The Reception of Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain: The Polish Case
For Polish bishops and laity alike, the final months of Vatican II were a busy time. In addition to the work of adopting and circulating 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.
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 pastoral greetings in October and November 1965, inviting colleagues from around the world to come to Poland on May 3, 1966, to celebrate 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.
The May 3 event was to be the culmination of the Great Novena. 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 pastoral letter to their German counterparts. Its most important sentence was, “We grant forgiveness as well as ask for it.” 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 expellees expelled by an inter-Allied order of the victorious powers at Potsdam in 1945.” 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 polemics, 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.”
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 expectations—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 after World War II. Though the Poles had consulted the German bishops in advance in Rome, the official response sent by the latter 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 bishops did not give the Poles what the latter had expected, which was gratitude, forgiveness, and support for Polish claims of sovereignty demarcated by the postwar border on the Oder and Neisse rivers.
What surprised the Polish bishops even more, however, was the aggressive reaction of the PZPR. The Communist general secretary, 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 sovereignty over the “Recovered Territories.” An ugly exchange of letters 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 primate despaired—Wyszyński explained that the bishops and Communist Poland in fact shared the same position of wanting to see the border recognized.
Nonetheless, Gomułka had taken personal offense at what he saw as ecclesiastical meddling in foreign affairs of the highest 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.
The church-state thaw was over. Gomułka went after Wyszyński’s pride and joy: the millennial celebrations. The PZPR ran its own “millennial” campaign, designed to substitute the millennium of Polish statehood for the millennium of Polish Christendom. 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 political harm done by the episcopate.” 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 convinced 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.
It is in this context that one must evaluate the Council’s consequences for Communist Poland. For Polish bishops and laity 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 degenerated 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. Within the year or two following the Council, most Western European 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 beginning in 1968, and they progressed at a painfully slow pace. Only in 1968 was the first missal printed in Poland that was not entirely 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 dissipated, 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 Intelligentsia Club against “intellectualizing the Church, as if it consisted entirely of philosophers.” The club’s resident theology expert, Stanisława Grabska, complained that Wyszyński had sent her, Swieżawski, and others away when they came to him in February 1967 to request that priests face the congregation during 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 congregations, 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?”
The message behind that caustic remark is not that Wyszyński was blocking reform, but rather that he had his own particular understanding of John XXIII’s principle of renovatio accomodata. In Communist Poland, the primate saw a need for evolutionary, 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.”
Rather than privilege some and disenfranchise others, Wyszyński preferred for reform to proceed in tandem with pressuring the regime to loosen restrictions on Catholic life. Over the course of the 1970s, Wyszyński put his full weight behind liturgical reform, but the process took time. This delay fueled arguments 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 rationale for his approach to renovatio accomodata: “There are fanatical 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.”
Miscommunications over the liturgy show how difficult it is to come up with a simple balance sheet for Vatican II’s impact on Poland. 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 activists becoming the unwitting allies of the Polish secret police.
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 episcopate, 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 movement split over whether or not to continue cooperating with the regime in the wake of the Millennium conflict. Even more difficult for ZNAK were the dramatic events of March 1968, which brought both mass beatings and political repressions of protesting Polish students and a mass exodus of Polish Jews facing anti-Semitic persecution. For the laity, these events became entangled with the Council’s legacy.
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 activists 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 disappointed Wyszyński, ZNAK activists in the decade following the Council entered into vigorous exchanges with lay activists from both West and East Germany.
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. Although it was Agostino Casaroli who negotiated the partial normalization 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 crucial the Holy See’s support could be, while the laity embraced the Holy See’s turn to human rights and world solidarity.
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.”
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. 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 cooperation that spoke loudest.
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 Mazowiecki and other ZNAK activists in 1980 as they helped to found the Solidarity trade-union movement.
Despite the postconciliar false starts for Poland, then, in the long view Vatican II mobilized the players and shaped the messages that would guide Poland and the Church to the collapse of communism in 1989. Still, the dark notes sounded in episcopal statements in today’s Poland demonstrate that the “spirit of Vatican II,” for Poland as throughout the world, was neither universally received nor permanent. It may well be that open Catholicism, 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.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016). All rights reserved.