, and the result was a small group of Catholic MPs in
the Sejm (parliament) of Communist Poland.41
By 1958, pressure from the Soviet Union and from other Pol-
ish Communists led to a retrenchment within the Polish United
Workers’ Party (PZPR, Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza—
Poland’s Communist party). Its leader, Gomułka—himself a for-
mer prisoner of Stalinism—turned against the Church once again.
Yet de-Stalinization had given the Church a firm footing in the
People’s Republic of Poland, and this would never go away. Politi-
cal repressions lasted until the collapse of communism in 1989,
but Wyszyński never again faced arrest. As José Casanova has
argued, the political choices and ecclesiological vision pursued by
Wyszyński following his 1956 release demonstrate that “Polish Ca-
tholicism had also been undergoing its own process of aggiorna-
mento.”42
And yet world-renowned Polish philosopher Leszek Koła-
kowski would have disagreed with this last statement. Though he
began as a young Marxist firebrand who helped to justify Stalin-
ism, Kołakowski soon became the clarion voice of de-Stalinization,
humanism, and revisionist Marxism. Criticism of political violence
by Gomułka’s security forces in 1968 would land Kołakowski a one-
way ticket out of Poland, from which he proceeded to a career at
the University of Chicago and Oxford. For Kołakowski, as for his
students, John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento within the Catholic
Church represented a modern reincarnation of an old danger, what
Kołakowski called a “new Counter-Reformation.”43 In both cases,
41. Friszke, Koło posłów “Znak” w Sejmie PRL 1957–1976 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo
Sejmowe, 2002), 5–40.
42. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 103.
43. Leszek Kołakowski, Notatki o współczesnej kontrreformacji (Warsaw: Książka
i Wiedza, 1962).

the fundamental concern was that the Catholic Church would
only adopt a façade of reform so as to appeal more effectively to
the modern world, while in fact shedding none of its dogmatism.
For revisionist Marxists, the pastoral traditionalism of the Pol-
ish episcopate seemed less “dangerous” than open Catholicism,
which for them carried the potential of a wolf in sheep’s clothing:
a repressive institution cloaked in a falsely modern aesthetic and
idiom. Kołakowski’s students would debate this issue with the
Polish laity throughout the conciliar era.
The Polish Episcopal Presence in Rome

When John XXIII’s call for an ecumenical council reached Polish
bishops in 1959, they were just learning the limits of de-Staliniza-
tion. Religious education in primary and secondary schools, re-
introduced into public classrooms in 1956, was threatened and
ultimately phased out between 1959 and 1961. Permits for the con-
struction of new churches were becoming impossible to obtain.44
An abstinence campaign launched by Rev. Franciszek Blachnicki
—soon to become known as the founder of Poland’s Oaza (Oasis)
movement—was under attack.45 Primate Wyszyński, who had con-
cluded a new memorandum of understanding with the party-
state in late 1956 and had encouraged Catholics to vote in the elec-
tions of 1957, soon began to regret those actions.
And yet Wyszyński proved extremely adept at mobilizing Pol-
ish clergy following his release from house arrest. The primate
believed that his task was to square two separate processes: on
the one hand, Poland’s participation in the universal Church’s
aggiornamento; and, on the other, the singularly Polish experi-
44. Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce, 147–79.

45. Andrzej Grajewski, “Oskarżony ks. Franciszek Blachnicki,” Więź, no. 511
(2001): 112–28; Esther Peperkamp, “ ‘There Can Be No Vacation from God’: Chil-
dren’s Retreats, Leisure, and Social Change in Poland,” Religion, State, and Society 34,
no. 3 (2006): 271–86.

ence of what Wyszyński called the Great Novena. The latter rep-
resented a decade’s worth of preparations for the coming 1966
celebration of the millennium of Polish Christendom. It was this
“novena” that had been launched at Częstochowa in August 1956,
the primate’s throne empty, with Bishop Klepacz presiding.
The key to understanding how the Polish episcopate squared
the circle is Wyszyński’s declaration at the outset of the Great
Novena that Poles were “surrendering Poland into maternal ser-
vitude to the Virgin Mary.”46 Wyszyński’s campaign to mobilize
clergy and laity alike for a singularly Polish version of Marian de-
votion conditioned the country’s response to aggiornamento. In
the words of Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch, Wyszyński
“knew the Church must offer alternatives, rather than just attack-
ing communism.”47 In particular, the Polish bishops hoped that
peregrinations of the icon of the Black Madonna would boost the
Polish response rate to the surveys sent out worldwide by the
Holy See following the 1959 announcement of an impending ecu-
menical council. Parish priests were called to deliver to their bish-
ops answers to the question: “What does the Polish clergy expect
from the upcoming Council?” Even though answers could not be
anonymous, the final response rate was impressive.
The Polish bishops collectively projected the impression in the
years leading up to Vatican II that they sought a genuine fusion
of Polish piety with an enthusiastic embrace of modernity in the
universal Church. As the Polish episcopate declared in a Septem-
ber 1960 pastoral letter, “We firmly reject the accusation that we
are somehow ‘backward.’ We in no way wish for a return to the
bygone (and not always good) social forms of the middle ages. We
look calmly to the future.”48
46. Noszczak, “Sacrum” czy “profanum”? Spór o istotę obchodów Milenium polskiego
(1949–1966) (Warsaw: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie/IPN-KŚZpNP, 2002), 75–
112; Raina, Jasnogórskie Śluby Narodu Polskiego 1656, 1956, 1966 (Warsaw: Pax, 2006).
47. Luxmoore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 84.
48. Quoted in Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 112.

When the Second Vatican Council opened on October 11, 1962,
twenty-six of Poland’s sixty-four bishops were present.49 These
bishops had arrived four days earlier. John XXIII granted them an
audience the very next day.
There was no point at which all sixty-four Polish bishops were
at the Council. Only ten Polish bishops attended all of its ses-
sions.50 The Polish delegation amounted to only 2.6 percent of
the total number of bishops at the Council. Meanwhile, the num-
ber of speeches given by the Poles represented 2.9 percent of the
total.51
These numbers might suggest that the Polish delegation could
not have played a serious role at Vatican II. Yet eight of the ten
Polish bishops who attended all four sessions served the Coun-
cil in an official capacity, whether as committee members or—in
Wyszyński’s case—in the Council presidium. Entirely wide of the
mark was the 1964 judgment by leading Polish lay activist Jerzy
Zawieyski that the Polish bishops “play no role and do not count
here at all.”52 This marks a striking contrast, for example, with
Yves Congar’s belief in the significance of the Poles’ participation
in the Council. Writing in 1963, the great Dominican theologian
was genuinely in awe of the prelates who had come to Rome from
behind the Iron Curtain.53
49. There has been some disagreement about the numbers—the result of con-
fusion as to if and how to count émigré bishops. This chapter follows the detailed,
bishop-by-bishop breakdown in Rutkowski, Polscy biskupi jako ojcowie Soboru Waty-
kańskiego II, 87.
50. Ibid., 283.
51. Bejze, Kronika Soboru Watykańskiego II, 98–99.
52. Jerzy Zawieyski was, in fact, parroting the opinion that he had heard from
PZPR general secretary Władysław Gomułka; Zawieyski, Dzienniki, vol. 2, Wybór z lat
1960–1969 (Warsaw: Ośrodek KARTA/IPN-KŚZpNP, 2012), 377.
53. Congar, My Journal of the Council, 367.

The Public Relations of Primate Wyszyński
In Rome, Wyszyński resided at the Polish Institute at via Pietro Ca-
vallini 38. Meanwhile, the remaining bishops—including Wojtyła
—stayed at the Collegium Polonium on the Piazza Remuria. These
bishops were celebrities in Rome. Wyszyński may have been a
“solitary cardinal,” but his was one of the most recognizable fac-
es amidst a sea of nearly 3,000 Council fathers.54 Given his “cel-
ebrated status of primate of the strongest Church behind the ‘iron
curtain,’ ” the cardinal needed only to walk into a room to capture
the imaginations of Council fathers and journalists alike.55 As he
noted in 1962, “Everywhere I go, I must endure that Italian hissing
of ‘Wissiski,’ which is supposed to be ‘Wyszyński.’ These hisses go
hand in hand with applause and requests that I pose for a pho-
tograph. Che magro [how thin]—such comments are intended to
bring shame on those who represent the materialist [Communist]
order, for they attest to its economic inefficacy.”56
The Polish primate’s celebrity at the Council was largely in-
dependent of his extensive service on its behalf, both in Rome
during sessions and back on Polish soil during the intersessions.
Cardinal Wyszyński had been friends with Cardinal Roncalli of
Venice before the latter’s 1958 election to the papacy, so it came
as little surprise that the Pole received successive prestigious ap-
pointments: first, to the Central Preparatory Commission (1960);
then, to the Secretariat for Extraordinary Affairs (1962); and, fi-
nally, to the Council Presidium (1963), consisting of nine cardinals
responsible for steering the course of debate. Several historians
54. Grootaers, Actes et acteurs à Vatican II, 326–36.

55. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 1st ed. (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2009),
448. Both editions are referenced throughout this chapter because, although the
second edition is considerably longer, it is also missing entire threads of analysis
that are present in the original edition.
56. Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, vol. 4, Czasy prymasowskie, 1962–1963
(Warsaw: von Borowiecky, 2005), 35.

have rated Wyszyński as having been one of the most influential
Council fathers.57
The primate’s international celebrity carried consequences
also on Polish soil. In its conciliar coverage, the Polish weekly
Tygodnik Powszechny regularly highlighted Wyszyński’s comings
and goings in Rome. At the close of the First Session, the jour-
nal chronicled in great detail the bishops’ homecoming, with the
primate at their head: “Following the Holy Mass, the Cardinal in
a speech lasting more than an hour summarized the course of
the First Session of the Council, and he described the role played
by the Polish Council fathers. Following his speech, the Cardi-
nal granted absolution on behalf of the Holy Father to everyone
present, conveying also His apostolic benediction. Crowds of the
faithful, unable to enter the overflowing cathedral, participated
in the ceremony thanks to the audio simulcast in the nearby Je-
suit Church.”58 Back in Poland, in the three months that followed
the First Session, Wyszyński delivered over 130 lectures and ser-
mons in Poland on the topic of the Council, criss-crossing the
country dozens of times along the way.59
The primate’s lectures and sermons were not ad hoc initia-
tives, but rather part of a concerted public-relations effort under-
taken by the Polish episcopate already in advance of the Council’s
opening to shape the Polish reception of Vatican II. This campaign
involved a two-pronged strategy: personal contact with represen-
tatives of the Polish laity who spent time in conciliar Rome, either
as public figures or as journalists covering the Council, and pub-
lic events such as press conferences and lectures. In the end, this
strategy was unsuccessful—though not for lack of effort on the
bishops’ part.
57. For example, Grootaers, Actes et acteurs à Vatican II; Luca Rolandi, Testimoni del
Concilio: Il racconto del Vaticano II nell’esperienza dei protagonisti (Turin: Effatà, 2006).
58. “Powrót Księdza Prymasa i biskupów polskich do kraju,” Tygodnik Powszech-
ny, December 23, 1962.
59. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 528.

In 1962, the primate recommended Rev. Szczepan Wesoły, the
pastor of the Polish émigré community in Rome, to head the Slav-
ic section of the press office of the Council Secretariat. Wesoły
thereafter produced a weekly bulletin, and on every weekday of
the First and Second sessions of the Council, Wesoły held a press
briefing in Polish on the news of the day from both the plenary
session and the various conciliar committees. The extraordinary
achievement of these briefings was to assemble in one room rep-
resentatives of the émigré press from London, Paris, and Rome;
of the official Communist press from Warsaw; and of a range of
Catholic publications operating legally on Polish territory (some
seen as regime puppets, others as “concessioned” but autono-
mous).60 It was only in late October 1964—more than a month
into the Third Session—that the word came down from the PZPR
leadership that Communist journalists were no longer to attend
the same briefings as émigrés. To avoid playing favorites, the epis-
copate canceled the briefings altogether.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, it was actually much easier
for Polish Catholic activists who had managed to get passports
to travel to Rome to obtain face-time with Wyszyński and other
bishops there than under normal circumstances in Poland. Ja-
nusz Zabłocki, an editor of the monthly Więź who covered three
Council sessions for the journal, enjoyed long, almost weekly one-
on-one meetings with the primate, usually over a meal: “I arrive
for another prearranged meeting with the Primate on via Pietro
Cavallini. He arranged for me to meet him on a Sunday, as that is
a day free of conciliar events, and conditions are best for a quiet
conversation of some depth.”61
60. The émigré titles included the Paris-based Narodowiec (Nationalist). The
key Communist correspondent, Ignacy Krasicki, represented Polish Radio, but his
reports also made it into, among others, the Communist daily Trybuna Ludu (The
People’s Tribune). PAX’s daily newspaper was called Słowo Powszechne (The Univer-
sal Word). On the press of Communist Poland, see Alina Słomkowska, Prasa w PRL:
Szkice historyczne (Warsaw: PWN, 1980).

The final means by which the Polish bishops attempted to
steer the reception of Vatican II involved networking with Coun-
cil fathers and Catholic activists from other countries. Émigré in-
termediaries frequently facilitated these contacts. For example,
Maria Winowska, an interwar Polish lay activist who had fought
in the French Resistance during World War II and remained in
France thereafter, served as Primate Wyszyński’s eyes and ears
throughout Western Europe.62 Winowska wrote two books in
French that stridently condemned the Polish Communist regime
for throttling religious life in Poland; the second of these ap-
peared in 1963, during the Second Session.63 Several months later,
Winowska arranged an interview between Wyszyński and An-
toine Wenger, AA, editor-in-chief of France’s highest-circulation
Catholic paper, the daily La Croix. Its title, “France: Our Older Sis-
ter,” made clear the international relevance of Polish Catholicism
in the time of the ecumenical council.64
When, in 1963, Primate Wyszyński concluded that the philo-
Communist Catholics of PAX had begun using their journalists in
Rome to discredit Wyszyński as a “retrograde conservative,” he
sent Winowska on the attack. She had published a book-length
exposé in 1956 denouncing PAX’s “Catholic socialism,” and she
was only too happy to bring the organization’s sins back into
the public eye. The French-language Catholic bulletin Informa-
tions Catholiques Internationales, which had taken PAX seriously
as a Catholic association for years, got caught in the crosshairs.65
62. Krystian Gawroń, “Maria Winowska, grand apôtre laïque du XXe siècle,”
Homme Nouveau (June 6, 1993).
63. Claude Naurois [Maria Winowska], Dieu contre Dieu? Drame des progressistes
dans une église du silence (Fribourg: Éditions Saint-Paul, 1956); Pierre Lenert [Maria
Winowska], L’église catholique en Pologne (Paris: Centurion, 1962).
64. Stefan Wyszyński and Antoine Wenger, “La France—notre soeur ainée,” La
Croix, November 24–25, 1963.
65. Informations Catholiques Internationales published an extensive review of
its earlier writings on the Catholic Church in Poland, documenting assiduously that
since 1957 it had never cited any PAX writings, though it had regularly reported on

Wyszyński was so incensed that he complained personally both
to the French primate and to Pope Paul VI. As a result, a range
of French Catholic journals—including the high-circulation daily
La Croix—raged against Informations Catholiques Internation-
ales.66 Paul VI did likewise—much to the shock, among others, of
Yves Congar.67 In the world of French Catholicism, this became
known as the Affaire PAX.68
When they felt it appropriate, then, the Polish bishops had
substantial international resources at their disposal. In a sense,
the suspension of regular press briefings during the Third Session
made it even easier for the Polish Council fathers to craft a mes-
sage about Vatican II. When they felt the need, they could count
on a sympathetic ear on the airwaves of Vatican Radio as well
as a wide audience through the pages of Osservatore Romano.69
The Affaire PAX, though largely the result of a misunderstanding,
was also the high watermark of Wyszyński’s international visibil-
ity. Yet the bishops’ increasing self-reliance in matters of public
relations adversely impacted their dealings not only with PAX,
but also with Polish Catholic journalists from across the politi-
cal spectrum. Maria Winowska, in particular, rubbed those jour-
nalists the wrong way, and Wyszyński’s reliance on her alienated
them, with deleterious consequences for all parties.70
the association’s activities; “Le cardinal Wyszynski, Pax et les ‘I.C.I.,’ ” Informations
Catholiques Internationales, June 15, 1964.
66. Wenger, “Remous au sujet de Pax,” La Croix, June 24, 1964; “Mise en garde
au sujet de ‘Pax,’ ” Documentation Catholique (1964), col. 851.
67. As the peritus noted on October 20, 1963, “when he received Fr General in
the month of August, Paul VI spoke very critically of ICI, which he accused of being
a secret and hidden enemy of the Church. On account of an article on Poland. Very
odd”; Congar, My Journal of the Council, 386.
68. Jean-Marie Mayeur, “ ‘L’affaire Pax’ en France,” in Le cardinal de fer: Stefan
Wyszyński, ed. Jean Offredo (Malakoff: Éditions Cana, 2003), 127–36.
69. Rutkowski, Polscy biskupi jako ojcowie Soboru Watykańskiego II, 285.
70. For example, Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:199.

The Business of the Council
To determine which bishops would go to Rome, Wyszyński estab-
lished several ground rules prior to the First Session. Their pur-
pose was to preempt the tactics of the Polish security apparatus.
If the ordinary bishop of a diocese did not receive a passport, the
auxiliary bishop would not go, either. If a bishop received a pass-
port without having formally requested one, that bishop would
not go.
There was, however, one bishop for whom Wyszyński consis-
tently went to the mat with Poland’s Office of Confessional Af-
fairs: Wrocław’s apostolic administrator, Bolesław Kominek. This
archbishop was the personification of Poland’s campaign to gain
control over religious life in its formerly German western terri-
tories. As Wyszyński wrote in October 1962, “It is necessary to
underscore at every turn the unity of those bishops [from the
western territories] with the Polish episcopate, for that is in the
interest also of Polish raison d’État.”71
Wyszyński made it clear to every bishop headed for Rome
that he had certain expectations. The Polish bishops met weekly
on Thursday afternoons in Wyszyński’s Roman apartment. There,
he handed out assignments. Bishops would only address the top-
ics that he had chosen for them, even if these were not their re-
spective areas of expertise. And yet, when they did speak, Polish
bishops spoke not simply on their own behalf, but for the entire
national episcopate.
By the same token, the Polish primate consistently kept the
Poles out of the larger ad hoc organizations that formed in the
course of the Council. The best known among these were the “pro-
gressive” Domus Mariae and the “conservative” Coetus Interna-
tionalis Patrum (which included Holy Office prefect Alfredo Car-
dinal Ottaviani and future Society of St. Pius X founder Marcel
71. Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 4:24.

Lefebvre).72 The Polish primate explained that, having come from
behind the Iron Curtain with the responsibility to bear witness to
the unique challenges faced there by the Church, the Polish bish-
ops must remain a “special group” conducting “its own affairs in-
dependently according to its own sensibilities and experience.”73
Like other delegations from behind the Iron Curtain, the Pol-
ish bishops were accused of being unprepared for conciliar work.
As Polish Catholic journalist Jerzy Turowicz disclosed to his Flem-
ish counterpart Jan Grootaers, “The majority of Polish bishops
have an outdated and impoverished theological education. Only a
few of the young are very open, for example Msgr. Wojtyła.”74 Only
three bishops from Poland—Wyszyński, Wojtyła, and Bolesław
Kominek of Wrocław—could speak conversational Italian. For
many others, even Latin was a tall order. Yet this did not automati-
cally reduce the other Polish Council fathers to mere tourists.
Mainstream media coverage of the Council—from both sides
of the Iron Curtain—regularly presented Wyszyński as the ring-
leader of a band of doctrinal conservatives. Statistical data gath-
ered by Melissa Wilde on the Polish bishops’ voting patterns at
the Council complicate this picture, however. Even though Wilde
posits clear divisions between “progressives” and “conservatives”
among the vast majority of Council fathers, her data for bishops
from behind the Iron Curtain suggests that their alignments were
not so clear. As Jan Grootaers—who covered the Council as a jour-
nalist before becoming one of its historians—suggests, “Examin-
ing the participation of Cardinal Wyszyński in Vatican II provides
grounds for the dismissal of one of the most lasting stereotypes of
the history of the Council, according to which the Council Fathers
72. On these networks, see Wilde, “How Culture Mattered at Vatican II.”
74. “Diarium Jan Grootaers” (personal diary, as yet unpublished), notebook 14
(version February 17, 2010), October 15, 1963, 1896. I thank Jan Grootaers for making
his diary available to me. It can now be found in the Archive J. Grootaers, Center for
the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

were more or less divided into two camps: a minority and a ma-
jority.”75
Grootaers’s point applies not just to the Polish primate. Ag-
gregate voting results clearly demonstrate that the Polish bishops
who attended the Second Vatican Council fell into neither a “con-
servative” nor “progressive” camp. Nor, in fact, did they maintain
the voting discipline that Wyszyński had tried to introduce. The
Polish primate, for example, favored both the principle of collegi-
ality and Marian devotion, which was one of the declared priori-
ties of the Polish Council fathers. Yet the Polish bishops were not
unanimous in their October 1963 votes on collegiality: 12 percent
voted against the principle.
Even more striking is the division among Polish bishops in
the October 1964 vote to bestow on the Virgin Mary the title of
“Mother of the Church.” Namely, a full half of Polish Council fa-
thers voted “no.”76 Given the secrecy of the votes, there is no way
that Cardinal Wyszyński could have known the extent to which his
fellow Poles were breaking the discipline that he had imposed. If he
had known, he would have been devastated, and he may well have
changed the terms of participation in the Council’s final session.
Between Communism and Freedom of Conscience

The conciliar rumor mill, with some prompting from the Commu-
nist press and secret police, quickly came to identify Wyszyński
with the Coetus Internationalis Patrum.77 In reality, the pri-
75. Grootaers, Actes et acteurs à Vatican II, 326.

76. Because the bishops from Communist-run countries represented such a
small proportion of overall attendance at the Council, these tendencies become clear
only when one extracts those countries from the aggregate data. The author thanks
Melissa J. Wilde for the suggestion to examine the raw voting data that she has com-
piled from the Vatican Secret Archive. It is now available online: “Second Vatican
Council Votes,” Association of Religious Data Archives, http://www.thearda.com/
Archive/Files/Descriptions/VATICAN.asp; accessed January 1, 2014.
77. Wyszyński complained, “During the Council, I was always presented by the

mate’s position was far more complex. As his biographer Ewa
Czaczkowska has put it, “the views presented by the primate at
the Council ranged from conservatism to liberalism (with respect
to the matter of freedom of conscience), depending on the mat-
ter at hand.”78
The issue of the vernacular liturgy is a case in point. After
Vatican II, Wyszyński gained the reputation of opposing missals
and Mass in Polish. And yet, six years earlier, the Polish primate
had listed the vernacular liturgy among his greatest hopes for
the coming council. In 1959, Wyszyński wrote, “I believe that the
words of prayer and acclamation used in the ministry of the sac-
raments should be spoken in the vernacular so that the faithful
sharing in the sacrament can participate more actively and ben-
efit more fully from its fruits.”79 And yet, once in Council, he re-
fused, for example, to support a vernacular breviary, fearing that
“clergy of the Latin rite might lose the ability to use the Latin
language, that mighty bond of unity.”80
Wyszyński also had a very particular understanding of the
link between ecclesiological and pastoral reform. The primate en-
dorsed the famed Schema XIII that ultimately became the 1965
pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes. Yet he did so with a mea-
sure of concern, shared in plenary session with the other Coun-
cil fathers, that pastoral reform would only work if the Council
first succeeded in renewing Catholics’ sense of membership in a
universal Church. Similar concerns defined Wyszyński’s take on
press as the retrograde primate of a developmentally impaired episcopate”; quoted

in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, vol. 5, Czasy prymasowskie 1964–1965 (Warsaw: von
Borowiecky, 2001), 260.
78. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 499.
79. Wyszyński, Votum (September 23, 1959), in Acta et Documenta Concilio Oe-
cumenico Vatican II Apparando, Series I, Antepraeparatoria (Vatican City: Typis Poly-
glottis Vaticanis, 1960), 2: 673–79.
80. Wyszyński, “Wypowiedź w związku ze schematem de Sacra Liturgia” (No-
vember 9, 1962), in Dzieła zebrane, vol. 9, Sierpień-grudzień 1962 (Warsaw: Soli Deo,
2011), 296–300.

freedom of conscience: “One can speak of the existence of reli-
gious freedom only if all people as individuals, persons, and citi-
zens grant to every human being the right to believe and profess
belief according to his own free will.”81
The Polish primate’s reflections on the liturgy and on freedom
of conscience have received no attention from any scholar other
than his biographer Ewa Czaczkowska. Instead, scholars tend to
see Wyszyński—and, by extension, the rest of the Polish episco-
pate as well—as having been preoccupied with only two issues.
These were, on one hand, the Church’s stance on communism
and, on the other, the Virgin Mary’s place in Catholic ecclesiology.
These were, in fact, priorities for the primate and his episcopal
colleagues, but the Poles did not have tunnel vision. For the bish-
ops from behind the Iron Curtain, effective pastoral reform by the
Council was necessary to give meaning to any action on either of
its priorities.
It was the schema on the Church—which eventually became
the Council’s dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium—in which the
Polish bishops placed the greatest hope for reminding all Catho-
lics of what it meant to be part of the faith. Following his return
to Warsaw from the Third Session in 1964, Wyszyński revealed in
a meeting with seminarians high hopes for lasting ecclesiological
reform: “Perhaps this will finally bring to an end the individual-
ized relationship to the Church that to this very day is so often
encountered among Catholics who approach the Church accord-
ing to their own notions of it.”82
This “individualization” of the Church, in the eyes of the Pol-
ish Council fathers, was neither an Iron Curtain singularity nor
the product of Communist propaganda. Rather, it was a cause for
concern across the entire, universal Church at a time of new chal-
lenges connected to decolonization and globalization.
81. Quoted in Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 519.


While the Polish Council fathers believed that the Council
needed to speak out on communism, there was some uncertainty
as to how far the Church should go. Archbishop Józef Gawlina—
a Polish émigré responsible for the whole Polish diaspora—had
worked for several years alongside Cardinal Ottaviani, the icon of
Catholic “traditionalism,” to prepare a draft declaration condemn-
ing communism. Although Wyszyński would on occasion side with
Ottaviani in the course of the Council, he in fact worked to torpe-
do that draft document. Fearing that a blanket condemnation of
communism could worsen the condition of the Church in Poland
and in the GDR, Wyszyński teamed up with Berlin’s Julius Cardi-
nal Döpfner to ensure that it never made it out of the Preparatory
Commission. When Ottaviani’s Coetus Internationalis Patrum cir-
culated a petition during the Second Session for a conciliar judg-
ment on Marxism, socialism, and communism, the Poles were not
among the two hundred signatories.
Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch have argued that
“John XXIII saw communism as an outgrowth of modernity with
its own roots and rationale—a ‘sign of the times’ that had to be
read and interpreted if it was to be countered by a prophetic wit-
ness.”83 It would be a stretch to attribute similar thinking to Car-
dinal Wyszyński: he himself had been a prisoner of a Communist
regime, and he was acutely aware of persecutions faced by the
Church in Communist Poland. Despite the hope that accompanied
de-Stalinization, the party-state was turning against the Church
once again just as the Council was opening. The latest sign had
been the banning of religious education in Communist Poland.84
And yet, the Polish primate still felt caught between the ev-
eryday exigencies of pastorship and the moral imperatives of
high politics. Wyszyński resisted the impulse to push his fellow
bishops toward wholesale public anti-communism for the same
83. Luxmoore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 125.

reason that he had sought accommodation with the Polish Com-
munist apparatus fifteen years earlier: a sense of pastoral respon-
sibility for the souls of Catholics living in Communist Poland.
In the end, the Polish bishops adopted a moderate stance in
Council debates on communism, asking only that the final docu-
ments reflect existing Church teachings in, among others, Rerum
novarum and Quadragesimo anno. As Schema XIII evolved into the
draft of Gaudium et spes in 1965, Polish bishops joined the ranks
of 450 conciliar participants from eighty-six countries insisting
that the constitution’s section on atheism reiterate earlier papal
teachings. Even following Paul VI’s personal intervention, how-
ever, this initiative produced only a single footnote, to Article 21
in the final version.
In this instance, the pope offered the Polish bishops political
cover, recognizing that they were in a tough spot and taking a
clear stance against communism—so that they would not have
to do so. In a private audience with Wyszyński in December 1965,
on the day following the Council’s conclusion, Paul VI explained,
For sure, something should have been said during the Council against
communism, and in no uncertain terms, yet that could have caused
you all harm. . . . Please trust that we are cautious not out of fear, but
out of love. We trust you. We proceed with caution and wisdom, al-
though our heart breaks when we see the torments that you endure.
We earnestly admire and support you through prayer. The Mother of
God is triumphant and will triumph here as well.85
The Virgin Mary

The other declared priority of the Polish Council fathers—the
Virgin Mary—proved to be politically problematic, too. Marian
devotion had been a central feature of Roman Catholicism in Po-
85. Wyszyński, Zapiski milenijne: Wybór z dziennika “Pro memoria” z lat 1965–
1967, ed. Maria Okońska, Mirosława Plaskacz, and Anna Rastawicka (Warsaw: Soli
Deo, 2001), 22.

land since at least the early-modern period. Mary was symboli-
cally crowned “Queen of Poland” in 1656 by King Jan Kazimierz
to honor the successful Polish defense one year earlier of the
Częstochowa fortress at Jasna Góra, home of the icon of the Black
Madonna. In August 1956, with Primate Wyszyński still under
house arrest, the acting head of the Polish episcopate launched
the Great Novena, a decade-long celebration of “Poland’s surren-
der into maternal servitude to Mary, Mother of the Church, in re-
turn for the freedom of Christ’s Church.”86
As it happens, the two most prominent Polish clerics of
the twentieth century, Wyszyński and Karol Wojtyła, indepen-
dently arrived at mystical devotion to the Virgin Mary: Wojtyła,
through his experience of forced labor during World War II,87
and Wyszyński, during his years of house arrest in the mid-
1950s.88 It was Wojtyła who had announced at Vatican II during
the First Session that proposed schemata on the Church and on
the Holy Virgin Mother must be connected. He explained, “in the
fact that the Holiest Mary is, in the Church—the Mystical Body
of Christ—both the Mother of the Head and the Mother of all
members and cells of the Body, one finds at the same time her
motherhood over the Church itself.”89
The principal argument against elevating Mary to “Mother of
the Church” was that strengthening the Cult of Mary went di-
rectly against the spirit of ecumenical dialogue with Orthodox
86. On the devotional connections between Mary’s 1656 coronation, the 300th
anniversary celebration of that event in 1956, and the 1966 celebration of the mil-
lennium of Polish Christendom, see Raina, Jasnogórskie Śluby Narodu Polskiego; Jan
Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the
Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1994), 110–17.
87. George Huntston Williams, The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of His Thought
and Action (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 279–84.
88. Wyszyński, Zapiski milenijne, 19.
89. Karol Wojtyła, Communiqué, in Skrzypczak, Karol Wojtyła na Soborze
Watykańskim II, 197.

and Protestant Christians in which Vatican II had been called. As
Polish Catholic journalist Janusz Zabłocki worried, “Is the title
of mediatrix owed to Mary, can she be called the Mother of the
Church? Won’t emphasis on the Marian cult weaken the ecumen-
ical movement?”90
Complicating the debate further from the standpoint of the
Polish Council fathers was a disinformation campaign spearhead-
ed by Polish Communist éminence grise Zenon Kliszko. Kliszko
had been in Rome at the time of the Council’s opening in 1962,
and he had offered to host a reception for Poland’s bishops at the
embassy in Rome. Since the Holy See at the time continued to
recognize the pre–World War II Polish government that had es-
caped to London in 1939, Communist Poland had no ambassador
to the Holy See.91 Not wanting to second-guess Vatican diplomacy
by giving the Communist Polish embassy in Rome standing in
Church matters, Wyszyński declined Kliszko’s invitation. The lat-
ter would not forget this snub.
Declassified documentation from the Polish archives shows
that Kliszko directed the secret police to develop and circulate dur-
ing the Second Session a scholarly memorandum—written by real
Catholic theologians—criticizing the primate and his fellow Coun-
cil fathers for their Marian devotion. The security apparatus used
informants—including biblical experts from the state-run Acade-
my of Catholic Theology in Warsaw—to string together the Memo-
randum on Certain Aspects of the Marian Cult in Poland.92 Commis-

91. Żaryn, Stolica Apostolska wobec Polski i Polaków w latach 1944–1958 w świetle
materiałów Ambasady RP przy Watykanie: Wybór dokumentów (Warsaw: Neriton/IH
PAN, 1998).
92. The relevant documentation from the security apparatus archives is in
Stanisław Morawski, “Notatka dot. opracowania i sposobu wykorzystania materiałów
nt. wypaczenia przez Wyszyńskiego kultu maryjnego w Polsce,” November 14, 1963,
Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (AIPN [Archives of the Institute of National
Remembrance]), Biuro Udostępniania (BU [Bureau for Provision and Archivization
of Documents]) 0639/27; see also Cenckiewicz, “Sprawa anty-maryjnego memoriału

sioned personally by Poland’s internal affairs minister on October
23, 1963, the document was prepared in just under three weeks.
Calling the cult “superficial and bigoted,” the memo went so far as
to request of Pope Paul VI the designation of a special envoy to
Poland to study the cult, “to whom Poles might be able to express,
without fearing for themselves, their observations and fears, espe-
cially those born of the unhealthy and exaggerated Marian cult.”93
This document circulated far and wide—in public and in pri-
vate. It was delivered to 170 specifically targeted recipients at the
Council, including the twenty-three Polish bishops then in Rome,
as well as important theologians and émigré activists in Paris,
London, Berlin, and Munich. On November 30, 1963, the day when
the memorandum first surfaced in public, “unidentified persons”
were even distributing copies on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica.94
As Wyszyński’s biographer reports, “The memorandum sowed
confusion and disorientation among Council participants. Some of
them, including official representatives of bishops’ conferences—
from France, Switzerland, and Spain—came to the Polish section
of the conciliar press office requesting copies of the memoran-
dum.”95 In response, Polish bishops in Rome for the Second Ses-
sion issued a press release on the memo the very next day: “Its
true purpose is a direct personal attack on Cardinal Wyszyński and
an indirect attack on the Polish bishops as a whole, in keeping with
the tactics of the Communists who seek to make the hierarchy
look as bad as possible in the eyes of the world, seeking thereby to
justify their hatred toward it.”96
Before this campaign, the Polish delegation had positioned
itself as the clarion voice advocating Mary’s elevation to the sta-
czyli o tym jak bezpieka ‘uczestniczyła’ w Soborze Watykańskim II,” Arcana, nos. 55–56
(2004): 118–35.
93. Quoted at Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 1st ed., 442.
94. Cenckiewicz, “Sprawa anty-maryjnego memoriału,” 118.
95. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 1st ed., 443.

tus of “Mother of the Church.” The Polish primate clearly imag-
ined this as a natural consequence of the 1956 “surrender into
maternal servitude” with which he had launched Poland’s Great
Novena. It was this approach that would earn Wyszyński the
scorn of many “progressive” Council fathers belonging to the Do-
mus Mariae network.
Although the Council voted by a narrow margin on Octo-
ber 29, 1963, to include Mary in the draft schema for the dogmatic
constitution on the Church (the future Lumen gentium), the final
vote one year later on the title of “Mother of the Church” failed.
Wyszyński took this as a personal defeat. The Polish security ap-
paratus, meanwhile, interpreted the proposal’s failure as a sign of
its own success.
Wyszyński was relieved the next year to hear personally from
Paul VI that, since the Council had refused to elevate Mary to
“Mother of the Church,” the pontiff would issue his own declara-
tion. Wyszyński learned from an expert belonging to the Coun-
cil’s Theological Commission, Father Carolus Balic, that “this was
a true miracle. The Holy Father was broken up over what to do.
He was being lobbied on all sides by delegations, memoranda,
and opponents of the initiative. It is only the bravery of the Pri-
mate of Poland that made the pope take this brave, independent
decision. I underscore here that this was the great manly achieve-
ment of Primate Wyszyński.”97
Poland on the Banks of the Tiber

For Poland, Vatican II was as much about politics as theology or
philosophy. The bishops’ departure for Rome transplanted to the
Eternal City conflicts once internal to Communist Poland. What
had been a national story of church and state overnight turned
97. Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 5:117–20.

into a transnational tug of war; Polish prelates and Communists
alike drew in third parties from around the world.
The anti-Marian memo commissioned and promoted by the
secret police can be seen as the immediate impetus for the fury
unleased by Wyszyński during the Affaire PAX. The primate’s de-
nunciation of Catholic fellow travelers can, in turn, be seen as
the motivation for the PZPR’s withdrawal of Communist press
from the bishops’ briefings. This was Polish politics relocated to
a Roman playground, where the field of play between the episco-
pate and the party was far more level than in Poland.
Unlike other Iron Curtain countries with substantial Catholic
populations, Communist Poland also sported a substantial civic
space for concessioned groups of lay activists. Of the three sig-
nificant movements in place during Vatican II, two were little
more than puppets of the PZPR: PAX and a splinter group called
the Christian Social Association (Chrześcijańskie Stowarzyszenie
Społeczne, ChSS).98 Meanwhile, the ZNAK movement created in
the wake of Gomułka’s return to power in 1956 pursued a genu-
inely independent agenda. Its leader, Jerzy Zawieyski, was not
only president of the Warsaw Catholic Intelligentsia Club, but an
MP and a member of the elite State Council of the People’s Re-
public of Poland.99
Zawieyski was both a Catholic and a socialist.100 He had known
Gomułka since the 1930s. On the cusp of the Second World War, he
experienced a spiritual awakening. While in hiding during the Nazi
occupation, he became friends with Stefan Wyszyński, not yet
even a bishop. A playwright and poet by vocation who had refused
all commissions during Poland’s Stalinist era, Zawieyski nonethe-
98. Friszke, Oaza na Kopernika: Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej 1956–1989 (Warsaw:

Biblioteka WIĘZI, 1997), 34–54.
99. On Zawieyski, see Marta Korczyńska, Jerzy Zawieyski: Biografia humanistyc-
zna 1902–1969 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2011).
100. Zawieyski explained his attempts at reconciling Catholicism and commu-
nism in Zawieyski, Droga katechumena (Warsaw: Biblioteka WIĘZI, 1971).

less felt it his duty to enter public life following Gomułka’s return
to power, with a mission of reconciling church and state in Com-
munist Poland. As he would explain in a November 1962 private
audience with John XXIII, “I play the role of a mediator between
the government and the Church, and I often mediate between
Władysław Gomułka and Cardinal Wyszyński.” To this, the pope
would reply, “That must be a difficult role to play—yet at once also
beautiful.”101
By the time that Vatican II opened, this mission seemed
doomed to fail. The mutual respect and support shown each oth-
er by Gomułka and Wyszyński in the fall of 1956 quickly turned
to a tug of war between church and state over grassroots activism
in Communist Poland. Of particular concern to the PZPR was the
Great Novena, which was proving wildly successful in mobilizing
crowds of pilgrims.
In Zawieyski’s eyes, however, Vatican II brought the perfect
opportunity to wipe the slate clean. There had been no diplomatic
relations between the Holy See and Poland since September 1945,
when the new Temporary Government of National Unity uni-
laterally abrogated the concordat of 1925.102 Given the warmth
shown Pope John XXIII by Communist leaders worldwide, Za-
wieyski sought to pave the way for an agreement involving the
Holy See, the Polish episcopate, and the PZPR. Other ZNAK activ-
ists who spent time in Rome during the Council joined Zawieyski
in his quest.
The playwright-turned-politician was in the unique position
of being able to backdoor his own primate in private papal au-
diences, first with John XXIII and then with Paul VI. Their ex-
changes are immensely telling—particularly because Zawieyski
was delivering messages from the Polish Communist leader to
the Roman pontiff. Before leaving Warsaw for Rome to attend
101. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:205.

102. Żaryn, Kościół a władza w Polsce, 88–144.

the opening session of Vatican II, he went to see Władysław
Gomułka, who told him:
I personally have never been an advocate of struggle against the
Catholic Church. The government never wanted this, and our policy
has been inclined toward mutual understanding and agreement. The
conflicts that have arisen have been the fault of the episcopate, not
the government. The episcopate from the very beginning has done
nothing but await change, revolution, and even war. Such an atti-
tude of necessity had to provoke the enmity of the People’s govern-
ment. In these days of horror that we have experienced [the Cuban
Missile Crisis], the pope has played a great role by issuing a fervent
appeal for peace. The pope is a great statesman because he under-
stands the world’s conflicts, or rather he understands what nuclear
war might mean. At any rate it is not the first time that this pope
has spoken out in defense of peace. And is it not strange that it is
not Cardinal Wyszyński, but I, who have been quoting the pope’s
statements to the Polish public? Cardinal Wyszyński represents a
church of combat. In his pastoral letter on atheism, he insulted non-
believers like me. He insulted me, an atheist. All the while, the pope
represents a church of peace, wisdom, a church of love, as you peo-
ple would call it. The pope extends his hands to all, and that is why
he has won everyone’s hearts, including those beyond the Church.
I will admit that, while abroad, the Cardinal has not done anything
with which I can find fault, but at home perhaps the Council and the
pope’s stance will have a positive influence on the attitude of the
primate and the episcopate.103
A few moments later, Gomułka asked Zawieyski to convey the

following verbatim greeting to John XXIII: “May the Lord God
grant him health.”
Coming from the mouth of the top Communist politician of
the most Catholic country behind the Iron Curtain, these words
seemed a revelation. Some historians have argued that the Com-
munist embrace of John XXIII marked a definitive break with
103. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:192, 194.

the “Church of Silence,” with Communists instead trying to le-
verage the pope against the primate.104 Even after the death of
John XXIII, Poland’s Office of Confessional Affairs made a point
of framing its criticisms of Catholic activists in contrast to the
“Good Pope.” Perhaps the most extraordinary reprimand that
the Warsaw Catholic Intelligentsia Club leadership ever received
from the Communists came in the early spring of 1963: “we are
devoting too little attention to the Council and to the person of
John XXIII.”105
Zawieyski described his audience with John XXIII on Novem-
ber 20, 1962, in dramatic terms: “One of the greatest days of my
life!” The two spoke French, a language that the pope knew well
from having served as nuncio, among others, to France. When
Zawieyski conveyed the Polish Communist leader’s blessings to
the pontiff, the latter exclaimed, “Ah, Gomułka! I know that he
has done a great deal of good for Poland.”106 Without prompting,
the pontiff declared that Polish jurisdiction over the formerly
German “Recovered Territories” must be formalized in the inter-
est of achieving “peace and understanding between the nations.”
Following the audience, Zawieyski immediately shared his im-
pressions with the primate, with his ZNAK colleagues in Rome,
and also with Polish ambassador to Italy Adam Willmann, under-
scoring for them all “the great pope’s authentic interest in and
good will toward Poland.”107
Gomułka and his Communist colleagues thought less of Paul
VI than they had of John XXIII.108 Even though it was Paul VI
who really inaugurated a comprehensive Ostpolitik predicated on
bilateral negotiations with Communist regimes, the Polish Com-
munist stance toward the Holy See soured in the years following
John XXIII’s death in June 1963.
104. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 285–313.

105. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:465. 106. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:203.

Two years later almost to the day, Zawieyski had another pri-
vate papal audience—this time, with Paul VI. Before leaving for
Rome, he met with Gomułka, asking what if anything he should
convey to the pope on the Communist’s behalf. The ensuing mes-
sage was much more strained than two years earlier.
Nonetheless, with Gomułka’s blessing, Zawieyski initiated
a conversation with Paul VI about whether or not he would be
willing to take the step of normalizing relations with Commu-
nist Poland. In response to Zawieyski’s suggestion that Gomułka
might be ready, the pope stretched out his hands to the Polish
writer and replied, “As are we.”109 The pope continued, “We would
also like for there no longer to be any internal conflicts [between
church and state], so that Poland might develop freely and do its
part in safeguarding peace in the world. That is the most impor-
tant matter.”110
The pope exuded warmth in this conversation, both toward
Zawieyski personally and toward Polish Catholic activism more
generally. The conversation had literally begun with the Holy Fa-
ther declaring, “It is an honor to meet you.” And then, “We always
think with great appreciation of Poland, with admiration for its
religiosity. We want for Poland to have the best possible outcome.
I know how important your position is there, how great the re-
sponsibilities and the work that you carry out.”111
The pontiff’s words point to the substantive nature of the role
that Zawieyski and his fellow ZNAK activists saw themselves play-
ing. Both his diary and the diary of his junior colleague Janusz
Zabłocki are full of details of backroom meetings during Council
sessions with the Vatican insiders most directly responsible for
shaping Paul VI’s Ostpolitik: Archbishop Antonio Samorè, Rev. Lu-
igi Poggi, and Rev. Agostino Casaroli.112 The ZNAK activists asked
109. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:389. 110. Ibid., 2:388.

111. Ibid., 2:389.
112. Cerny-Werner, Vatikanische Ostpolitik und die DDR.

their primate’s permission before taking these meetings, yet the
meetings were set up not through Wyszyński, but through back-
channels. The most important intermediary proved to be Konrad
Sieniewicz, a leader of Poland’s exiled Christian Democratic par-
ty, who in the 1950s had become a major player in transnational
Christian Democracy.113
Noting Wyszyński’s “historic” opportunity to play intermedi-
ary between the Catholic Church and a Communist regime, Za-
wieyski remained skeptical of the primate’s willpower: “I feel in
my bones that the cardinal will somehow worm his way out of this
role.”114 Time and again, after hearing Wyszyński deliver sermons
and lectures in Rome, Zawieyski noted with regret the primate’s
incessant emphasis on the value of “martyrdom”: “The word ‘mar-
tyrdom’ was repeated hundreds of times. Young Italian girls were
listening to these words, students of the Ursuline nuns in Rome.
What could they possibly have thought of all of this?”115
The other branches of the ZNAK movement—particularly
the writers and editors of the Kraków-based Tygodnik Powszechny
and Znak—evinced a similar skepticism toward Wyszyński. Ty-
godnik Powszechny editor-in-chief Jerzy Turowicz covered the en-
tire First and Second sessions of the Council, with his reporting
appearing in a weekly front-page feature entitled, “Jerzy Turow-
icz Is Calling from Rome.” In an October 1963 conversation with
Jan Grootaers, Turowicz minced no words as he expressed his
frustration with the Polish Council fathers’ refusal to compro-
mise with the regime. Turowicz declared,
Cardinal Wyszyński is too tough on the regime, it seems to me. He
seems to believe that the fall of communism is very near. Yet we
may still be living under this regime for a long time. Some form of
coexistence (not too peaceful) is inevitable. It is necessary to be re-
113. Konrad Sieniewicz, W Polsce po trzydziestu latach (London: Odnowa, 1978).

115. Ibid., 2:208.

alistic, given the facts. Respecting some agreements is in the inter-
est even of the Communist regime. After the First Session of the
Council, there was a moment when the government was disposed
toward a concordat or the establishment of certain diplomatic rela-
tions. But, in effect, the cardinal behaved in such a manner that the
government soon stiffened. The Polish Church in general remains
very constantinian.116
When one scratches beneath the surface of the Polish bish-

ops’ story, it becomes a tale of prelates trying to overcome re-
sentment: not only against the Communists, but also against the
Holy See. As Jan Grootaers has noted, in the battle for religious
freedom, this issue “constituted a separate front: that of recur-
ring tensions between the Polish bishops’ conference and repre-
sentatives of the Vatican each time the latter entered into direct
negotiations with the Polish government without including the
relevant bishops.”117
Seen in this light, it becomes clear that Vatican II’s signifi-
cance for the Soviet Bloc has been largely misunderstood by ex-
isting scholarship. Rather than ignore populations walled off by
an Iron Curtain, the Council created a unique transnational space
for intellectual and political interaction and debate involving
Communists, Iron Curtain Catholics (clergy and laity alike), and
émigrés—of which Poland offered perhaps the most vibrant case,
though hardly the only one.118
Christian Democratic émigrés, in particular, played the semi-
nal role of facilitators. Supported by funds originating from
the Free Europe Committee and the United States Information
Agency, these “last men standing” for the Polish Christian La-
116. “Diarium Jan Grootaers,” 1893–94; underlining in the original.

117. Grootaers, Actes et acteurs à Vatican II, 327.
118. It is therefore inaccurate to present—as does, for example, Piotr Rutkows-
ki—the Polish story of Vatican II as a struggle by the bishops (especially Cardinal
Wyszyński) against the putatively aligned forces of the Polish Communists and Cath-
olic lay activists; Rutkowski, Polscy biskupi jako ojcowie Soboru Watykańskiego II, 171.

bor Party (Stronnictwo Pracy) saw in the younger generations of
ZNAK activists the future cadres of Polish Catholicism.119 In this
assessment, the Christian Democrats were not wrong: among
their beneficiaries were future MPs, senators, and a prime min-
ister of post-Communist Poland. All that these men and women
needed, the exiles reasoned, was a sense of Christian Democratic
identity.120
Yet these lay activists had different goals. While Zawieyski
played a delicate diplomatic game, Zabłocki—twenty-five years
Zawieyski’s junior—was more interested in the Christian Demo-
cratic exiles and their Western European contacts.121 Meanwhile,
Turowicz and his colleagues from Kraków at times seemed to
side openly with the regime against the primate.122 Rather than
nudge the Polish bishops along, they attempted to go over the
prelates’ heads altogether.
The result was perhaps the greatest disaster in relations be-
tween Poland’s clergy and laity at any point in the whole Com-
munist period. The crisis came to a head in Rome in the middle
of the Second Session. The Polish lay activist Stanisław Stomma,
founding editor-in-chief of the Znak monthly and an MP to the
Polish parliament, went behind the Polish episcopate’s back. In
November 1963, Stomma submitted to the Holy See a memoran-
dum entitled, “The Opinions of the Catholic Circles in Poland
Grouped in the Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs, around Tygodnik
119. Stanisław Gebhardt, “Sprawozdanie o sytuacji na emigracji przedstawione

na Radzie SP na Wychodźstwie,” November 18–19, 1956, Archives of the Polish Insti-
tute of Arts and Sciences of America, New York, Karol Popiel papers, box 9.10; see
also Gebhardt, “Działalność na forum międzynarodowym,” in Świadectwa/Testimo-
nianze, vol. 4, Pro publico bono: Polityczna, społeczna i kulturalna działalność Polaków
w Rzymie w XX wieku, ed. Ewa Prządka (Rome: Fundacja Rzymska im. J.S. Umiast-
owskiej 2006), 259–322.
120. Gebhardt, interview with author, February 23, 2006.
121. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:666–68.
122. Robert Jarocki, Czterdzieści pięć lat w opozycji: O ludziach “Tygodnika Pow-
szechnego” (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1990).

Powszechny, around the Znak and Więź monthlies, and in the
ZNAK Parliamentary Circle in the Sejm of the People’s Republic
of Poland.”123 Although Stomma claimed to speak for the entire
movement, Zawieyski, for example, was not even consulted.
Wyszyński already felt that lay activists had betrayed him a
decade earlier, when PAX failed to defend him at the time of his
arrest in 1953. PAX had never been close to the primate; ZNAK,
however, aspired to close cooperation with the episcopate. For
the primate, then, Stomma’s memo was even more hurtful, for
it came from activists who “call me ‘Father,’ and who therefore
should have called upon me as their ‘Father.’ ”124 It was not even
the substance of the memorandum—a vague declaration of in-
tent to help normalize relations between Poland and the Vati-
can—that irked Wyszyński, but rather the underhanded manner
in which it had been presented to the Holy See. This was all the
more painful coming, as it did, immediately on the heels of the
anti-Marian memorandum.
Much had therefore changed in the two years separating Za-
wieyski’s papal audiences. In this poisoned environment, it was
difficult for any autonomous initiatives to bear fruit. When Za-
wieyski arrived in Rome in the fall of 1964 for his private audi-
ence with Paul VI, he had to wait over a month in utter uncer-
tainty. Preoccupied with the Affaire PAX, Wyszyński seemed also
to be punishing his old friend, suggesting at one point that Za-
wieyski see the pope not as a member of the Polish State Council,
but instead as a private citizen, an artist. To this, Zawieyski re-
sponded, “I didn’t come here to talk to the pope about theater.”125
At the same time, the Communist journalist Ignacy Krasicki
—permanent Roman correspondent for Polish Radio and for the
123. “W setną rocznicę urodzin prymasa Stefana Wyszyńskiego (3 sierpnia

1901–2001): Wyszyński: strażnik tradycji czy wizjoner?” Tygodnik Powszechny, Au-
gust 5, 2001; Friszke, Koło posłów “Znak” w Sejmie PRL, 53–57.
124. Quoted in Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:502.

Polish Workers’ Agency—was making the rounds of various Ital-
ian journals, spreading disinformation about Zawieyski’s visit.126
Some heard that it was connected to the breaking news of Nikita
Khrushchev’s resignation as Soviet premier, others that it was
a prelude to Poland’s answer to the Partial Agreement that the
Holy See had just reached with Hungary.127
These rumors apparently angered Wyszyński even further.
Meanwhile, Zawieyski stewed in isolation, pouring into the pag-
es of his diary his frustrated sense of mission on behalf of Pol-
ish Catholicism: “I’m doing this for the Church; I’m doing it for
Poland, for our society, for our clergy, for the improvement of
spiritual life in Poland. I will be happy if the facts can speak for
themselves; I can remain in the shadows, absent from this im-
portant matter.”128
Once the audience finally came to pass, Zawieyski left Rome
thinking that he might have single-handedly engineered the
normalization of relations between the Holy See and the Peo-
ple’s Republic of Poland. When he returned to Poland, however,
Gomułka said the following to him: “The government will not
address itself to the Vatican for the normalization of relations.
Any demand for the government to address itself officially in
this matter will trigger a rejection. We know that the Vatican ad-
dressed itself to Hungary, to Czechoslovakia, and to Yugoslavia.
Why should we be any worse?”
The ZNAK activists could not overcome their frustration. The
episcopate, the Holy See, and the PZPR all essentially had the
same priority: maintaining Poland’s prewar status as a “nuncia-
126. Krasicki had already prepared an extensive report for the PZPR’s Central
Committee before the start of the First Session: Ignacy Krasicki, “Notatka w sprawie
sytuacji w Watykanie przed II Watykańskim Soborem Powszechnym—po wizycie
kardynała Wyszyńskiego w Rzymie,” March 19, 1962, Archiwum Akt Nowych (Ar-
chive of Modern Records, Poland), PZPR 237/Y-367.
127. “Nuovo tentativo della Polonia per un incontro con la Chiesa,” Il Tiempo,
November 13, 1964; Il Symbolo, November 13, 1964.

ture of the first category,” restitutio ad integrum.129 The disagree-
ment, rather, lay in the matter of who would take the leading role
in negotiations and their publicity. Gomułka did not want to cede
ground to Wyszyński, nor Wyszyński to Gomułka. To complicate
matters even further, in the course of the Council, Wyszyński
developed a profound distrust for Casaroli, the architect of Ost-
politik—this, despite the fact that Casaroli, Poggi, and Samorè
intentionally held ZNAK at arm’s length, looking to preserve
Wyszyński’s position.130 In fact, it was Wyszyński who nudged
them in this direction, undermining Zawieyski’s credibility in
memoranda to the Vatican insiders responsible for Ostpolitik.131
The matter would stop there, and normalization would have
to wait until 1972.132 Polish lay activists would look on dourly
while Communist and Catholic Church officials allowed their ex-
tensive efforts on behalf of diplomatic normalization to come to
naught. As Janusz Zabłocki observed in December 1963 after a
meeting with Poland’s ambassador to Italy, “while things are at
an impasse in the Vatican’s relationship with other socialist coun-
tries, with respect to Poland things are moving backward . . . I real-
ize what kind of news Warsaw needs to hear from Rome and what
end it is to serve. There can be no illusions about this: they are to
be ammunition serving the continued fight against the Church in
Poland.”133

130. Poggi prepared notes for Casaroli that repeated Wyszyński’s dismissal
of the activists of Znak and Więź as being no better than PAX, in other words—
“representatives of the Warsaw regime and its various agents”; Luigi Poggi, “Espos-
to dell’E.mo Sig.Card. Wyszyński circa eventuale accordo tra Santa Sede e Governo
polacco,” December 2, 1963, Archivio di Stato di Parma: Fondo Casaroli, Serie: Paesi
del Est, Sottoserie: Polonia, Imm.12 (provisional document record). I thank Roland
Cerny-Werner for sharing these files.
131. Wyszyński, “Indizi che dimostrano la tendenza del regime del Polonia ad un
accordo con la Santa Sede,” November 2, 1963, Archivio di Stato di Parma: Fondo Casa-
roli, Serie: Paesi del Est, Sottoserie: Polonia, Imm.12 (provisional document record).
132. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 347–48.

“Open Catholicism”
But the story of the Polish laity’s engagement with Vatican II is
about much more than backroom negotiations. Ecumenism, mo-
dernity, the human person, the apostolate of the laity, Jews as
Christians’ “elder brothers in faith”—this was a vocabulary deep-
ly familiar to many of Poland’s top Communist-era lay activists
long before it was codified in the constitutions, declarations, and
decrees handed down at Vatican II.134 The ZNAK movement was
the product of several generations’ worth of transnational en-
gagement by Polish Catholic thinkers and activists, dating back
to Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum.135 When John XXIII
announced an ecumenical council in 1959, there were thus scores
of activists in Poland—some educated in the fin-de-siècle, others
in the interwar period, others under Stalinism—who felt that
their time had finally come.
Poland’s top lay activists had an impact both inside and out-
side Poland as mediators for the Council. On the one hand, with
their reporting, they shaped Vatican II’s reception back in Po-
land. On the other, they lived at the forefront of aggiornamento
in their encounters with lay counterparts throughout Europe
and the world.
These activists lived paradoxical lives as members of an of-
ficially sanctioned movement of autonomous associations oper-
ating within a Communist-run state. ZNAK activists considered
themselves obliged to pursue bona fide dialogue with Marxism,
both in academia and in power. As the leadership of the Warsaw
Catholic Intelligentsia Club reported to the government in 1965,
ZNAK saw its major contributions proceeding along two tracks,
134. Jerzy Turowicz, “Antysemityzm,” Tygodnik Powszechny, March 17, 1957;

“Rozdroża i wartości,” Więź, no. 1 (1958): 5–13; Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Andrzej
Wielowieyski, “Otwarcie na Wschód,” Więź, no. 67 (1963): 7–13.
135. Kosicki, “Between Catechism and Revolution.”

both international and national. Its activists were happy to be
“bringing much into the common good of the laity in the inter-
national arena,” while also intending “to serve and actually serv-
ing People’s Poland.”136 While Jerzy Zawieyski, Jerzy Turowicz,
and other movement elders met with Gomułka and other high-
ranking functionaries and party officials, the movement’s Young
Turks—assembled in the Warsaw-based monthly Więź, founded
in 1958—set up regular, structured debates with the students
of Warsaw University professors Leszek Kołakowski and Adam
Schaff, the leading lights of revisionist Marxism.137
The common ground forged by the ZNAK movement in both
its national and transnational dialogues on how the modern
Catholic layman should best serve the causes of social justice and
world solidarity gave rise to good conversations, deep friendship,
and—most importantly—an ideology that the Poles described as
“open Catholicism” (katolicyzm otwarty). Inspired by a range of
Catholic theologians and philosophers who later served as periti
or auditors at Vatican II—including Yves Congar, Henri de Lu-
bac, Jacques Maritain, and Karl Rahner—the entire movement
embraced the idiom of “open Catholicism” to describe its own
philosophy of engagement in the world. As the Warsaw Catholic
Intelligentsia Club’s leadership put it, “The attitude represented
by the Club should be called an ‘open attitude,’ for it is open to all
that is good and true and accepting of the principles of exchange
of cultural goods between believers and non-believers.”138
The “open Catholicism” of ZNAK preceded Vatican II, but it
became the single most important lens shaping Poland’s recep-
136. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Klubu Inteligencji Katolickiej w Warszawie za

okres od 1.I.-31.XII.1965r.,” 9, AIPN, BU 0712/31.
137. These dialogues yielded, among others, Tadeusz Maciej Jaroszewski,
Nauka społeczna Kościoła a socjalizm (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1960); Tadeusz
Mrówczyński, Personalizm Maritaina i współczesna myśl katolicka (Warsaw: Książka
i Wiedza, 1964).
138. “Sprawozdanie z działalności Klubu, 1.I-31.XII.1965r.,” 6.

tion of the Council’s debates, teachings, and legacy. As the Coun-
cil unfolded, Więź, Znak, and Tygodnik Powszechny published arti-
cle after article debating the proper bases of Catholic thought in
a postconciliar world.139 The ZNAK publishing house that printed
both the Więź and Znak monthly journals also published Polish
translations of canonical texts by Western European periti.140
In parallel, the five Catholic Intelligentsia Clubs attached to
those publications held regular debates on the Council and on the
future of the Church. By 1965, the Warsaw club alone had hosted
1732 meetings and 1432 talks. Even Polish critics of Vatican II have
acknowledged the heuristic power of “open Catholicism.” For ex-
ample, the late Polish politician Wiesław Chrzanowski, a long-
time political prisoner of Stalinism and a committed exponent
of Polish Catholic nationalism, described himself in 2006 as a
“closed Catholic,” making a point to underscore the contrast with
ZNAK.141
The single most important theoretician of “open Catholicism”
was Juliusz Eska, a Warsaw-based editor for Więź. Because of his
limited language skills, Eska never achieved the prominence of
many other leading lights of the rich cast of characters inhabit-
ing the ZNAK movement. Janusz Zabłocki, for example, became
Więź’s conciliar correspondent only after Eska turned the assign-
ment down for want of competency in spoken French and Ital-
ian.142 Yet Eska had two major strengths: a clear and penetrating
139. In 1963, in Znak alone: Hans Küng, “Sobór, odnowa i zjednoczenie,” Znak,
no. 107 (1963): 530–60; Jean Guitton, “Czym jest Kościół?,” Znak, no. 107 (1963):
561–75; Karl Rahner, “O schemacie De Ecclesia,” Znak, no. 114 (1963): 1477–83.
The next year, Znak was the first journal to publish remarks made by Archbishop
Wojtyła concerning Schema XIII: Karol Wojtyła, “Chrześcijanin a kultura,” Znak, no.
124 (1964): 1153–57.
140. Chenu, Lud boży w świecie, trans. Zofia Włodkowa and Halina Bortnowska
(Kraków: Znak, 1968); Emmanuel Mounier, Wprowadzenie do egzystencjalizmów oraz
wybór innych prac, ed. and trans. Janusz Zabłocki (Kraków: Znak, 1965).
141. Wiesław Chrzanowski, Interview with author, November 3, 2005; Roman
Graczyk, Chrzanowski (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2013).
142. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:488–89.

prose style that distinguished him from many of his colleagues;
and the unwavering support of Więź’s editor-in-chief, a future
dissident and prime minister of Poland: Tadeusz Mazowiecki.
One of Więź’s founding members, Eska became its pointper-
son early on for ecclesiology, pastoral life, and aggiornamento. His
first writings on the need for reform in the Church came in the
September 1958 issue of Więź, just one month before the death
of Pius XII elevated the reforming John XXIII to the throne of
St. Peter.143 Following the elderly pontiff’s election, Eska wrote
regularly on the Church. Following the January 1959 announce-
ment of an upcoming ecumenical council, Mazowiecki suggested
that he consider collecting his essays into a single volume.
Published in 1963 during the Second Session, Eska’s book be-
came a manifesto of the ZNAK movement’s identification with
Vatican II. Its title, Kościół otwarty (An open church), spoke to his
hopes for reform not just within Polish Catholicism, but indeed
throughout the entire universal Church. Drawing extensively on
Karl Rahner, the essays assembled in the volume reevaluated,
among others, the Catholic Church’s pastoral future, the role of
the laity, and the place of ideology (especially so-called “integ-
rism” and “progressivism”) in the Church.144
The cornerstone of Eska’s open Catholicism lay in the recogni-
tion that the Catholic Church had become a “Diaspora Church.”145
By this, Eska meant that the vibrancy of Catholicism must be
judged not according to declared membership in the Church or
regular attendance at Mass, but by Catholics’ active efforts to re-
shape the world around them. Measured according to these crite-
ria, most believers of “good will” found themselves at odds with
some aspect of pre–Vatican II teaching, rendering them a “dias-
143. Juliusz Eska, “O kierunek katolickiej formacji intelektualnej,” Więź, no. 5

(1958): 11–20.
144. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, trans. Karl-H. Krueger (London:
Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1966), 5:115.
145. Juliusz Eska, Kościół otwarty (Kraków: Znak, 1963), 107.

pora.” For this reason, the Church’s core mission—“mission in the
spirit of an ‘open’ attitude”146—needed to be adapted to the task
of winning back Catholics who had left the Church. Eska wrote
that “an ‘open’ program of renewal in the Church demands both
a new form of mission and a new form for the Church’s existence
in the world.”
It was this “updated” mission that demanded the most of the
laity. Eska wrote, “For spokespersons of the ‘open’ attitude, the
matter of the laity is not simply one of the principal objective
processes denoting a turning point in the history of the modern
Church. It is also the touchstone and condition for reform, one of
its core problems.”147 As the ZNAK movement had demonstrated
for years, “the apostolate of a layman is not a special, separate
task, but rather an organic element of the Christian relationship
to the human being and to people.”148
In addition to engaging the laity, pastoral and ecclesiological
reform needed to struggle against the ideologization of Catholi-
cism—what Eska called the “Constantinian Church.”149 As Eska
wrote, “Catholicism is not an ideology. . . . The Church is neither an
institution nor an organization.” Although he named no names,
his book argues against both “progressivism” and “integrism” as
ways of framing Catholic mission in the world. In other words,
Catholicism was to be neither a political football in the hands of
Communists masking oppression with words of praise for aggior-
namento nor a mere instrument of fundamentalist mobilization.
Dialogue
Eska’s sensitivity to “ideological” Catholicism was the product of
years’ worth of conversations between the Więź staff and the Pol-
ish school of revisionist Marxism. Więź’s two principal cofound-
146. Ibid., 105. 147. Ibid., 127.

148. Ibid., 105. 149. Ibid., 115.

ers and intellectual architects were Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Ja-
nusz Zabłocki, who had become close friends over the course of
five years spent together in PAX.150 In the end, they rejected the
organization’s Stalinism, but they continued to aspire to harmo-
nizing Catholicism with state socialism. For them, Więź became a
vehicle for promoting Catholic socialism—whatever the Marxist
establishment thought of their efforts.
Mazowiecki was, both philosophically and personally, very
close to Eska. As he put it in 1965, Eska’s ideas had “been at the
very core of Więź’s mission since the moment of its founding,”
even if not articulated in so many words.151 To understand Eska,
one must first understand Mazowiecki.
In May 1963, Mazowiecki traveled to Brussels to deliver a paper
at a conference organized by Informations Catholiques Internation-
ales, in which he argued that “Poland is changing from a Catholic
country into a secular, pluralistic country”152 and that “one can-
not fight for humanism within the socialist world while remaining
completely apart from it.”153 Read together, Mazowiecki’s state-
ments show that ZNAK took state socialism and its philosophical
exponents seriously. Poland’s top lay activists saw Vatican II as nei-
ther a rejection of communism nor an escape from behind the Iron
Curtain, but rather as a set of guidelines to be followed in their
aspirations to be both good Catholics and good “citizens” of their
150. For example, Zabłocki, “Mazowiecki mój przeciwnik (10): Dni-burze, o

których wiesz tylko ty,” Ład, no. 327 (1991).
151. “Motywy, dążenia i braki postawy otwartej—dyskusja wokół książki Ju-
liusza Eski Kościół otwarty,” Więź, no. 81 (1965): 19.
152. Mazowiecki, “Odnowa polskiego katolicyzmu: Misja i wolność świeckich
w kraju socjalistycznym,” Więź, no. 658 (2014): 115. The Polish-language original of
the Brussels lecture was never published during Mazowiecki’s lifetime. This author
discovered the typescript in the WIĘŹ Archives (Warsaw). Więź then published the
text with a new title. An abridged version of the text appeared in French in 1964 as
Mazowiecki, “Mission et liberté des laïcs en pays socialiste,” in Mission et liberté des
laïcs dans le monde, by Georges Hourdin et al. (Paris: Cerf, 1964), 33–50. On the Brus-
sels trip more generally, see Kosicki, “*,” Więź, no. 658 (2014): 123–26.
153. Mazowiecki, “Odnowa polskiego katolicyzmu,” 116.

self-proclaimed “people’s republic.” When Mazowiecki spoke of
Poland as a “secular, pluralistic country,” he meant not confes-
sional pluralism — Poland was over 90 percent Catholic, follow-
ing the Holocaust, pogroms, and border shifts154 — but that he
was recognizing that Polish society included many unbelievers of
good will.
Mazowiecki’s 1963 talk in Belgium matters in this context
because, to a great extent, the Więź editor was relying on Eska.
The point about Poland changing into a “secular, pluralistic coun-
try,” for example, matched word for word what Eska had written
several years earlier.155 It was Eska’s ideas that served the Polish
laity in their dealings with bishops and Marxists alike. Like Pri-
mate Wyszyński, Eska believed that Church reforms needed to
proceed in Poland according to an “accomodata renovatio.”
While his bishop meant by this phrase to justify a slower pace
of reform, Eska in fact saw it as a call for radical “social dialogue
between Catholics and Marxists” of good faith.156 The best pos-
sible outcome would be not the defeat of state socialism by a
reforming Church, but rather Catholicism’s “contributing to the
entrenchment and development of humanistic, natural Christian
elements in the structure of socialist society.”157
The potential roadblocks on this path were legion. Among
Polish Marxists and Western European Catholics alike, ZNAK
encountered fears that open Catholicism was merely a ruse. As
Mazowiecki noted during a 1964 discussion of Eska’s book, the
challenge was to convince interlocutors of one’s good will, avoiding
“the mere appearance of reform, masking actual neo-integrism.”158
Leszek Kołakowski’s disciple Tadeusz Jaroszewski argued that
such “neo-integrism” boiled down to treating “openness as a
154. Kosicki, “Masters in Their Own Home.”

155. Eska, Kościół otwarty, 142. 156. Ibid., 143, 145.
157. Ibid., 145.
158. “Motywy, dążenia i braki postawy otwartej,” 23.

method of social engineering . . . from the standpoint of efficacy,
from a pragmatic standpoint, seeing principally that integrist
methods are less pastorally effective in the rechristianization of
the world than the ‘open’ method.”159 To this, Mazowiecki, Eska,
and their colleagues responded in unison that they meant to
demonstrate “a spirit of service and solidarity toward people of
other convictions”—they meant Marxists—citing as an encour-
aging sign the Holy See’s 1964 Partial Agreement with Commu-
nist Hungary.160
Time in Rome gave the Więź editors real hope of making
“open Catholicism” a reality. Mazowiecki traveled from Brus-
sels to Rome in June 1963 to attend John XXIII’s funeral, which
proved to be one of the defining experiences of his adult life. A
mere five months later, Zabłocki and Zawieyski took the initia-
tive in reestablishing ties between the Polish Church and the
Moscow patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. As it
happened, Archpriest Vitaly Borovoy had studied in Warsaw in
the 1930s, and he spoke fluent Polish; the Polish activists made
contact with him and tried to get their primate to take a meet-
ing with him.161 Wyszyński demurred, insensitive to the impor-
tance that the ZNAK activists attached to their own efforts. For
Zawieyski and Zabłocki, however, every conversation they had
spelled a life-or-death opportunity to reconnect Polish Catholi-
cism with the rest of the world.162
Many of the contacts made by ZNAK with Catholics from
across the Iron Curtain would outlast even the end of the Cold
War. The results included substantive and substantial intellec-
tual and political exchanges, as well as personal friendships. The
same Christian Democratic émigré activists who set Zabłocki
159. Ibid., 23.

160. Ibid., 20, 21.
161. See, for example, Vitaly Borovoy, “The Meaning of Catholicity,” Ecumenical
Review 16, no. 1 (1963): 26–32.
162. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:495; Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:377–78.

and Zawieyski up with Casaroli, Poggi, and Samorè in the 1960s
had earlier facilitated most of the contacts that the ZNAK move-
ment had not inherited from PAX.163 During the Council, they
also provided one-month scholarships to ZNAK activists coming
to Rome to cover Vatican II.
In addition, Konrad Sieniewicz and his Christian Democratic
colleagues Stanisław Gebhardt and Stanisław August Morawski
organized picnics, daytrips, and a host of other meetings for
their Polish visitors with “counterparts and potential partners
in similarly attuned quests” from Belgium, France, Italy, and the
Netherlands.164 While Janusz Zabłocki met the Flemish Catholic
labor leader August Vanistendael and attended a conference of
the French Catholic-socialist organization La Vie Nouvelle, Ty-
godnik Powszechny’s Jerzy Turowicz socialized with other Catho-
lic journalists, including Jan Grootaers, then editor-in-chief of
the Flemish Catholic monthly De Maand.165
These contacts were about far more than curiosity or bragging
rights. They also had tangible consequences for ZNAK’s ability to
translate conciliar teachings back to Poland. By 1964, Zabłocki
had decided to write a book about the evolution of what was then
called Schema XIII, which would subsequently become Gaudium et
spes. Given this project, his budding friendship with Vanistendael
struck in Rome proved to be like manna from heaven. The Belgian
labor leader was one of a select few lay auditors at Vatican II with
privileged access to confidential drafts of the conciliar documents.
Already at his first meeting with Zabłocki in 1964, Vanistendael
promised the Pole a copy of every draft of Schema XIII that came
163. The Polish security apparatus offers copious corroborating evidence at

AIPN, BU 0785/7, 1–289.
165. Vanistendael and Grootaers both also spoke at the same Brussels confer-
ence as Mazowiecki, Hourdin, et al., Mission et liberté des laïcs dans le monde, 15–33,
133–60. On La Vie Nouvelle, see Jean Lestavel, La Vie Nouvelle: Histoire d’un mouve-
ment inclassable (Paris: Cerf, 1994).

into his hands.166 This illegal leaking of confidential drafts by a lay
auditor made it possible for Zabłocki to write a serious intellec-
tual history of the pastoral constitution’s development, published
in Polish two years after the Council’s conclusion.167
Covering the Council

Meanwhile, the contacts made by Turowicz in Rome literally
shaped the week-by-week Polish reception of the Second Vatican
Council as it unfolded. For all of the devastating repressions suf-
fered by the Catholic Church in Poland during the Communist
period, those same years were also a time of unprecedented cul-
tural, intellectual, and social engagement and leadership for the
Polish laity. Poland was the only country behind the Iron Curtain
that was able to send “independent” Catholic activists, who then
received official credentials as journalists in the Vatican press of-
fice, allowed to observe portions of the Council. Given this ac-
cess, the “open Catholics” achieved an authoritative voice as they
mediated the Council back to Poland.
As with the bishops, passports were granted or withheld to
lay journalists for any number of reasons: some strategic, some
ad hoc. Yet, with exceptions few and far between, Communist Po-
land had journalists on the ground in Rome for all of the sessions
of the Second Vatican Council. This on-the-ground presence clear-
ly mattered for the Council’s reception back home—in particular,
for the active young Catholic intellectuals waiting each day with
bated breath for news from Rome, seeking to understand the
transformations of their Church underway in the Vatican.168
The undisputed leader among Polish Catholic mediators of the

167. Zabłocki, Kościół i świat współczesny: Wprowadzenie do soborowej konstytucji
pastoralnej “Gaudium et spes” (Kraków: Znak, 1967).
168. Friszke, Oaza na Kopernika, 75–87.

Council was Jerzy Turowicz, who had access to the largest Polish-
language readership of any journalist, aside from Communist
correspondent Ignacy Krasicki. As Brian Porter-Szűcs has noted,
Tygodnik Powszechny had a reputation of “constantly push[ing] at
the edges of Polish Catholicism (and, for that matter, Polish com-
munism), testing how far one could go without crossing some line
that would solicit charges of heterodoxy.”169
In the course of the Council, even as the state deployed ever
more severe repressive measures against Tygodnik Powszechny, its
mass readership continued to grow. The weekly could boast of the
most direct link of any Polish Catholic voice to what the Council
fathers were doing. As Zabłocki noted in October 1964, Tygodnik
Powszechny was, given its weekly print run of 50,000, “for the Pol-
ish reader effectively the principal source of information about
the Council.”170 Even when the print run was halved that year as
punishment for editor-in-chief Jerzy Turowicz’s decision to sign
the so-called Letter of 34171—an open letter of Poland’s journal-
istic and literary elite to the prime minister protesting censorship
of the written word—Tygodnik Powszechny was able to continue
its weekly coverage.
During each of the four sessions, Tygodnik Powszechny was
the main source of Polish-language translations of texts by Holy
fathers and Council fathers.172 During the First and Second ses-
sions, Turowicz’s extensive reporting by telephone from Rome
graced the front page of each issue. In 1964, when Turowicz was
denied a passport following the Letter of 34, Jacek Woźniakowski
took over for him with weekly reports from Rome.
The commentaries provided by Turowicz and Woźniakowski
painted a portrait of daily life in conciliar Rome, providing a mise-
169. Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 40.

171. Jerzy Eisler, List 34 (Warsaw: PWN, 1993).
172. For example, “Jan XXIII z okazji zamknięcia Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny,
December 23, 1962.

en-scène for the faithful back in Poland. Turowicz, in particular,
graced his reporting with amusing anecdotes: on the one hand,
these helped his readership to understand the gravity of the pro-
ceedings; on the other, they offered much-appreciated moments
of levity. For example, in an article entitled “Daily Life at the
Council,” Turowicz wrote, “As is generally known, the debate takes
place in Latin, which is the only working language of the Council’s
plenary sessions. There are, however, exceptions to this otherwise
ironclad rule. Technical or administrative announcements, as well
as information directed to Council fathers, are often read not only
in Latin (by the general secretary), but also in five modern lan-
guages (by the undersecretary, namely: French, English, German,
Spanish, and Arabic).”173
The linguistic norms of the Council gave rise to a range of
amusing situations. Janusz Zabłocki captured one of these bril-
liantly as he chronicled the statements of plenary session chair-
man Archbishop Pericle Felici. The Polish journalist had a great
knack for finding humor in the Italian prelate’s difficulties with
“modern” Latin: “he has certain difficulties in informing Council
fathers in the language of Cicero of what hours the cafeteria is
open or where they can obtain commemorative Vatican postage
stamps. Today he had particular difficulty in exhorting the fa-
thers, in light of President Sukarno’s audience with Paul VI, not
to park their cars after a certain hour in the Piazza San Pietro.”174
In the end, the laity’s coverage of the Council, as well as the
networking pursued in its course, paved the way for ever greater
Polish participation in the global transformation of the Catholic
Church. Fourteen years before the election of John Paul II, ZNAK
activists joined almost 20,000 other participants at the 38th Inter-
national Eucharistic Congress in Bombay, where Pope Paul VI pre-
173. Turowicz, “Dzień powszedni Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny, November 18,

1962.

sided, following preparatory sessions in Rome.175 One of the con-
gress’s principal tasks was to set the agenda for the Third World
Congress of the Laity, planned for 1967, the first to be held since
the death of Pius XII. Joining laity from all over the world, Poles
traversed the Iron Curtain to assume the role that they believed
it their obligation to play alongside their bishops. In this, “open
Catholicism” was both their guide and the gateway to a new kind
of transnational engagement.
Poland was also the only Iron Curtain country to be granted a
lay auditor at the Second Vatican Council. Introduced by Paul VI
for the Second Session, the status of auditor allowed prominent
Catholic philosophers, historians, and social activists to observe
the plenary sessions and to participate fully in conciliar commis-
sion work as the only nonclerical voices at Vatican II. In most cas-
es, auditors were designated at the recommendation of the head
bishop of a given country, although officially they participated in
the Council ad personam at the Holy Father’s invitation. The Sec-
ond Session featured twelve lay auditors (all men), while the Third
Session included also women (seventeen out of a total of forty au-
ditors).176
Poland had one auditor, a professor from the Catholic Uni-
versity of Lublin named Stefan Swieżawski. This historian was
unique among his colleagues in the ZNAK movement, as his for-
mal training in Catholic thought both far exceeded and substan-
tially antedated that of his fellow activists. One of Poland’s most
eminent scholars of Catholicism, Swieżawski had an interna-
tional reputation that preceded even World War II. As a graduate
student, he had studied in France in 1929–30 under the Thomist
175. Woźniakowski’s impressions from both meetings—as well as the Third

Session—are recorded in Jacek Woźniakowski, Laik w Rzymie i w Bombaju (Kraków:
Znak, 1965).
176. On Paul VI’s unprecedented decision to bring in lay auditors, see Groot-
aers, “The Drama Continues between the Acts: The ‘Second Preparation,’ ” in History
of Vatican II, 2:350–441.

historian Étienne Gilson. At the same time, he also developed a
friendship with one of Vatican II’s most important forerunners,
Jacques Maritain, that would last more than forty years.177 He
was one of the few non-Marxist humanists in postwar Poland
who both maintained an international reputation and engaged in
substantial scholarly activity outside of Poland. Few other schol-
ars outside the PZPR were able to preserve what the Polish secu-
rity apparatus called “quite lively ties abroad” throughout the en-
tire Communist period.178
Although he attended only the final weeks of the Third Ses-
sion, Swieżawski made his mark one year later on a global scale.
There, he joined fellow auditors Jean Guitton and Ramon Sug-
ranyes de Franch on the preparatory commission for Schema XIII’s
subsection on culture. At the close of Vatican II, he shared with
Guitton and with his old friend Jacques Maritain the great honor
of personally receiving from Paul VI an appeal to “men and women
of science and culture.”179
Like his ZNAK colleagues in Rome covering the Council,
Swieżawski, too, mediated the event back to Poland. Yet the priv-
ileged access that, as an auditor, he enjoyed to conciliar debates
and documents meant that he was in a better position than any
Pole besides the bishops to assess the Council’s successes and
failures. By turns, Swieżawski assisted the Polish episcopate, rep-
resented the Polish laity, and acted autonomously of both. For
the Lublin professor, taking seriously the “signs of our times”
meant addressing what he perceived as a crisis in Catholic atti-
tudes toward philosophy.180
177. Stefan Swieżawski, Wielki Przełom 1907–1945 (Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnic-
tw KUL, 1989), 104–7.
178. E. Mirowski, “Analiza materiałów operacyjnych dotyczących Stefana
Swieżawskiego,” February 21, 1964, 2, AIPN, BU 0192/168/1.
179. Paul VI, Second Vatican Council Closing Speech (December 8, 1965), http://
www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6closin.htm; accessed September 2, 2014.
180. Georges (Jerzy) Kalinowski and Stefan Swieżawski, La philosophie à l’heure
du Concile (Paris: Société d’Éditions Internationales, 1965), 13.

Even though his time at the Council was limited, Stefan Swie-
żawski’s presence there substantially raised Polish Catholicism’s
profile abroad. He actively promoted his home institution, the
Catholic University of Lublin—the only nonpublic university be-
hind the Iron Curtain. When the formation of a pontifical commis-
sion called Iustitia et Pax was announced to oversee the implemen-
tation of Gaudium et spes, Swieżawski was chosen for a five-year
term as one of its thirteen members.181 The rector of the Catholic
University of Lublin delighted in the spotlight that Swieżawski’s
distinguished service shone on his university, and he squared off
against the Communist security apparatus again and again to as-
sure that Swieżawski would “be able to travel freely and to partici-
pate continuously in all of the work of the Commission.”182
Who Is Karol Wojtyła?

Although Swieżawski’s activities at the Council have thus far re-
ceived little scholarly attention, much has been written about
the conciliar work of his longtime Lublin colleague, Rev. Karol
Wojtyła. Though already an accomplished philosopher when he
became auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Kraków in 1958,
the future John Paul II was merely thirty-eight years old at the
time. He would later be young for an archbishop, young for a car-
dinal, and young for a pope.
When Vatican II began, Wojtyła was one of the Council’s most
junior bishops. Nonetheless, having completed his doctoral dis-
sertation in Rome at the Collegium Angelicum in 1948, fluent in
six languages by the time he received the bishop’s miter, Wojtyła
181. Paul VI created Iustitia et Pax with “Catholicam Christi ecclesiam,” Acta
Apostolicae Sedis no. 59 (1967): 27. On the commission’s early work, see W. M. Cash-
man, “The Laity Council’s First Year,” Furrow 21, no. 4 (1970): 248–55.
182. Wincenty Granat to Passport Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, June
24, 1967, Archiwum Uniwersyteckie Katolickiego Uniwersytetu im. Jana Pawła II (Ar-
chives of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin), Lublin: File 311A.

clearly felt at home at the Council.183 He could communicate eas-
ily with other delegations, and he already had extensive contacts
among even the more theologically progressive circles in France,
Belgium, and the Netherlands from time spent traveling around
those countries in the 1940s.184
Wojtyła’s junior status lent itself to easy contact with other
national delegations. As a young bishop, he was seated in close
physical proximity with the junior members of other national
episcopates from around the world. The spatial geography of seat-
ing within St. Peter’s Basilica placed Wojtyła in the back rows,
alongside others who had entered adulthood on the eve of World
War II and were mostly a product of the 1930s and 1940s—as op-
posed to the 1910s or 1920s (like Wyszyński). As Jan Grootaers
writes, “the young generation found itself at the back of the ba-
silica, and there the applause began for the more ‘audacious’ pro-
posals that would gradually engulf the whole assembly.”185
Particularly since Wojtyła’s elevation to the papacy, a notable
strain within the historiography of modern Poland has highlight-
ed the putative opposition between Wojtyła’s supposed “pro-
gressivism” and Wyszyński’s supposed “conservatism.” Yet, as
Brian Porter-Szűcs points out, “Wojtyła’s poetic, often mystical
language allowed him to finesse the tensions between the postc-
onciliar terminology and ecclesiology and the centralism favored
by Wyszyński and most of the remainder of the Polish episco-
pate. . . . At the same time, he would not abide any weakening of
his authority as bishop, and he fully accepted Wyszyński’s call for
unity and obedience in the face of the communist threat.”186
Wojtyła was no upstart. In fact, he delivered many of the Pol-
ish conciliar delegation’s most prominent speeches. As Robert
183. Wojtyła, Faith According to St. John of the Cross, trans. Jordan Aumann (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981).
184. Wojtyła, “Mission de France,” Tygodnik Powszechny, March 6, 1949.
185. Grootaers, Actes et Acteurs à Vatican II, 94.

Skrzypczak argues, “The Polish bishops themselves, particularly
in the last two conciliar sessions, deemed him to be their official
representative, if not their leader, conferring upon him the right
to take the floor in their collective name.”187 Over the course of
the four conciliar sessions, the bishop from Kraków spoke in ple-
nary session a total of eight times and delivered sixteen written
communiqués to the Council secretariat.
Wojtyła had four core areas of interest: ecclesiology, relations
with the secular world, human freedom, and evangelization.188
Pastoral and theological issues were most important to Wojtyła.
Polish auditor Stefan Swieżawski argued that his friend had played
a decisive role in shaping Vatican II’s reinvention “of the paschal
mystery, a central issue in theology.”189 Meanwhile, French jour-
nalists ranked him behind only cardinals Bea and König as a driv-
ing force behind Nostra aetate, the Council’s declaration on non-
Christian religions.190
Religious freedom was the topic on which Wojtyła spoke most
often. Like his lay friends who promoted “open Catholicism” in
the pages of Więź or Tygodnik Powszechny, Wojtyła, too, sought
to turn Vatican II into a weapon in the struggle against religious
“indifferentism.”191 In a speech delivered in plenary session on
September 22, 1965, Wojtyła insisted that the Council must state
clearly that religious freedom is “deeply personalistic in the Chris-
tian sense, rather than derived from liberalism or indifferent-
ism.”192 The archbishop pointedly distinguished between freedom
of conscience and unrestricted libertinism. Freedom of conscience
187. Skrzypczak, Karol Wojtyła na Soborze Watykańskim II, 19.

188. Ibid., 113.
189. “Określanie tożsamości: Ze Stefanem Swieżawskim rozmawiają Anna
Karoń-Ostrowska i Józef Majewski,” in Dzieci Soboru zadają pytania, 27.
190. Skrzypczak, Karol Wojtyła na Soborze Watykańskim II, 71.
191. This is the same language used by Mazowiecki, “Odnowa polskiego katoli-
cyzmu.”
192. Quoted in Skrzypczak, Karol Wojtyła na Soborze Watykańskim II, 312–13.

meant taking responsibility for one’s choices, especially “in reli-
gious matters.” This declaration came a mere two days after Polish
primate Wyszyński had warned Council fathers in plenary session
against “unwittingly furnishing totalitarian states with additional
ammunition in their fight against religion.”193
The future pope worked the hardest of any bishop to give
the fruits of Vatican II concrete form on Polish soil. During the
Council, he published a string of interviews, letters, and com-
mentaries in Tygodnik Powszechny, to whose staff he had once
belonged.194 As Brian Porter-Szűcs has noted, “back in the 1960s
and 1970s Wojtyła’s commitment to the ‘people of God’ helped
ensure that the Tygodnik Powszechny circle could elaborate their
views with the full support of their bishop.”195 To the ZNAK lead-
ership, Wojtyła was both a personal friend and their episcopal
protector. In the Council’s immediate aftermath, he took advan-
tage of ZNAK’s work to bring to Poland as its guests Catholic lu-
minaries like Yves Congar and August Vanistendael, asking those
visitors to smuggle materials back to Western Europe on his be-
half.196 Close cooperation between the Kraków archbishop and
the Polish laity assured serious Polish debate on Gaudium et spes
and the other key messages of Vatican II.
Wojtyła, in fact, became the only Polish Council father to or-
ganize diocesan synods on the Council’s teachings. Their purpose
was to give clergy and laity the opportunity to reflect together on
193. Ibid., 94–95.

194. Wojtyła, “List ks. biskupa Wojtyły do ‘Tygodnika Powszechnego,’ ” Tygod-
nik Powszechny 16, no. 46 (1962): 3; Wojtyła, “List pasterski ks. biskupa Wojtyły,” Ty-
godnik Powszechny 16, no. 47 (1962): 9; Wojtyła, “List pasterski z Soboru,” Tygodnik
Powszechny 18, no. 48 (1964): 1; Wojtyła, “Sobór od wewnątrz,” Tygodnik Powszechny
19, no. 16 (1965): 1, 3; Wojtyła, “Millennium a Sobór,” Tygodnik Powszechny 19, no. 18
(1965): 1–2.
196. On Congar’s 1966 visit to Poland, see the correspondence in Archives de la
Province Dominicaine de France, Paris: Collection V-832 (Yves Congar papers), box
300.24.33.

the nature of their involvement in the life of the Church. The cap-
stone event of Wojtyła’s pre-pontifical years was the synod that he
launched in Kraków in 1972, which then met on and off through
1979. The Kraków metropolitan even put his own ideas up for de-
bate: just before the synod opened, he published a book-length
treatise on how to breathe life into the conciliar documents.197
It was Vatican II that launched Wojtyła as an international
mover and shaker in the Catholic Church. In addition to shaping
the letter of its reforms, he made extensive contacts in the Holy
See over the course of the Council. Though unknown in the Vati-
can at the Council’s outset, work in successive Council commis-
sions turned the priest from Wadowice from a relative unknown
into an intellectual respected even by such esteemed periti as
Yves Congar. During the First Session, the Dominican Congar
had described Wojtyła simply as one “Polish bishop” among
many.198 Yet, by February 1965, he not only knew the Kraków
archbishop’s name, but in fact had developed a deep and abiding
respect for the prelate: “Wojtyła made a very great impression [in
the commission on Schema XIII]. His personality is imposing. A
power radiates from it, an attraction, a certain prophetic force
that is very calm, but incontestable.”199
By the end of the Council, Wojtyła had become a Vatican
insider from behind the Iron Curtain. This does not mean that
Wojtyła played a defining role at the Council. Nonetheless, he
became progressively more significant and more visible over its
course. His newfound prominence contributed in no small part
to his rapid ascent through the Church hierarchy—archbishop
in 1964, cardinal in 1967, Holy Father in 1978. Stefan Swieżawski
later recalled, “Both during the Council and thereafter, when we
197. Wojtyła, U Podstaw Odnowy: Studium o Realizacji Vaticanum II (Kraków: Pol-
skie Towarzystwo Teologiczne, 1972); Wojtyła, Sources of Renewal: The Implementation
of the Second Vatican Council, trans. P. S. Falla (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).
198. Congar, My Journal of the Council, 152.
199. Ibid., 714.

traveled to meetings of the Pontifical Commission Iustitia et Pax,
one could see the growing interest in Rome in the person of Car-
dinal Wojtyła. He was becoming papabilis.”200
It was this emerging reputation, alongside his active sponsor-
ship of synods and his delivery of the 1976 Lenten message in
Rome on Paul VI’s behalf, that ultimately carried Wojtyła to the
seat of St. Peter. Remarkable though the choice of a non-Italian
was in 1978 to follow the short-lived pontificate of John Paul I,
Wojtyła’s candidacy seems far less improbable in light of his rep-
utation gained through years of conciliar activism.
Coda: Concilium, Millennium, and Beyond

For Polish bishops and laity alike, the final months of Vatican II
were a busy time. In addition to the work of adopting and cir-
culating the final versions of the conciliar documents, the Poles
were preparing to celebrate a millennium of Polish Christendom
in 1966. ZNAK leaders like Zawieyski and Mazowiecki did not
hide their concern that the Marian devotion at the heart of the
millennial celebration might detract from the implementation of
conciliar reform in Poland.201
The Polish episcopate, meanwhile, used the Fourth Session to
try to show that Concilium and Millennium were complementary,
not contradictory. The bishops sent out fifty-six letters of pasto-
ral greetings in October and November 1965, inviting colleagues
from around the world to come to Poland on May 3, 1966, to cel-
ebrate the Polish Millennium. Among these letters, the greatest
care went into crafting the letter to German bishops. The result,
however, was a public scandal that shook Polish Catholicism.202
200. “Określanie tożsamości.”

201. “Milenium a dzień dzisiejszy—dyskusja redakcyjna,” Więź, no. 95 (1966):
3–65.
202. Kosicki, “Caritas across the Iron Curtain? Polish-German Reconciliation

The May 3 event was to be the culmination of the Great Nove-
na. This was the focal point of Wyszyński’s pastoral and political
program. For one day, Poland was to be the center of attention
for the global Catholic Church. Poland’s Marian devotion would
take center stage, with Pope Paul VI journeying to Częstochowa
to celebrate Mass before the icon of the Black Madonna at the
historic Jasna Góra Monastery. In the end, however, the Polish
authorities would deny the pope’s visa request, preventing him
from making his planned pilgrimage to Poland.
On November 18, 1965, the Polish Council fathers sent a pas-
toral letter to their German counterparts. Its most important
sentence was, “We grant forgiveness as well as ask for it.”203 The
letter contained a long and intricate historical narrative in which
the Poles attempted to recapitulate, from their own perspective,
the history of wrongs done to their nation by Germans, before
saying, “we well understand that the Polish western border on
the Oder and Neisse Rivers is, for Germany, an extremely bitter
fruit of the last war of mass extinction. Part of the bitterness is
caused by the sufferings of millions of German refugees and ex-
pellees expelled by an inter-Allied order of the victorious pow-
ers at Potsdam in 1945.”204 Instead of reopening old wounds, the
Poles proposed reconciliation: “despite everything, despite this
situation that is almost hopelessly burdened with the past, we
call on you, highly esteemed Brothers, to come out and away
from precisely that situation. Let us try to forget: no more po-
lemics, no more Cold War, but rather the beginning of a dialogue,
such as that which the Council and Pope Paul VI are seeking to
foster everywhere.”205
and the Bishops’ Letter of 1965,” East European Politics and Societies 23, no. 2 (2009):
213–43.
203. “Polish Bishops’ Appeal to Their German Colleagues,” November 18, 1965,
in German-Polish Dialogue: Letters of the Polish and German Bishops and International
Statements (New York: Edition Atlantic Forum, 1966), 7–19.
204. Ibid., 15. 205. Ibid., 16–17.

Written by Wrocław’s apostolic administrator, Archbishop
Bolesław Kominek, the letter was intended as an olive branch.
At the same time, the Polish prelates had certain hopes and ex-
pectations—namely, that the bishops of the Federal Republic of
Germany would lobby the Holy See to give Poles jurisdiction over
the dioceses of the “western territories” absorbed by Poland af-
ter World War II.206 Though the Poles had consulted the German
bishops in advance in Rome, the official response sent by the lat-
ter was a disappointment. Irrespective of how one assesses the
German bishops’ letter, there had clearly been a breakdown in
communication between the two episcopates. The German bish-
ops did not give the Poles what the latter had expected, which
was gratitude, forgiveness, and support for Polish claims of sov-
ereignty demarcated by the postwar border on the Oder and
Neisse rivers.207
What surprised the Polish bishops even more, however, was
the aggressive reaction of the PZPR. The Communist general sec-
retary, Władysław Gomułka—who did not know about the Polish
bishops’ letter until weeks later—spearheaded a campaign of anti-
ecclesiastical propaganda intended to punish the episcopate. More
than once, he publicly accused Wyszyński of having gone against
Polish raison d’État by meddling in the delicate matter of sover-
eignty over the “Recovered Territories.” An ugly exchange of let-
ters followed between the general secretary and the primate at the
turn of 1965 and 1966. Decrying the official propaganda campaign
against the Church—“Of what have I not been accused?” the pri-
mate despaired—Wyszyński explained that the bishops and Com-
206. Basil Kerski and Robert Żurek, “Orędzie biskupów polskich i odpowiedź nie-
mieckiego episkopatu z 1965 roku: Geneza, kontekst historyczny oraz oddziaływanie,”
in Basil Kerski, Tomasz Kycia, and Robert Żurek, “Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebacze-
nie”: Orędzie biskupów polskich i odpowiedź niemieckiego episkopatu z 1965 roku: Geneza—
kontekst—spuścizna (Olsztyn: Borussia, 2006), 20–25.
207. “German Bishops’ Reply to Their Polish Colleagues,” December 5, 1965, in
German-Polish Dialogue, 21–25.

munist Poland in fact shared the same position of wanting to see
the border recognized.208
Nonetheless, Gomułka had taken personal offense at what
he saw as ecclesiastical meddling in foreign affairs of the high-
est importance. Moreover, he felt increasing pressure within his
own party to take a tough stance in the face of competition from
Interior Minister Mieczysław Moczar.209
The church-state thaw was over. Gomułka went after Wy-
szyński’s pride and joy: the millennial celebrations. The PZPR ran
its own “millennial” campaign, designed to substitute the mil-
lennium of Polish statehood for the millennium of Polish Chris-
tendom. In tandem with the Communists’ own celebrations, the
Politburo wanted a “propaganda campaign that would reveal the
falsehoods contained in the [bishops’] letter, as well as the po-
litical harm done by the episcopate.”210 State officials disrupted
Catholic pilgrimages to Częstochowa, and one of the corner-
stones of the Great Novena—the peregrination of the Icon of the
Black Madonna around Poland—was interrupted at every stop
with a competing Communist rally.
Wyszyński, like Gomułka, took all of this personally. Pulling
back entirely from Polish-German reconciliation, he became con-
vinced of one overriding priority: to fight the Communists for
the soul of the Polish nation. This was a direct response to the
campaign that the PZPR had unleashed in the months following
the end of Vatican II.211
It is in this context that one must evaluate the Council’s con-
sequences for Communist Poland. For Polish bishops and laity
208. Stefan Wyszyński to Władysław Gomułka, March 12, 1966, reprinted in

Antoni Dudek, Państwo i Kościół w Polsce 1945–1970 (Kraków: PiT, 1995), 247.
209. On Gomułka and Moczar, see Jerzy Eisler, “March 1968 in Poland,” in 1968:
The World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 237–52.
210. Quoted in Friszke, Koło posłów “Znak” w Sejmie PRL, 67.
211. Kosicki, “Caritas across the Iron Curtain?,” 224–27.

alike, the Council constituted an unprecedented space of trans-
national engagement. Yet none of the players were able to escape
the constraints of Soviet Bloc ideology and Cold War geopolitics.
As a result, the immediate consequences of the Council were, in
fact, overwhelmingly negative.
The relationship between the episcopate and the PZPR de-
generated to its nadir at the very moment when the Holy See was
most interested in bringing Ostpolitik to Poland. Moreover, the
relationship between the episcopate and the laity also suffered.212
Within the year or two following the Council, most Western Euro-
pean countries had introduced the vernacular liturgy, with priests
facing the congregation, rather than the altar, as they officiated
Mass. In Poland, however, these reforms took effect only begin-
ning in 1968, and they progressed at a painfully slow pace.213 Only
in 1968 was the first missal printed in Poland that was not en-
tirely in Latin; it was, however, only partially in Polish. The first
full Polish-language missal was not published until 1986.
Once the tensions of the Millennium campaign had dissipat-
ed, lay activists began to appeal to Wyszyński to speed the pace
of reform. They left meetings with the primate feeling rebuffed,
even mocked. As early as 1965, following his return from the
Fourth Session, the primate warned the Warsaw Catholic Intel-
ligentsia Club against “intellectualizing the Church, as if it con-
sisted entirely of philosophers.”214 The club’s resident theology
expert, Stanisława Grabska, complained that Wyszyński had sent
her, Swieżawski, and others away when they came to him in Feb-
ruary 1967 to request that priests face the congregation during
212. In addition to the fallout from the 1963 memorandum that Stomma sent
to the Vatican behind Wyszyński’s back, the primate also took exception to a de-
bate published by Więź on the future of priestly vocation in Poland. The result was
a multi-year ban preventing Polish clergy from writing for the journal; “Dyskusja o
księżach w Polsce,” Więź, no. 123 (1968): 3–36.
213. Mazurkiewicz, “Recepcja Soboru,” 29.
214. Quoted at Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 50.

the liturgy, that they pronounce liturgy in the vernacular, and
that small-group pastoral work be introduced into the Church in
Poland. Responding to the request that priests face their congre-
gations, the primate was to have said, “You want people to see the
priests’ faces? I often tell priests: your backs, people can stomach
seeing, but your faces?”215
The message behind that caustic remark is not that Wy-
szyński was blocking reform, but rather that he had his own par-
ticular understanding of John XXIII’s principle of renovatio acco-
modata.216 In Communist Poland, the primate saw a need for evo-
lutionary, rather than revolutionary, change. Undoubtedly, the
failure of rapprochement with German bishops and the Church’s
unexpected confrontation with the PZPR over the Millennium
left Wyszyński bitter. Yet the primate’s understanding of the
proper pace and methods of incorporating conciliar reforms into
Polish Catholicism needed to take into account the material and
political constraints that the Church was facing. Printing Polish-
language missals and breviaries required access to paper and the
approval of censors, both of which the PZPR denied the Church
in the wake of the struggle over the Millennium. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Wyszyński repeated the adage, “When there will
be paper, then there will be reform.”217
Rather than privilege some and disenfranchise others, Wy-
szyński preferred for reform to proceed in tandem with pressur-
ing the regime to loosen restrictions on Catholic life. Over the
course of the 1970s, Wyszyński put his full weight behind litur-
gical reform, but the process took time. This delay fueled argu-
ments by his critics, both within the Party nomenklatura and
within Poland’s secular anti-Communist opposition.
Yet Wyszyński already had clearly explained in 1964 the ratio-
215. “W setną rocznicę urodzin prymasa Stefana Wyszyńskiego.”

216. Mazurkiewicz, “Recepcja Soboru,” 28.

nale for his approach to renovatio accomodata: “There are fanati-
cal liturgists who would wish immediately, tomorrow, to have
in their hands a missal [in Polish] because, if they don’t have it,
the whole Kingdom of God will fall. Yet the heart of the matter
lies elsewhere. There is no need to emphasize that. The goal is for
people to pray, for people to want to pray, while the language in
which they will do it is a secondary matter.”218
Miscommunications over the liturgy show how difficult it is to
come up with a simple balance sheet for Vatican II’s impact on Po-
land. Contemporary commentators like the Munich-based émigré
Józef Mackiewicz, as well as historians like Sławomir Cenckiewicz,
have claimed that Vatican II became a tool in the hands of the
Communist regime. As the argument goes, Communists exploited
the Council to the detriment of the Church in Poland, with lay ac-
tivists becoming the unwitting allies of the Polish secret police.219
Yet, even acknowledging the documented role of the Polish
security apparatus—for example, with the anti-Marian memo—
this interpretation gives too much credit to the Communists
and too little to all of the remaining players. Within the episco-
pate, as within the laity, there were differences of opinion and
strategy. Wojtyła worked to acquire a voice in the Vatican, while
Wyszyński prioritized the Polish Millennium. The ZNAK move-
ment split over whether or not to continue cooperating with the
regime in the wake of the Millennium conflict. Even more dif-
ficult for ZNAK were the dramatic events of March 1968, which
brought both mass beatings and political repressions of protest-
ing Polish students and a mass exodus of Polish Jews facing anti-
Semitic persecution.220 For the laity, these events became entan-
gled with the Council’s legacy.

219. Józef Mackiewicz, Watykan w cieniu czerwonej gwiazdy (London: Kontra,
1975); Cenckiewicz, “Cisi sprzymierzeńcy reform.”
220. On the Polish student protests, see Eisler, “March 1968 in Poland.” On the
anti-Semitic purges, see Dariusz Stola, “Anti-Zionism as a Multipurpose Policy In-

A bird’s-eye view shows that Vatican II fundamentally re-
shaped the course of Polish events in the final decades of the
Communist period. The transnational space that the ZNAK activ-
ists had encountered in Rome convinced them to be both more
independent of the hierarchy and more aggressive in the pursuit
of their own agenda. Even though the German bishops had dis-
appointed Wyszyński, ZNAK activists in the decade following
the Council entered into vigorous exchanges with lay activists
from both West and East Germany.221
These budding partnerships bred an ethos of reconciliation
and dialogue. Poles became open to Willy Brandt’s historic 1970
visit to Poland and then to the Holy See’s confirmation in 1972 of
Polish jurisdiction over the long-disputed dioceses.222 Although
it was Agostino Casaroli who negotiated the partial normaliza-
tion of relations between the Vatican and the People’s Republic
of Poland, both the episcopate and the laity played a role. In the
wake of the Millennium conflict, the bishops realized how cru-
cial the Holy See’s support could be, while the laity embraced the
Holy See’s turn to human rights and world solidarity.223
Italian Christian Democratic statesman Giorgio La Pira, an
icon of cross–Iron Curtain cooperation who visited the Soviet
Union in 1959 and corresponded with Gomułka throughout the
1960s, had written to the Polish general secretary in April 1966
encouraging him to endorse the Church’s millennial celebrations.
Poland, wrote the mayor of Florence, had a chance to become the
“grand bridge that joins the West to the East,” the guarantor of
“immeasurable hope for world peace.”224
strument: The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland, 1967–1968,” in Anti-Semitism and

Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective, ed. Jeffrey Herf (London: Routledge, 2007),
159–85.
221. Kosicki, “Caritas across the Iron Curtain?,” 227–34.
222. Karolina Wigura, Wina narodów: Przebaczenie jako strategia prowadzenia
polityki (Gdańsk-Warsaw: Scholar, 2011).
224. Giorgio La Pira to Władysław Gomułka, April 10, 1966, Archivio della Fon-

Gomułka did not heed La Pira’s advice, but four years later he
would be out of power, having employed heavy-handed physical
repression against students in 1968 and workers in 1970, as well
as promoting an anti-Semitic campaign.225 His successor, Edward
Gierek, tried to clear the air with church and society alike. Yet it
was the increasing involvement of the Polish laity in shaping an
international discourse of human rights and East-West coopera-
tion that spoke loudest.226
As Wyszyński began to implement conciliar reforms in the
1970s, Wojtyła became ever more prominent within the universal
Church. Like La Pira, the future John Paul II genuinely believed
that Poland had a historic role to play in facilitating world peace
and solidarity. This is the same message that he would bring to
Poland as pope in 1979. This message also guided Tadeusz Mazow-
iecki and other ZNAK activists in 1980 as they helped to found
the Solidarity trade-union movement.227
Despite the postconciliar false starts for Poland, then, in the
long view Vatican II mobilized the players and shaped the mes-
sages that would guide Poland and the Church to the collapse
of communism in 1989. Still, the dark notes sounded in episco-
pal statements in today’s Poland demonstrate that the “spirit
dazione Giorgio La Pira, Florence: Box 10/6inse2/40. On La Pira’s aspirations for
“bridging East and West,” see Marcello Coppetti and Franco Vaselli, Giorgio La Pira
aggente d’Iddio: Dal “rapporto segreto di Kruscev” al viaggio ad Hanoi (Milan: Feltrinelli,
1978).
225. Eisler, “Polskie miesiące” czyli kryzys(y) w PRL (Warsaw: IPN-KŚZpNP, 2008),
28–49, 91–96.
226. See especially the French publication of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s November
1977 talk at a session that he organized on “Christians and Human Rights” at the War-
saw Catholic Intelligentsia Club: Mazowiecki, “Les chrétiens et les droits de l’homme,”
in Nous, chrétiens de Pologne, ed. Jean Offredo (Paris: Éditions Cana, 1979), 159–67;
Friszke, Oaza na Kopernika, 168–96.
227. See especially John Paul II, Laborem exercens, September 14, 1981, http://
www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_
14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html; accessed September 2, 2014; Józef Tischner,
The Spirit of Solidarity, trans. Marek B. Zaleski and Benjamin Fiore (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1984); Kubik, Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power, 129–82.

of Vatican II,” for Poland as throughout the world, was neither
universally received nor permanent. It may well be that open Ca-
tholicism, despite the well-timed kick-start with which Vatican II
provided it, will nonetheless land in the dustbin of Polish public
life, having outlived the collective efforts of Primate Wyszyński,
John Paul II, and the pope’s longtime allies among the laity.228
228. On Polish responses to the pontificate of Pope Francis, see Kosicki, “Why
Are the Vatican and Poland So Far Apart?” Eurozine, March 28, 2014, http://www
.eurozine.com/articles/2014–03–28-kosicki-en.html, accessed September 10, 2014.

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La Croix
Documentation Catholique
The Ecumenical Review
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Informations Catholiques Internationales
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Literární Listy
Ład
New York Times
Osservatore Romano
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Pravda
Službeni List SFRJ: Međunarodni Ugovori
Il Symbolo
Il Tiempo
Tygodnik Powszechny
Więź
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CONTRIBUTORS
Ivo Banac is Bradford Durfee Emeritus Professor of History at Yale Uni-

versity. He is the author of, among many others, The National Question
in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (1984); With Stalin against Tito:
Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (1988); and — most recently
— Hrvati i Crkva: Kratka povijest hrvatskog katoličanstva u modernosti
[Croats and the church: A brief history of Croat Catholicism in moder-
nity] (2013).
James Ramon Felak is professor of history at the University of Washing-

ton. He has published, among others, At the Price of the Republic: Hlinka’s
Slovak People’s Party, 1929–1938 (1994) and After Hitler, Before Stalin:
Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia, 1945–1948 (2009). He
is currently preparing a history of John Paul II’s papal pilgrimages to
Poland.
Gerald P. Fogarty is William R. Kenan Jr. University Professor of the His-

tory of Christianity and professor of religious studies and history at the
University of Virginia. He is the author of, among many others, Nova
et Vetera: The Theology of Tradition in American Catholicism (1987) and
American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to
Vatican II (1989; 2006). He is currently completing a history of American
relations with the Holy See during World War II.
Piotr H. Kosicki is assistant professor of history at the University of

Maryland. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France,
and “Revolution,” 1939–1956 (2017) and Personalizm “po polsku”: Francuskie
korzenie polskiej inteligencji katolickiej (2016).
Árpád von Klimó is associate professor of history at the Catholic Univer-

sity of America. He has published, among others, Nation, Konfession, Ge-
schichte: Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns in europäischen Kontext
(1860–1948) (2003) and Ungarn seit 1945 (2006). He is completing Cold
Days, a study of the Novi Sad Massacre of 1942 and how it was discussed
in Hungary through 1989 in the context of Holocaust commemorations.
219
INDEX
Academy of Catholic Theology Christian Democracy, 164–66, 177–79,

(Warsaw), 134, 156 196
Accomodata renovatio, 176, 194–95 Christian Social Association (ChSS), 159
Action Program, 107, 110 “Church of Silence,” 4, 14–16, 21–22,
Aggiornamento, 1–3, 5, 16–25, 99–100, 133, 136, 162
116, 138–41, 170, 173–74. See also Church-State Accord, Polish (1950),
Dialogue 132, 136
Agreements with the Holy See: Cold War, 4–5, 7–8, 11–15, 20, 22–25,
Hungary (1964), 23, 60–67, 168, 177; 131, 177, 190, 193
Yugoslavia (1966), 87–88 Collegiality, 18, 99–100, 150
Alberigo, Giuseppe, 16, 52 Communism: Catholic alternatives
Atheism, 154, 161 to, 141; Catholic reconciliation
Athenagoras, 29–32 with, 122, 137–38, 150n100, 164–65,
Auditors, conciliar, 19, 129, 171, 178–79, 175–77, 180; condemnation in Divini
182–84. See also Swieżawski, Stefan redemptoris, 11–12; Ecclesiam suam
on, 21–22; Vatican II debates on, 21,
Babiuch, Jolanta, 15, 141, 153 150–54
Bauquet, Nicolas, 54, 60, 63 Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,
Bea, Augustin, 30–31, 42, 186 100, 107–8, 110, 114–115
Benedict XVI, 72–73 Conciliar schemata: Schema “on the
Beran, Josef, 6, 104–6, 111, 132–33 Church,” 152, 155, 158; Schema XIII,
Bokor, 23, 72–74 67, 151, 154, 178–79, 183, 188. See also
Borovoy, Vitaly, 31, 177 Gaudium et spes; Lumen gentium
Brezanóczy, Pál, 64–65, 67–68 Concordats, 12, 160, 165
Bulányi, György, 72–74 Congar, Yves, 128, 142, 147, 171, 187–88
Containment, 14–15
Caritas (organization), 110, 120 Cousins, Norman, 34–35, 41–44
Casanova, José, 2, 19n55, 139 “Croatian Spring,” 23–24, 93–95
Casaroli, Agostino, 6, 22, 46, 49, 65, 87, Crown of Saint Stephen, 48–49
111–12, 163, 169, 178, 196. See also Cuban Missile Crisis, 19, 23, 32–41, 46,
Ostpolitik 161. See also Nuclear conflict
Catechism, Catholic, 93, 121 Cyril (saint), 117, 122
Catholic Herald, 65–66 Czaczkowska, Ewa, 151–52
Catholic socialism, 134, 146, 175 Czechoslovakia, 5, 7–9, 12–14, 17, 24–
Catholic University of Lublin, 133–34, 25, 54, 56, 99–126, 129, 168. See also
182–84 1968
Cenckiewicz, Sławomir, 5n11, 195
Censorship, 52, 70, 102, 113, 129–31, Decolonization, 19, 152
180, 194 De-Stalinization, 138–40, 153
221
Dialogue: and Aggiornamento, 1, 4, of Polish Christendom; Wyszyński,
15, 99–100; Catholic-Protestant, Stefan
118–119, 124; Christian-Marxist, Greek Catholicism, 9, 16, 109–12
16, 107–8, 118–20, 124, 126, 176–77; Grootaers, Jan, 130, 149–50, 164–65,
Ecclesiam suam on, 22; Pacem in terris 178, 185
on, 21; Polish-German, 190–96; at
Vatican II, 118–19, 123, 124 Hamvas, Endre, 61, 64, 66
Diaspora church, 173–74 Holy Office, 13–14, 135, 137, 148
Dignitatis humanae. See Freedom of Hrůza, Karl, 110, 112
conscience Human Rights, 22, 48, 84, 107–8, 124,
Divini redemptoris. See Communism 125, 126, 196–97
Dobrynin, Anatoly, 35, 42 Humanism: of Leszek Kołakowski, 139;
Draganović, Krunoslav, 77, 89–90 of Stefan Swieżawski, 183; of Więź,
Dubček, Alexander, 107, 123 175–76
Dziś i Jutro [Today and tomorrow], 135. Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 57, 58
See also PAX Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party,
62, 64
Eastern Orthodoxy, 2, 9, 29–32, 42–43, Hungary, 5–8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 22–25, 50–
105, 155–56, 177 74, 129, 168, 177. See also Agreements
Ecclesiam suam, 20–22. See also Dialogue with the Holy See; State Office of
Ecumenism, 1–2, 114, 116, 118–19, 121, Confessional Affairs
123, 126, 128n8, 155–56 Hus, Jan, 102, 106, 121
Education, 103–4, 106, 108–10, 120–22 Hussites, 102, 117–18, 121–22
Émigrés: Croatian, 77–78; Polish, 136,
145–46, 153, 157, 165–66, 177 Index of Banned Books, 55–56
Eska, Juliusz, 172–77. See also Więź “Indifferentism,” 186–87
Informations Catholiques Internationales,
Federal Executive Council of Yugoslavia 146–47, 175. See also PAX
(SIV), 78–79 “Integrism,” 173–77
Francis (pope), 4, 198n228 Italy, 13, 15, 28, 41, 45, 63, 65, 77–78, 94,
Freedom of conscience, 73, 84, 134, 162, 169, 178
87–88, 99, 105–6, 128, 150–52, Izvestia [News], 27, 45
186–87
Jaroszewski, Tadeusz, 176–77
Galuška, Miroslav, 110, 112 Jesus, 121, 123
Gaudium et spes, 20, 80, 100, 128, John Paul II (pope, saint): auxiliary
151, 154, 178–79, 184, 187. See also bishop of Kraków, 29, 130, 184;
Conciliar schemata election to papacy, 6, 97, 181, 189;
Germany, 8–9, 13, 54, 120–21, 135, and human rights, 124–25; and ideas
189–192, 194, 196 of Tomislav J. Šagi-Bunić, 96; legacy,
Glas Koncila [Voice of the council], 23, 197–98, 128–29; on legacy of Vatican
75, 82–84, 93, 97 II, 7, 24–25; at Vatican II, 132, 184–89
Glas s Koncila. See Glas Koncila John XXIII (pope, saint): 1, 19, 27–29,
Gomułka, Władysław, 139, 142n52, 31–32, 34–38, 41–46, 49, 54, 57, 62,
159–63, 168–69, 171, 191–92, 196–97 70, 78–79, 99, 103, 113, 122, 131,
Grabska, Stanisława, 193–94 139–40, 142, 153, 160–62, 170, 173,
Great Novena, 141, 155, 158, 160, 190– 177, 194
92. See also Mary, Virgin; Millennium Johnson, Lyndon B., 35, 46–47
222 INDEX
Kadlecová, Erika, 110, 112, 119 to, 141, 189–90, 192; as Mother of
Kardelj, Edvard, 78, 86 the Church, 18, 150, 154–58; Polish
Katolické Noviny [Catholic news], devotion to, 141; Polish secret police
110n19 campaign against, 156–57, 159. See
Kennedy, John F., 1, 19, 27, 33–36, also Great Novena; Millennium of
38–44, 46–47, 65 Polish Christendom
Kent, Peter C., 13–15 Masaryk, Tomáš G., 102, 122–24
Khrushchev, Nikita, 19, 26–29, 31–33, Máté-Tóth, András, 52, 59
35–36, 38–45, 85, 103n6, 168 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 131, 173–89, 197.
Klepacz, Michał, 137, 141 See also Więź
Kołakowski, Leszek, 139–40, 171, 176. Methodius (saint), 117, 122
See also Humanism Millennium of Polish Christendom,
Kominek, Bolesław, 148–49, 191 141, 189–95. See also Great Novena;
Komonchak, Joseph, 16, 52 Mary, Virgin
Krasicki, Ignacy, 145n60, 167–68, 180 Mindszenty, József, 6, 29–48, 57–58, 61,
Křesťanská Revue [Christian review], 65, 132–33
118 Missals, 151, 193–95
Küng, Hans, 19–20 “Modernity,” 2, 20, 139–41, 153, 170–71,
Kustić, Živko, 82–83, 92 188
Montini, Giovanni Battista. See Paul VI
La Croix [The cross], 146–47 Moravia, 101n3, 116–17, 125
Laity, 20, 99, 109, 113–14, 116–18, Morlion, Felix, 34, 41
125–26, 129, 165–70, 174, 178–79,
182–84, 192–97 1965 Polish bishops’ letter to German
La Pira, Giorgio, 196–97 bishops, 189–92
Latvia, 12, 16 1968: in Czechoslovakia, 24, 100–101,
League of Communists of Yugoslavia 107–13, 115, 117–20, 126; in Poland,
(SKJ), 77, 85, 88–89, 96, 97 139, 195. See also Normalization;
Lefebvre, Marcel, 127, 148–49 Prague Spring
Lékái, Lászlo, 48–49 Normalization: imposed on
Lidové Noviny [People’s news], 107 Czechoslovakia after 1968, 24, 101,
Lithuania, 12, 16 112, 117, 120–21, 125–26; in Vatican
Liturgy: in Latin, 117; reform of, 3n6, diplomacy, 131, 163–69, 196
23, 71, 99, 116–18, 126; in Slavonic, Nostra aetate, 20, 186
117; vernacular, 2, 116–18, 126, Nuclear conflict, threat of, 131, 161. See
151–52, 193–95 also Cuban Missile Crisis
Lubac, Henri de, 128, 171
Lumen gentium, 72, 152, 158. See also “Open” Catholicism, 138, 170–79, 182,
Conciliar schemata 186, 198. See also Eska, Juliusz; Więź
Luxmoore, Jonathan, 15, 141, 153 Ostpolitik, Vatican, 6, 15, 22–23, 53–55,
60, 65, 103–4, 106–7, 109, 111–12,
Maritain, Jacques, 171, 183 162–63, 169, 193
Marxism: Catholic collaboration with, Ottaviani, Alfredo, 30–31, 148, 153
134; revisionist approach to, 138–40,
170–77; Vatican II debates on, 153–54 Pacem in terris (encyclical), 19–21, 41,
Mary, Virgin: Black Madonna, 141, 45, 62. See also Dialogue
155; coronation as Queen of Poland, Pacem in Terris (organization), 113,
155n86; Great Novena dedicated 117
INDEX 223
“Patriot” priests, 58, 76–77, 104–7, 110, Ratzinger, Joseph. See Benedict XVI
113–14, 134, 137 “Recovered Territories.” See World War II
Paul VI (pope), 6, 21–22, 46–48, 65, 70, Regnum Marianum, 23, 55n13, 72
79, 90–91, 94, 104, 108, 122, 147, 154, Religious orders, 60, 102–3, 106, 108–11
157–58, 160–63, 181–84, 189–90. See Rerum novarum, 154, 170
also Ostpolitik Ressourcement, 99–100, 121
PAX, 14, 134–35, 138, 145–47, 159, 167, Romania, 8, 9, 12
169n130, 175, 178. See also Dziś i Jutro Roncalli, Angelo. See John XXIII
Peace Movement of Catholic Clergy
(MHKD), 14, 104, 109–10, 113–14 Samizdat, 121–23
Periti, conciliar, 3, 19, 141n67, 171–72, Samorè, Antonio, 163, 169, 178. See also
188 Ostpolitik
Pius XI (pope), 11–12 Secret police, 5n11, 16, 18, 23, 54, 56, 59,
Pius XII (pope), 1, 4, 12–15, 21, 58, 63, 60–65, 77, 88–89, 131–34, 148, 150,
77, 135–36, 173, 182 156–58, 178n163, 183–84, 195
Poggi, Luigi, 163, 169, 178. See also Secretariat for Church Affairs
Ostpolitik (Czechoslovakia), 110, 119
Poland, 6–9, 12, 14, 17, 24–25, 57, 62, Secretariat for Promoting Christian
127–98. See also 1968; State Office of Unity, Vatican, 30–31
Confessional Affairs Secretaries, church (Czechoslovakia),
Polish Christian Labor Party, 164–66, 104, 108, 111
177–79. See also Sieniewicz, Konrad Seminaries: Litoměřice, 114–15, 119;
Polish Radio, 145n60, 167–68, 180 Olomouc, 115–16; Prague-Jircháře,
Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), 119; underground, 122
138–39, 145, 159–160, 168, 183, Šeper, Franjo, 79–80, 84, 90
191–94 Show Trials, 6, 57, 76–77, 108,
Pontifical College of Saint Jerome 132–33, 137. See also Beran, Josef;
(Rome), 77–78, 89–90 Mindszenty, József; Stepinac,
Pontifical Commission Iustitia et Pax, Alojzije
184, 188–89 Shvoy, Lajos, 55–56, 61, 64
Porter-Szűcs, Brian, 2, 6, 180, 185, 187 Sieniewicz, Konrad, 164, 178. See
Prague Spring, 24, 100–101, 107–13, 115, also Christian Democracy; Polish
117–20, 126. See also 1968 Christian Labor Party
Pravda [Truth], 27, 37–38, 40n28 Skalický, Karel, 119, 122–23
Priest Movements for Peace. See Skrzypczak, Robert, 185–86
“Patriot” priests Slipyj, Josyf, 23, 32, 42–45, 132
“Progressive” Catholicism. See Catholic Slovakia, 100, 125
socialism Socialism: Church statements on, 11;
Protestants: in Czech nation, 102, 123; Jerzy Zawieyski’s version of, 159–60;
in dialogue with Catholics, 118–19, PAX’s version of, 134–35, 146;
124; and Eucharist, 118; and liturgical Vatican II debates on, 153–54; Więź’s
language, 117–118; and Tomáš G. version of, 174–78. See also Catholic
Masaryk, 102; at Vatican II, 30–31, socialism; “Open” Catholicism
118; and White Mountain, 102, 117, Spellman, Francis, 29–30, 37
121 Stalin, Joseph, 133, 135
Stalinism, 132–38
Rahner, Karl, 71, 171, 173 State Office of Confessional Affairs:
Ranković, Aleksandar, 86, 88–89 in Hungary, 52, 56, 59, 62, 63, 68;
224 INDEX
in Poland, 134, 138, 148, 162. See White Mountain, Battle of, 102, 117, 121
also Secretariat for Church Affairs Więź [Bond], 128n8, 138, 145, 167,
(Czechoslovakia) 169n130, 170–77, 186, 193n212. See
Stehle, Hansjakob, 6, 15–16 also Eska, Juliusz; Humanism;
Stepinac, Alojzije, 6, 12n33, 13, 76, 77, Mazowiecki, Tadeusz; “Open”
83, 85n30, 132–33 Catholicism
Stomma, Stanisław, 138, 166–67, Wilde, Melissa J., 2n2, 17, 21, 26, 149–50
193n212 Willlebrands, Johannes, 30–31, 42, 45
Swieżawski, Stefan, 182–84, 186, 188– Winowska, Maria, 146–47
89, 193. See also Auditors, conciliar; Wojtyła, Karol. See John Paul II
Humanism Work of Conciliar Renewal (DKO), 111,
Šagi-Bunić, Tomislav J., 81–82, 92, 113–115, 118
95–96 World War II, 4, 7–11, 28–29, 34, 43,
51, 76–77, 135, 146, 155, 159, 182,
Tardini, Domenico, 55–56 185, 191; border adjustments after,
Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union 135–36, 162, 190–92
(TASS), 37–38, 45, 65 Woźniakowski, Jacek, 180–82
38th International Eucharistic Congress Wyszyński, Stefan: arrest and
(Bombay), 181–82 imprisonment, 132, 134–36; and
Tito, Josip Broz, 8, 10–11, 23, 85, 87–88, de-Stalinization, 139–40, 153–54;
94, 96 Great Novena created by, 140–41;
Togliatti, Palmiro, 28, 32 and Hungarian “catacomb hierarchy,”
Tomášek, Josef, 104–5, 109, 110n19, 57; Marian devotion, 155–58; and
113, 117n39, 124–25 PAX, 146–47, 159; on postwar border
Turkey, 39–41 adjustments, 136–37, 148, 189–92;
Turowicz, Jerzy, 149, 164, 166, 171, and ZNAK movement, 159–61, 163–
178–81 69, 193–94; at Vatican II, 129, 143–158
Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal
weekly], 128n8, 133, 138, 144, 164–72, Yugoslav Bishops’ Conference (BKJ),
178–81, 185–87 77–78, 84
Yugoslavia, 7–8, 10–13, 17–18, 22–25,
Ukraine, 8, 16, 42–43, 56 75–98, 168. See also Agreements with
Underground Church (Czechoslovakia), the Holy See
121–22, 125
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Zabłocki, Janusz, 1, 22n64, 131, 145,
7, 9–12, 16, 23, 45, 52, 54, 57–58, 62, 155–56, 163–69, 172–81
105, 112 Zawieyski, Jerzy, 142, 159–69, 177–78,
United Nations, 35, 37–38, 41 189. See also Socialism
United States, 7, 27–49, 56–58, 165 Znak (journal), 138, 166–67, 169n30, 172
ZNAK (movement): activist laity of,
Vanistendael, August, 178–79, 187 138–39, 159–89; projects in West and
Vatican Radio, 122, 147 East Germany, 190–96; transnational
Velehrad Monastery, 113, 125 dialogues of, 153–71, 192–93
Vietnam War, 19, 46–47 Znak (parliamentary circle), 138–39,
166–67
Warsaw University, 134, 171 Zvěřina, Josef, 123–25
Wenger, Antoine, 146–47
INDEX 225
Vatican II behind the Iron Curtain was designed in Chaparral Pro with Palatino Sans
display and composed by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It
was printed on 60-pound Natures Book Natural and bound by Thomson-Shore of
Dexter, Michigan.

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VATICAN II

The Catholic University of America Press

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

– Vatican II and the Cold War

– Vatican II and Hungary

Árpád von Klimó

– Vatican II and Yugoslavia

– Vatican II and Czechoslovakia

James Ramon Felak

– Vatican II and Poland

AAN Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of Modern Records,

ABH Arhiv Bosna i Hercegovine (Archives of Bosnia and

AIPN Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Archives of

AJ Arhiv Jugoslavije (Archives of Yugoslavia, Belgrade)

ASP Archivio di Stato di Parma (State Archive of Parma)

AUKUL Archiwum Uniwersyteckie Katolickiego Uniwersytetu

BKJ Biskupska konferencija Jugoslavije (Bishops’

BU Biuro Udostępniania (Bureau for Provision and

ChSS Chrześcijańskie Stowarzyszenie Społeczne (Christian

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

DKO Dílo Koncilové Obnovy (Work of Conciliar Renewal)

GDR German Democratic Republic

KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee

OSA Open Society Archives (Budapest)

PZPR Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United

RCC Roman Catholic Church

RKVP Republička Komisija za Odnose s Vjerskim Zajednicame

SIV Savezno Izvršno Vijeće (Federal Executive Council of

SKJ Savez Komunista Jugoslavije (League of Communists

TASS Telegrafnoye Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza (Telegraph

UDB-a Uprava Državne Bezbednosti (Directorate of State

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Výbor na Obranu Nespravedlivě Stíhaných (Committee

The announcement of the Council aroused great interest and great

Roughly near the Palazzo della Cancellaria we stop at a small pizzeria

2. By Melissa J. Wilde’s count, “approximately 2,200 bishops voted on any one

2 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

4 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

“Cisi sprzymierzeńcy reform,” Christianitas, November 19, 2010, at http://christian-

6 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

Modernity in Eastern Europe,” in Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, ed.

The Iron Curtain and the Catholic Church

8 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

lishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview

10 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

27. Zhdanov’s speech announcing the doctrine is reprinted at A. A. Zhdanov,

12 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

34. Ibid., 104.

duced in Yvon Tranvouez, Catholiques et communistes: La crise du progressisme chré-

14 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

42. Ibid., 94.

“Aggiornamento” behind the Iron Curtain

45. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 5.

16 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

18 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

53. Joseph A. Komonchak has described the Council as a historical “ ‘aggregate

A Kaleidoscope History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

20 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

22 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

24 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

26 PIOTR H. KOSICKI

28 GERALD P. FOGARTY

VATICAN II AND THE COLD WAR 29

5. Spellman to “Dear Friends,” n.p., “Christmas Night”—probably December 27,

AAN Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of Modern Records,

ABH Arhiv Bosna i Hercegovine (Archives of Bosnia and

AIPN Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Archives of

AUKUL Archiwum Uniwersyteckie Katolickiego Uniwersytetu

BKJ Biskupska konferencija Jugoslavije (Bishops’

BU Biuro Udostępniania (Bureau for Provision and

ChSS Chrześcijańskie Stowarzyszenie Społeczne (Christian

KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee

PZPR Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United

RKVP Republička Komisija za Odnose s Vjerskim Zajednicame

SIV Savezno Izvršno Vijeće (Federal Executive Council of

SKJ Savez Komunista Jugoslavije (League of Communists

TASS Telegrafnoye Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza (Telegraph

UDB-a Uprava Državne Bezbednosti (Directorate of State