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Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain
 9780813229126, 081322912X

Table of contents :
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction - Piotr H. Kosicki
One – Vatican II and the Cold War - Gerald P. Fogarty
Two – Vatican II and Hungary - Árpád von Klimó
Three – Vatican II and Yugoslavia - Ivo Banac
Four – Vatican II and Czechoslovakia - James Ramon Felak
Five – Vatican II and Poland - Piotr H. Kosicki
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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—Permanence 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



OSA



Member of Parliament 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) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics



USSR



VONS  Výbor na Obranu Nespravedlivě Stíhaných (Committee 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 windows 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 encouraging 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 announced 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 commentaries, and historical studies have recapitulated the major achievements of Vatican II, from introducing the vernacular liturgy to engineering the Catholic Church’s embrace of modernity, Judaism, 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 Catholic 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: Collegiality 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, preparatory commissions assembled working documents. Although the four sessions that followed the Council’s launching in October 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—renowned theologians and philosophers invited to participate in the Council.6 Over the course of four years, two-month stretches of debate 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. Specially appointed commissions and subcommissions of Council fathers drafted working conciliar schemata, revised as the Council unfolded. Bishops deliberated and ultimately produced a final corpus of documents for which the phrase “Vatican II” has become a metonym. The Council’s prolific textual output alone makes it unprecedented 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 seventeen 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 liturgical 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 Happen? 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 conversation 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 Cardinal 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 Francis 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 Vatican 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 philosopher, was a product of the council that his predecessor had called. The forty-two-year-old bishop from behind the Iron Curtain arrived in Rome in 1962 as a Council father. Over the next three years, Karol Wojtyła would prove himself a living link between what Pius XII had termed the “Church of Silence”10—bear8. 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/francesco/en/homilies/2014/documents/papa-francesco_20140427_omelia-canonizzazioni.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, Communist 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 inadequate 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. Notwithstanding 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 living behind an iron curtain by the end of the 1940s. In fact, historians 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 Communist state actors in the story. A key example is Polish historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz’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 become John Paul II’s secretary of state, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli—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 journalist 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 cautioned 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://christianitas.org/news/cenckiewicz-cisi-sprzymierzenscy-reform; accessed February 2, 2014. 12. Paul Richard Blum, “The Catholic Church in Hungary: A Case of Remodernization?” 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, “Everything 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 according to their particular circumstances. Their stories are as important 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 Central and Eastern Europe back into the story of the Second Vatican Council, its origins, and its consequences. Paul Blum was obviously 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 contingent 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 Eastern Europe, see, for example, Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction,” 17; Pedro Ramet, “Religion 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 research (covering all relevant languages), with hopes to propel that research forward. All of the chapters draw on both non-English-language secondary 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. Paradoxically, 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 national 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 Eastern 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-

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Both Czechoslovakia and Poland had a higher percentage of Catholics at the war’s end than at its beginning. Protestant Germans were expelled from both countries. Poland, furthermore, lost the substantial Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic populations 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 outward 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 proceed 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 (Czechoslovakia).21 All of the states that came to constitute the Soviet Bloc—a geopolitical entity defined by the nominal sovereignty of its member states, as constrained by autarky and military dependence on the USSR—experienced forced migration and substantial demographic shifts in the war’s course and aftermath. In addition to Czechoslovakia and Poland, both Germany and Romania were redefined 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 Historical 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 Communist 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 Europe, 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 determining what kinds of Communist regimes would emerge in different 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 Yugoslavia nor Albania was there was a lasting Red Army presence; Soviet 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 legitimized 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 government 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 Herzegovina 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.

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When top Soviet Communist A. A. Zhdanov announced in 1947 that the world had split into “two camps”—one imperialist, 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 substantial material aid. Yet even an influx of tourists from all over the world did not diminish the repressive nature of Tito’s Communist regime.28 For this reason, even though Cold War Yugoslavia was not, strictly speaking, part of the Soviet Bloc, this volume 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 socialism 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 Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). On tourism: Igor Tchoukarine, “The Yugoslav Road to International Tourism: Opening, Decentralization, 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 (Budapest: 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 Europe that Pius XII issued his first public statements in support of democracy. These represented a distinct turn away from the pontiff’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 encountered dogged defiance; teetering on the verge of sedition, postwar 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 abrogating 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 accommodation and cooptation. This strategy envisioned two possible outcomes. Bishops could choose “to give national interests Revolution, see Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialization 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.

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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 nationalization 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 entire European continent.”36 With the indictment of Yugoslav primate 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 leadership 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 integration of Western Europe, Pius XII sought to prevent Catholics from joining or supporting Communist initiatives. On July 1, 1949, the Holy Office issued a decree threatening excommunication against any “faithful professing materialist and anti-Christian doctrine as Communists and, above all, those who defend or propagate 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 (Norwich: 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 (Cambridge: 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 Europeans 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 excommunication, 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, focused on containing the Communist threat to Central and Eastern Europe rather than pursuing an offensive drive to reestablish pastoral control behind the Iron Curtain. The Holy See was esduced in Yvon Tranvouez, Catholiques et communistes: La crise du progressisme chrétien, 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: Nationalism, 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 Project 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 Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch have argued, “the general anathema reaffirmed in the 1949 Decree made practical discernments impossible. Above all, Pius XII lacked the will to go beyond legalistic 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 calculations 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 constituted neither a pastoral vacuum nor a graveyard of martyrs for the Roman Catholic Church. It is true that, following their imprisonment 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 Roncalli’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 Silence,” 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 containment, John XXIII thereby opened the door for serious diplomacy and deal-making. Hansjakob Stehle has offered the best defini42. 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 advice 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 impossible, 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 Council, 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 consequences 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 Modernity in Eastern Europe, Berglund and Porter-Szűcs, 159–90. 47. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 6.

16   PIOTR H. KOSICKI

have argued, “The Council did not intend to produce a new doctrinal ‘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 individual 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 Czechoslovakia, twenty-four from Yugoslavia, and twenty-six from Poland. 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 unimpressive. 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 Al48. Giuseppe Alberigo, “Preface: 1965–1995: Thirty Years After Vatican II,” in History of Vatican II, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak, trans. Matthew 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 opinionmaking and lobbying for votes among the remaining bishops: respectively, the “progressive” 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 online at “Second Vatican Council Votes,” Association of Religious Data Archives, at http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/VATICAN.asp; accessed January 1, 2014.

INTRODUCTION  17

though this volume does not hold fast to that binary, it represents 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 bishops 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 principle 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 aggiornamento, 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 aftermath 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 experienced 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 encyclical 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 decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa, the end of French military involvement in Algeria, and the nonviolent resolution of the Cuban 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 involvement 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 MarieDominique 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 human 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 ontologically 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 session 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 examining the documents published during its final session in 1965, from Nostra aetate’s embrace of Judaism and Apostolicam actuositatem’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 expectation of war from men’s minds. But this requires that the fundamental 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 actuositatem, 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 engage 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 important issue at the Council,” and “many conservatives were quite invested in getting the Council to condemn it . . . progressives generally 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 passage reminiscent of Pius XI and Pius XII, Paul VI describes “atheistic 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 impossible.” 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; Luxmoore 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_father/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 Vatican 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 adherents 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 Communist 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 Vatican 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 declarations and practical decision-making, as it develops a more nuanced picture of Vatican II behind the Iron Curtain. ••• Gerald P. Fogarty opens the volume with the story of Soviet overtures 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),” Democrazia e Diritto nos. 1–2 (2013): 510–18.

22   PIOTR H. KOSICKI

frame the chapter’s overview of the Cold War context surrounding Vatican II—the arms race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ostpolitik—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 aggiornamento 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 regime co-opted the national episcopate to a significant degree. The Partial Agreement concluded in 1964 between the Communist regime and the Holy See lent legitimacy to a roster of Hungarian bishops and theologians participating in the Council who were either puppets of the regime or outright secret-police informants. 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 pathbreaking research on Vatican II’s significance for Tito’s realm appears here for the first time in English.66 The Council generated 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 Yugoslavia’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 experience 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 Czechoslovakia 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 impulses 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 suppression of the Prague Spring, surviving the so-called political “normalization” of the 1970s to play a visible role in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Unlike Hungary or Yugoslavia, Communist Poland saw no negotiations 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 gridlock, 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 shortlived, civic aggiornamenti magnified the impact of religious aggiornamento. Every country behind the Iron Curtain was different, yet even across such diverse cases as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, 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 modernization, reform, and an embrace of pluralism among Catholic populations 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 Council 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 Communism (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 RicardoCampbell National Fellows Program at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which funded the research leave during which the editor completed work on this volume.

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ONE

VATICAN II AND THE COLD WAR • • • Gerald P. Fogarty

On January 25, 1959, John XXIII, elected only three months earlier, 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 vastly 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 government’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 Konrad 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 remains 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 relations. 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 success in his noble aspiration to contribute to the strengthening and consolidation of peace on earth and to the solution of international problems through frank negotiations.” To the consternation 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 fraternity; 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 ambassador 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 Esztergom, remained sequestered in the American embassy in Budapest—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 thirtyfive bishops from the Soviet Bloc were present at the First Session. 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 ecumenical 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 December 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 Spell3. 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; Riccardi, Il Vaticano e Mosca, 232–35.

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man, archbishop of New York—then in Istanbul to visit U.S. troops in Turkey—to a conference at his residence. The cardinal then altered 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 enthusiastic, but Domenico Cardinal Tardini, the secretary of state, was less so. Spellman subsequently drafted a letter to Athenagoras, which he planned for the Vatican to send, but Tardini altered it and instructed Spellman to send it to the patriarch himself. Spellman 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 representative 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 granted equal status with the Theological Commission, presided by Alfredo 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 con5. 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 Christian Unity,” in Vatican II by Those Who Were There, ed. Alberic Stacpoole (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), 79–80.

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sulting other members of the Curia, agreed to accept a “courtesy visit” from Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury on December 2, 1960. Next came an invitation from Visser’t Hooft, secretary general of the World Council of Churches, to have the secretariat 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 secretariat. This paved the way for John XXIII in his Christmas allocution 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 Athenagoras’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 observers 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 responded almost immediately that he would send delegates to the Council.8 They were Archpriest Vitaly Borovoy and Archimandrite 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.

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It was one more step in the relationship that the premier was developing 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 Siberia; 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 other 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 question 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 9. New York Times, October 13, 1962. 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.

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Florida, from which it could easily attack the Cuban bases.12 Tensions were brewing. Two days earlier, President John F. Kennedy had been shown evidence that the Soviet Union had installed offensive missiles in Cuba that could easily reach cities in the United 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 shipping to Cuba.13 Life, the popular American weekly pictorial journal, 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 captured 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 opponents that he was strong in confronting the West.15 As Kennedy and Khrushchev began their diplomatic jockeying, a group of Soviet and American academics and journalists was assembling at Phillips Exeter Academy in Andover, Massa12. New York Times, October 19, 1962. 13. Ibid., October 23, 1962. The text of this address and other key U.S. documents 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 Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 230–97.

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chusetts, for the third in a series of conferences about the issues confronting statesmen of both nations, especially nuclear weapons. 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 October 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 between 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 politicians 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 intervention 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 removed.16 Morlion conveyed this information to the Vatican. A 16. In a letter to the author, Sorensen recalled speaking with Cousins only after the crisis and had no recollection of a papal intervention in the crisis itself; Sorensen to Fogarty, New York, December 1, 1994.

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member of the Soviet delegation then phoned Moscow and reported that Khrushchev would accept the pope’s proposal to withdraw 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. Kennedy, 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 confrontation.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 pontiff—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 relations with the Holy See. In March 1962, however, his wife, Jacqueline, had an audience with the pope. In September 1962, moreover, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had visited John XXIII. But these were overtures that fell far short of initiating a permanent 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, incorrectly gives the date of Kennedy’s televised address announcing the blockade as October 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.

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any action on his part might bear fruit, and this came from the Andover participants’ assurance that both Kennedy and Khrushchev would welcome a papal intervention. He now began to prepare 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 humankind. . . . Nevertheless, let it be well understood, only the Spirit of the Lord can accomplish this miracle, since, obviously, where the substance—true spiritual life—is lacking, many things cannot be imagined nor obtained.20

Here was the pope’s first signal to the two leaders. While maintaining 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 generalities rather than specifics—and thus applicable to similar circumstances. But all the contemporary listeners knew whom he meant. He began by noting, “While the Second Vatican ecumenical 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.

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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. Ambassador 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 mankind: ‘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.

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That Pravda published any of the papal overture was in itself significant. 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 beseech God’s blessing on our President and Government.”24 Meanwhile, the three Cuban prelates at the Council, bishops Manuel Rodríguez Rozas of Pinar del Rio, Carlos Riu Angles of Camaguey, and José Domínguez y Rodríguez of Matanzas, denied reports 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 coverage 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 interfere with peaceful shipping and for the Soviet Union not to at23. New York Times, October 26, 1962. 24. Ibid. 25. National Catholic Welfare Council News Service (Foreign), October 29, 1962, Archives of the Catholic University of America.

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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 Washington. He now introduced the question of Jupiter missiles in Turkey, “literally next to us.” While praising Kennedy’s agreement to accept U Thant’s mediation, the general secretary now proposed 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 sovereignty and borders of, respectively, Turkey and Cuba. While this second letter seemed to represent the hardliners in the Kremlin more than Khrushchev himself, there were, nevertheless, some indications that the general secretary was reacting 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 agree26. New York Times, October 27, 1962. 27. Khrushchev to Kennedy, October 26, 1962, in Chang and Kornbluh, eds., Cuban Missile Crisis, 185–88.

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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 importance to this agreement insofar as it could serve as a good beginning 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 humanity with a fine gift, and also to gladden it with the news that agreement has been reached on the cessation of nuclear tests and that consequently the atmosphere will no longer be poisoned. Our position and yours on this issue are very close together.28

The White House was now thrown into confusion between Khrushchev’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 latter was a move that Kennedy himself had actually proposed several 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 invasion 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.

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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 message, and negotiations began at the United Nations.30 Although tensions between the two superpowers remained high during November 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 Kennedy, 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 radio 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 communications between the Vatican and Moscow. He informed the Soviets that Cousins would be acceptable to the Vatican as a mediator if he was also acceptable to Moscow to undertake preliminary contacts. Late in November, Cousins received a call from Ambas30. Khrushchev to Kennedy, October 28, 1962, in ibid., 226–29, 230–32. 31. Zizola, Utopia, 9.

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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, including 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 display of opposition, rather than welcome, for the Russian observers.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 Release of Josyf Slipyj,” Catholic Historical Review 97, no. 4 (2011): 679–712. 33. Antoine Wenger, Vatican II: The First Session, trans. Robert J. Olsen (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1966), 174. 34. Cousins, Improbable Triumvirate, 29–31.

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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. Khrushchev 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 struggles 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 directly implicating Slipyj in his predecessor’s death, the premier did assert 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. Cousins and Khrushchev then discussed other issues of concern to the Vatican, such as the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jewish population.36 Cousins concluded his interview with Khrushchev by discussing the possibility that the United States and the Soviet Union negotiate a treaty banning any further testing of nuclear weapons. 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.

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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 congratulations from a man who wishes you good health and strength for your abiding quest for the peace and happiness of all mankind.”37 Back in Rome, Cousins personally handed the pope the premier’s greetings. A few days later, John responded to Khrushchev’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 leaving Rome, Monsignor Igino Cardinale arrived with a Christmas 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 re37. Ibid., 53–57; a facsimile of Khrushchev’s message to John XXIII with an English 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.

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lease of Slipyj.39 On January 25, 1963, Semyon Kozyrev, the Soviet 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 between the Holy See and the Kremlin, as Khrushchev told Fanfani.41 A short time later, Khrushchev arranged for his son-inlaw, Alexis Adzhubei, to be assigned as the Rome correspondent for Izvestia. On March 7, 1963, when John XIII received the Balzan 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 released 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 minesweepers and a Soviet freighter in Genoa harbor flew their flags at halfmast.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 significance, 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.

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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 intervention 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 Cardinal Montini was elected pope and took the name Paul VI. In keeping with the custom initiated by Roosevelt, Kennedy appointed a delegation of four, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Vice President 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 audience with him—the first time a sitting president had met a pope and an indication that the anti-Catholicism that would have surrounded such an action in 1960 had abated.46 Paul, for his part, continued his predecessor’s policy toward Eastern Europe and recruited 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 Vietnam, which the American government saw as a surrogate for the Soviet Union. Johnson, who became president following the assassination 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.

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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 President 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 circulated that the president was about to establish some type of formal 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 representative that had existed from 1939 to 1950 and named Henry Cabot Lodge, former ambassador to South Vietnam and his running mate against Kennedy and Johnson in 1960. Lodge presented 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 remained 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 foreign minister, had an eighty-minute audience with the pope, the duration of which prompted Il Tempo to chide the pope for showing 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.

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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 remained 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 Vienna, 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 laudatory 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 archbishop. 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 opposition—including that of Senator Robert Dole—returned the Crown of St. Stephen to the people of Hungary. A symbol of Hungarian sovereignty, the crown had been kept at Fort Knox for thirty-two years. Carter’s reasoning was that, while the Hungarian 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.

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Vance accompanied the crown. At its reception in the domed parliament 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 Soviet 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, especially 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 human person and the need for social justice that would ultimately undermine communism. 53. New York Times, January 7, 1978.

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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 Catholic 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 Vatican Council has often been narrated as part of the postwar trend toward further modernization, democratization, and emancipation 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 nonCommunist countries, as well countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia—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 expectations that many Catholics in the West had developed because of Vatican II. For a brief, but precise, description of this disappointment, see DeGroot, Sixties Unplugged, 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 appeared 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 difficult 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 establishment 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 “hermeneutics” of the Second Vatican Council: one of “discontinuity” and one of “reform.” While the first would highlight the differences between a preconciliar and a postconciliar Church, the second would emphasize the continuity of the one Church; Michael 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 happened 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 organization was, in turn, replaced in 1956 with the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party following Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of October–November 1956.

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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 partystate, in the words of Hungarian theologian András Máté-Tóth, “strictly controlled and limited the movements and public communication 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 security 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 discussions around Vatican II, let alone lead a passionate public debate about the renewal of Catholicism. Even the fact that a handful of representatives of the Hungarian Church were allowed to take part in the sessions in Rome, which came as a pleasant surprise after tough negotiations between the Holy See and the Communist 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 contribu6. András Máté-Tóth, “A II. Vatikani Zsinat és a magyar elhárítás,” at http:// internetlap.blogspot.com/2009/12/ii.html; accessed May 2, 2014.

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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 Second Vatican Council was so negligible, why should we even consider finding out more about it? Surprisingly, despite the weakness of the Hungarian delegation in Rome, the Council, on the other hand, did indeed have a strong effect on Catholics in Hungary, an effect that has not been studied until recently. This chapter will delineate what we so far know about the history of Hungarian 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 Hungary 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: Történettudományi Intézet (Hungarian Academy of Sciences: Institute of History, 2011), and the broader approach examining the complex power struggle between the Catholic Church and the Communist state in the monumental dissertation by Nicolas Bauquet, 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-

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used by journalists and scholars beginning in the 1970s to describe West Germany’s policy of détente toward the Soviet Union, Poland, and other Communist countries. In the context of Catholicism, 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 suppression 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 Ministers 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, better—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 Szabó have recently begun to investigate, based on findings in the Archives of the Hungarian State Security Service, how Communist 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 research, 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, egyházpolitika, identitás Magyarországon és Szlovákiában 1945 után., ed. András Sándor Kocsis (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

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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 communism 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 urgent problems facing the Church in order to prepare for the universal Council. The way in which the Hungarian bishops responded, 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 Tardini’s letter, and only the eighty-year-old Bishop Lajos Shvoy of Székesfehérvár managed to send a reply to the Roman committee responsible for the preparation of the Council.13 Shvoy’s letter 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 extension 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 zsinatra,” 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 Hungarian fascists and liberated by Soviet troops.

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and films. For him, opening up to modern society was not an option, 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 informants of the Hungarian State Security agency and the State Office of Church Affairs.14 This latter institution had been founded in 1951 and placed under the Council of Ministers. The State Office was responsible for the observation, infiltration, and manipulation of religious institutions. József Prantner, the president 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 per14. For the history of the State Security apparatus in Hungary, see Laszlo Borhi, “Stalinist Terror in Hungary,” in Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression, ed. Matthew Stibbe and Kevin McDermott (Manchester: Manchester 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 splitter 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.

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cent) and African bishops (83 percent) were even more responsive 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 arrest 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 acknowledge.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 Hungarian 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 primate, 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 érdékében 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 semplice, 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: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2010), 311–32. 18. Fejérdy, “Szentszéki stratégiák.”

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him personally in Venice, but the Hungarian bishops were not allowed 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 country’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 fifteen 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 apprehended 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 statesponsored “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 imprisoned 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 Népköztársaság 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 Netzwerk?,” in Vernetzte Improvisationen: Gesellschaftliche Subsysteme in Ostmitteleuropa und in der DDR, ed. Annette Schuhmann (Cologne: Böhlau 2008), 121–37.

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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 police and the State Office of Church Affairs, while about three- to four hundred priests worked illegally.22 According to Stefano Bottoni, 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 majority of priests in Hungary were loyal to the regime or even collaborated 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 affairs wanted to make sure that the Church was under total observation. 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 directing 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.

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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 officers, Catholic activists, and religious orders; and, between 1956 and 1958, reprisals. The year 1962 brought a new dynamic of power between the Church and the Communist state. Instead of using 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 informants and collaborators inside the Church to create a “culture of prevention.” Instead of torture and imprisonment, “conversations” 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 domination. This was the devilish consequence of the “soft” dictatorship 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 churchstate relations in Hungary.26 The agreement sanctified close collaboration between the Church hierarchy and the Communist state, particularly in the suppression of dissent. This image of a church under observation and control, however, 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 specific, biased perspective on reality.27 Katherine Verdery has rightly 25. Ibid., 627. 26. Ibid., 782; Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas 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.

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termed the state security forces of the Soviet Bloc “a system producing 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 participation 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 Mindszenty—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 presided 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. Mindszenty 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.

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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 comrades were nervous about their image in the Communist Bloc, so they waited for the opinions of party leaders from other countries. 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 relationship to Communist countries. The new pope was interested in developing more constructive diplomatic relations with the Eastern 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 Marxism 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 Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 59. 33. Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 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

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The Communist leadership distrusted this new, global approach, which seemed so different from Pius XII’s strong anticommunism because it made it more difficult to defame the Catholic 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’ perception of the outside world—specifically, the capitalist West. In other words, they started to understand the territories and societies of Western Europe—Italy in particular—not only as threatening, 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 foreign 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 struggle 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 establishing “useful contacts” in the West; (c) “repelling the conservaperson 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 University 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.

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tive-integrist wing” of the Church; and (d) supporting Communist-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 isolated.”41 The Communists were concerned that the Council would publish a statement condemning communism or perhaps even include 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. Meanwhile, 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 (“Patkay”), the lay president of the Saint Stephen Society, and Rev. István Hamvas (“Kecskeméti”) as attendants; the journalist Víd Mihelics (“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 hatvanas 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.

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sent back to headquarters in Budapest. The operation of Hungarian 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 Hungarians, but they were also joined by specialists from other Communist countries, and even a few Italians. Some Vatican circles warmly welcomed the Hungarian delegation 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 after 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 Brezanóczy, the pope had literally said, “Mindszenty makes big headlines 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, focusing 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 report is taken from the “Canale” file, published in Szabó, A Szentszék és a Magyar Népköztársaság kapcsolatai a hatvanas években, 127.

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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 amnesty. 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 media, 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 Radio 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 representatives, 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 going 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 European 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.”

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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 favored by the Communist government, and the Hungarian regime agreed to the installation of a few bishops and priests it had previously blocked. The four new bishops and two of the formerly banned bishops took part in the new fourteen-member Hungarian 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 offered a few concessions.48 The Hungarian Church historian Máté Gárdonyi interprets Vatican Ostpolitik and the 1964 Partial Agreement 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 Schema 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/holdings/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.

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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 spirit 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 representatives of churches in Western countries. To sum up the research that has been done so far, based mostly on archival materials from the state security services in Hungary, the following picture emerges: the participation of Hungarian 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 Council 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. Alberigo and Komonchak, 5:175. 51. A good introduction to the difficulties of interpreting the files of the Communist state security apparatus is in Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (New York: Random House, 1997).

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the Catholic Church.52 The Communist state also made sure that most of the Council’s documents were not published in Hungarian until 1975.53 The final part of this chapter will sum up what has been studied so far with regard to changes in Church administration, theology, and practice. It will also look at a different aspect of Hungarian Catholicism during the time of the Second Vatican Council: the independent Catholic and—later—ecumenical “base communities” 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, systematically blocked the application of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in Hungary.54 This critique is a bit overstated, exaggerat52. Stefano Bottoni writes, “It was during the II Vatican Council that the Hungarian intelligence officers, learning from their errors, laid the foundations for further operative work against the Vatican”; Bottoni, “Special Relationship,” 155. 53. This is a list of what had been published: Rendelkezés a szent liturgáról [Disposition 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 Quartalschrift 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

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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. Beginning 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, instead 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 “idealism” in favor of the “materialist world view.” It is true, however, that a fully engaged reception of the Council, 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 Hungarian believers, but not Paul VI’s in 1964.57 It took until 1975 for almost all documents of the Council to become available in Hungary, 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 Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 227. 56. The following summarizes the findings of Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 243–51. 57. Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 244.

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general under any Communist dictatorship, access to these documents was surely not the main obstacle to a lively debate about Vatican II. Rather, it was everyday discrimination against religion in schools, workplaces, and the public sphere. Despite these difficult conditions, a debate on the Council documents did indeed take place in Hungary. Mihály Kránitz described in an article how Hungarian theologians discussed ideas of the Dominican- and Jesuit-driven so-called nouvelle théologie and how Karl Rahner, who visited Hungary several times after 1968, contributed to a better knowledge of themes discussed during the Council.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 Hungary, 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 administrative structures and the renewal of the liturgy—could be implemented more easily than others. The Hungarian bishops’ conference established, among others, a National Liturgical Council (Országos Liturgikus Tanács) in 1964, and the renewal of liturgical forms was put into effect during the 1970s.60 More problematic because of the difficult political circumstances was the implementation 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). 60. Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 246. 61. Quoted in Fejérdy, Magyarország és a II. Vatikáni Zsinat, 246. This refers to the

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The most difficult question concerns the impact that the Council had on believers, since we have very few studies of religious life in Hungary since the 1960s. There were two movements persecuted by the Communist state that attracted a considerable number 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 written 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, despite the fact that he was imprisoned several times in the interim. The network of small communities that Father Bulányi founded under the name of Bokor (Hungarian for “bush”) was the most successful illegal religious movement during the Communist period.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 Würdigung (Vienna: Ungarisches Kirchensoziologisches Institut, 1996). On Regnum Marianum, 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).

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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 Hungarian 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 sentence that no one should “be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience,” citing Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis humanae.66 What made life in these groups particularly attractive was the fact that their members—priests and laymen, men and women—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 human 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:

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the center of these groups was the communal teaching and learning 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 Hungarian Catholicism. The Case of the Bokor-Movement (Ph.D. diss., Central European University, 2014), 41–55. 68. Von Klimó, “Zwischen Beat und Kommunismus: Katholische Jugendgruppen 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.

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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 détente between the Yugoslav party-state and its principal ideological 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 archdiocese 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 fathers 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 devastated by the Communists after 1945. The Catholic Church in Yugoslavia, notably in the preponderantly Catholic northwest (Slovenia and Croatia), but also in Voj1. Stjepan Bakčić, “Dragi svećenici!,” Glas s Koncila (Zagreb), October 4, 1962. 2. “Obavijesti,” Glas s Koncila (Zagreb), October 4, 1962, 23.

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vodina and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with their significant Catholic 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; destroyed most Catholic institutions; banned practically all Catholic publications; excluded religious instruction from schools; confiscated Church property; and, in 1946, arrested Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb, the most senior Catholic prelate in Yugoslavia, 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 California 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 institut za povijest, 2013); Akmadža, Katolička crkva u Hrvatskoj i komunistički režim 1945–1966 (Rijeka: Otokar Keršovani, 2004); Jure Krišto, Katolička crkva u totalitarizmu 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 znanstvenog skupa održanog u Mostaru 5. i 6. studenoga 2009, ed. Ivica Lučić (Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2011), 2:491–508; Stjepan Kožul, Stradanja u Zagrebačkoj nadbiskupiji za vrijeme Drugoga svjetskoga rata i poraća (Zagreb: Tkalčić, 2004). 4. On these see Velimir Blažević, “Kontroverze oko osnivanja i djelovanja udruženja 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 Associations,” 231–56; Stipan Trogrlić, “Istarska svećenička udruženja—Zbor svećenika sv. Pavla za Istru i Društvo sv. Ćirila i Metoda u Pazinu (1945–1952),” Croatica christiana periodica (Zagreb) 32, no. 61 (2008): 123–50.

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Despite their checkered and controversial experience, aimed at undermining the authority of the Catholic hierarchy, these associations, notably in Bosnia and Herzegovina, actually contributed 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 Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), when Pope Pius XII announced the cardinals for the upcoming consistory, among them the imprisoned Archbishop Stepinac, Yugoslavia 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 Communist sources, half a million Yugoslavs, mainly Croats, emigrated from Yugoslavia after the Second World War.5 From the standpoint of the regime, “the postwar Catholic clerical emigration was from the very beginning the most reactionary, most organized, 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 attracted attention immediately after the war through his efforts on behalf 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 Relations with Religious Communities] 1968).

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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 differentiation 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 regulate 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 obstacles to religious practice in state institutions, the return of nationalized 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 No7. Akmadža, ed., Krunoslav Draganović: Iskazi komunističkim istražiteljima (Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2010), 222. 8. Razvoj odnosa izmedju SFRJ-Vatikana-RKC od 1960. godine, 1, ABH, RKVP 1962. 9. Ibid., 5.

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vember 3, 1960, with an affirmative letter in which he noted that the “normalization of relations with the Catholic Church is a process 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 relations 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 reason. This perhaps suggests an explanation as to why the latterday critics of the Second Vatican Council hold it culpable for excessive 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 manner” of some of them had a tragic source in the persecution that they had experienced in Communist prisons11—but their contributions were important in their respective areas of competence. Croatian Council fathers, especially Stepinac’s successor, Archbishop Franjo Šeper, whom Paul VI named cardinal at the end of the Council in 1965, were members of various conciliar commissions. 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.

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the Discipline of the Sacraments and on the Preparatory Central Commission, and he was elected a member of the Theological 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 atheism. 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 conservative Council fathers among the Croat bishops—for example, Frane Franić of Split-Makarska—were great exponents of ecumenism. They warned that the excessive latinization of the Catholic 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 Cro12. “Gloria nationis, puritas stirpis, autonomia culturalis, et similia, non sunt summum bonum, quod in detrimentum solidarietatis generis humani qua talis conservari deberet!”; quoted in Nikola Dogan, “Franjo Šeper i Gaudium et spes,” in Veritatem 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.

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ats and Catholics.”15 He begged “our Orthodox brethren to forgive us just as crucified Christ forgave all.”16 Pichler found a ready interlocutor 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 destructive 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 Council 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 (Orientalium ecclesiarum). Twenty years after the Council, Šagi-Bunić held that, in the meantime, a “new world had come into being that is best reflected 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 be15. 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.

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longed, from the new generation that lives “in the world of image 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 commencement 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 impossible 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 toward 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 journal 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 communications, 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 Koncila, 121. 20. Ibid., 122.

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the struggle to prevent the Church from becoming again a handmaid of the state, the struggle to prevent the priesthood from becoming a more or less well-paid and self-satisfied profession, the struggle to have the clergy serve the people and not become an appendage 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 positively on a few of the bishops in Yugoslavia. Some returned “disappointed” from the Vatican, and a few openly attacked the policy of Pope John. Individual bishops from Asia, Africa, and even from certain 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 relationship toward the state, and some even reproached them their lessthan-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 conversation with “Him” (obviously, a Party functionary), the anonymous author in Glas Koncila satirized the eagerness of the authorities. “He” is reassured that the angel of the Lord has stirred the waters (Jn 5:4), and thereby set the whole Church into mo21. Ibid., 125. 22. Razvoj odnosa izmedju SFRJ-Vatikana-RKC od 1960. godine, Belgrade, November 19, 1963, 9–10, ABH, RKVP 1963.

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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 Vojvodina, 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 diplomatic 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 Koncila, 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 crkava 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 freedom of religion, but certain elements through impermissible procedures misuse their position and in various ways exert pressure on the conscience, thereby creating a psychosis of fear, which is contrary to law”; ibid. 28. “Božićna poruka i čestitka kardinala Šepera,” Glas Koncila, December 25, 1965.

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“Letter of a Village Parish Priest,” in which the various foibles of the regime were exposed to ridicule.29 All the same, the state authorities were convinced that they had the upper hand after the Council, whose logic, they thought, pushed church into accommodation 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 leadership—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, included a degree of defensiveness about Yugoslavia’s closeness to the West. (In 1955, Tito told Khrushchev that the West “demanded the establishment of a multiparty system [in Yugoslavia] and a détente [with the opposition]: for example, in the case of Stepinac—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 Yugoslavia’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 overreached 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 Yugoslavia (AJ), Belgrade: KPR I-3-a SSSR. Tito added that, in a 1950 draft, the U.S. ambassador 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.

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nationality question at the apex of power. Two blocs emerged— unitarist-centralists and federalists—who contended for influence over a variety of issues, including Church policy. Whereas the former favored a strongly centralist state, united in a projected 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 latter 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 generally 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 situation 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 European 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 in32. This refers to the Yugoslav ideological model of Communist rule, nominally through a devolving system of self-management in the workplace and in the public 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).

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formal and remained at the level of the Yugoslav embassy councilor 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 undisturbed 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 Casaroli to Belgrade. Although the Yugoslav government wanted accommodation, 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 Croatian bishops, the bishops ultimately did not become a party to the negotiations, instead taking advantage of the Yugoslav authorities’ 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, Herzegovina, 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.

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1966, was less formal than an agreement, did not define the legal position of the Church in the state, and mainly affirmed the letter 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 contacts with the Yugoslav bishops. For its part, the Holy See confirmed the religious and ecclesiastical 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 ambassadorial 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 plenary 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 various “deformations” and “chauvinist practices” against non-Serbs. 34. Službeni List SFRJ: Međunarodni ugovori (Belgrade), November 7, 1966.

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(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 reckoning with the Serb cadres. Ranković had favored concessions to the Holy See during the negotiations, especially in matters involving 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 Yugoslav subject, and the flying of the Yugoslav flag on state holidays. 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 protocol 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 Vatican 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 changes 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 requested 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.

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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 review, 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 Serbianized 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 Ambassador, 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 service of anti-Yugoslav political propaganda[; this] cannot be tolerated 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 per36. 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 ambasadorom Vejvodom—26.XI.1963. g., 3., ABH, RKVP.

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secuted Croatia.” He called on the Croat bishops “not to trample on our centuries-old traditions or rights in the name of any politics, Godless or Godly . . . because there will always be bishops where there are believers and priests, but what is the use of shepherds 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 pastoral service for the Croats in exile. After his death, this post was held by Msgr. Vladimir Stanković, who was in part resident in Yugoslavia. 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 Committee 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 Cardinal 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 evident 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 carols 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.

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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 editions of 100,000 copies).40 Kršćanska Sadašnjost (Christian Contemporaneity)—the Center for Conciliar Research, Documentation, 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 construction 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 engagement 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 Theological Culture of Laity—founded in 1968 at the Catholic Theological 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 instructors, 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 theo40. The chief editors were Jure Kaštelan, a prominent poet and party member, and Bonaventura Duda, a Franciscan friar and Bible scholar.

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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 organized by Josip Ladika, the chief administrator of Glas Koncila, as well as a number of groups that functioned in other major cities such as Split (St. Francis, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin 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 expectations in all segments of society. This was especially the case given their convergence with the beginning of the reform movement in Croatia, after the Croatian party organization dismissed its unitarist fraction. The so-called “Croatian Spring” thus followed the Tenth Plenum of the Croatian party’s central committee 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.

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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 attendance, provided the sort of mass phenomenon in this period of relative freedom that felt especially threatening to the Communist 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 Tito’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 government was aware that the Holy See “mainly refrains from interference 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 International 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 existed 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 na42. “Marijanski kongres u Mariji Bistrici,” Glas Koncila, August 22, 1971. 43. Zabeleška o razgovoru Predsednika Republike sa Papom Pavlom VI 29. marta 1971. u Vatikanu, 3. AJ, KPR I-2/48–2. 44. Medjunarodni položaj i spoljna politika Vatikana, 5, AJ, ibid. 45. Ibid., 8.

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tional colors, attempting to nationalize their history. Croat party leaders like Savka Dabčević-Kučar and Miko Tripalo became national leaders, symbolically upsetting hierarchical relations in the SKJ and the Yugoslav federation. The reopening of the national question—the place of Croats, Slovenes, and others in Yugoslavia, in the economy, and in the country’s international representation—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 interpretations. Tomislav Šagi-Bunić promulgated the incarnational approach. According to this influential theologian, Christianity incarnated itself in the pre-Christian forms of Croat natural religion, 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 exists a Muslim religious community of our language and kind, but also because we have among us a significant number of people without 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 different kind of communal living from that of national communalism, 46. Šagi-Bunić, “Ekumenska problematika kod nas,” Poslušni Duhu (Zagreb) 1, no. 3 (1966): 79.

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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 harmony with the Christian attitude to life.”47 Moreover, Šagi-Bunić advocated a politically powerless Church, responsible to the people, 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 mansions in the Father’s house. In the opinion of Živko Kustić, ŠagiBunić’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 nationalistic, but must be national, about how the Church has responsibility for the destiny of the nation, about how the Church is less concerned with the state and far more with the people” represented 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 Committee, which convened at Tito’s hunting resort Karađorđevo (Vojvodina) in December 1971. Duly condemned for “nationalist deviations,” 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.”

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members of the Croat Party organization, encompassing arrests and severe sentences for notable figures from cultural and economic 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 Karol 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 Catholic 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 “nationalists.” 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 developments,” occasionally using all sorts of allusions about the ongoing 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 tenderly 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.

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The Second Vatican Council and its immediate effects coincided 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 disappointments. 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 tolerated 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.

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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 concerns. The overall goal of those reforms is captured by the Italian 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 openness 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 foundational 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).

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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, defensiveness, clericalism, and traditionalism, the Church was experiencing 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 program of reform in an effort to bring their party up to date. Pursuing 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 Communists 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 Czechoslovak 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 outside 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.

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elite-driven, with new forces among the party leadership emerging 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 development 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 ensuing 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 “acculturate” 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 Catholicism in the 1960s, two important historical features of con3. 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 identified 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 interested 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 Slovak 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).

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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 imprisoned in large numbers. The state exercised tight control over religious media and publishing, educational institutions (including seminaries), and contacts with coreligionists abroad. The state’s refusal to consent to episcopal appointments that it deemed unfavorable 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 presented for Catholicism a challenge unparalleled among their neighbors. Whether it was the burning at the stake by the Catholic Church in 1415 of the great Czech religious reformer Jan Hus; the successful defense of their homeland by Hussite warriors 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 Protestant 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 entangled with suspicion, if not outright hostility, toward the Catholic Church.5 4. For a detailed discussion of the repressive nature of Czechoslovak Communist religious policy, see Sabrina Petra Ramet, “The Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia 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

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The years of the Second Vatican Council saw the resumption of negotiations between the Holy See and the Czechoslovak regime after a ten-year hiatus. By the early 1960s, it was clear that Communist regimes were here to stay, and the Church’s acceptance 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 bishop from Czechoslovakia would be permitted to attend the Council, while the Czechoslovak regime was hoping to enhance its international prestige by mending fences with Rome. The two sides met six times between March 1963 and February 1965, alternating 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 wording 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 dominated the negotiations in a number of respects. First, in 1963, some bishops were still imprisoned or interned. A number of diowith 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.

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ceses—including Prague—were without a bishop or even an apostolic administrator. The regime asserted its influence in the diocesan 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 Movement 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, imprisoned 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 permission 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 religious 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 Beran, 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 administrator—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 administer a diocese in which there was a vacancy for the position of bishop. In Czechoslovakia, some vicars capitular, though not all, were in the collaborationist camp.

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(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 informants’ success in this task was debatable.9 Czechoslovakia’s Council fathers spoke little at Vatican II, though Tomášek addressed 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 greatest 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 bishops, including Cardinal Beran, also took part. Despite the compromise 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 humanae), 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,” Religion, 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 Secretariat 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.

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support for freedom of conscience and to demand that governments 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, propagating, 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 freedom of conscience, Beran attacked not only those regimes that tried to suppress religion, but also those that mandated a particular 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 imposition 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.

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Church staunchly resisted. The government, meanwhile, blocked the implementation of many conciliar reforms, refusing to permit 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 education, 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 significant 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 Novotný 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 during 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 collectively served 472½ years of their sentences. The letter stated clearly 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 expressed 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-

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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 independent 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 delivered to the Communist Party’s Central Committee, categorizing the numerous crimes perpetrated by the regime against Catholics since the 1950s and calling for a number of changes and reforms.14 The grievances included the internment or imprisonment of bishops and priests; restrictions placed on episcopal authority; show trials against Church leaders and members of religious 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 laity imprisoned for carrying out their religious obligations; permission 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 Jaroslav Cuhra, Církevní politika KSČ a státu v letech 1969–1972 (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé de˘jiny AV ČR, 1999).

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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 constitutionally 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 policies 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 bishops’ proposals with respect to relations between church and state. They called for the opening of discussions between Czechoslovakia 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 communication 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 renewal of the Greek Catholic Church; the freedom of religious education inside and outside of school; free access to the press, radio, and television; and the freedom to carry out pastoral work in hospitals, prisons, and social welfare institutions.16 15. The Greek Catholics, also known as Eastern Rite Catholics, Byzantine Catholics, or—pejoratively—Uniates, are a semi-autonomous community within the greater Catholic Church that adheres to many of the traditions of Eastern Christianity while remaining in communion with the pope. 16. For a list of these demands, see Svoboda, Na straně národa, 65.

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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 constitutional freedoms of assembly and association” for voluntary social organizations, specified, “Freedoms guaranteed by law are applicable . . . to citizens of individual creeds and religious denominations.”17 As a concrete sign that the regime was taking its own rhetoric seriously, personnel changes ensued in the government offices responsible 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 Ministry of Culture.18 Less than two weeks later, on April 5, the minister 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 concessions to the Church. Some formerly interned bishops were allowed 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 reestablished; the Catholic press was revived; and religious instruction 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 strane˘ národa, 66, 72.

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relegalized; a new organization called the Dílo Koncilové Obnova (Work of Conciliar Renewal), or DKO, was founded; and the Church allowed freer interaction with theological and cultural developments 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 remained between church and state. The system of Church secretaries 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 candidates acceptable to both the Church and the regime was left unsolved. The Prague Spring did not see a resumption of negotiations 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 moment and pursue an agreement with the reformist regime, especially 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 accomplished 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 acquainted the younger generation with the theological thinking and developments in the Church outside Czechoslovakia. A similar series was then established in Brno; Svoboda, Na strane˘ národa, 73. 21. Karel Kaplan, Te˘žká cesta: Spor Československa s Vatikánem 1963–1973 (Brno: Centrum pro studium demokracia a kultury, 2001), 53

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From the Vatican’s perspective, Czechoslovakia now had a new set of personnel with whom it was not yet familiar, including Kadlecová, who sought to improve the Church’s situation in Czechoslovakia on her own initiative through work with the domestic Catholic 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 Czechoslovakia. Finally, one should not forget the Vatican’s tradition of caution 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 undone by summer 1969, with Miroslav Brůžek replacing Galuška as minister of culture in July and Hrůza, the man Kadlecová had replaced 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 sve˘tle 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 Gréckokatolíckej cirkvi v Československu roku 1968,” Historický Časopis 47, no. 3 (1979): 447–65. 24. Kaplan, Te˘žká cesta, 54.

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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 celebrated encyclical.25

Lasting Reforms The Prague Spring, short-lived though it was, gives an indication 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 originally 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 presidium, 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 hithertoscattered attempts to effect conciliar reforms in Czechoslovakia’s Catholic Church and to prepare the ground for the eventual implementation 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 EastCentral Europe and Russia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 124. 26. On the DKO, see Cuhra, “Dílo koncilové obnovy v kontextu státne˘-církevní politiky pražkého jara,” in Koncil a česká společnost, 112–24; Svoboda, Na strane˘ národa, 66–71, 75–77; Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 289. 27. Svoboda, Na strane˘ národa, 69.

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In the action program proclaimed at the congress, it noted the “insufficiently realized conclusions of the Council,” including the insufficient striving for ecumenical dialogue and dialogue with nonbelievers. It listed among its tasks “the development 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 organization. Václav Vaško recounts the initial resistance to the DKO from the seminarians at Litome˘řice, who suspected the new organization 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 rather to press the government into allowing the bishops to take up their leadership responsibilities in the Church. Among those convinced by Vaško was the future archbishop of Prague, Miloslav Vlk, who invited Vaško to speak at Litome˘řice, which he did to a full house of seminary students who then took the DKO’s program 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 ex28. 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.

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pressed concern over the organization’s growth, initiative, and “activization of the Church,” and it continued to postpone official 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 Czechoslovakia designated the organization as hostile to socialism. The DKO lived on until 1970 without legal authorization and then continued 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 Olomouc.32 Shut down in 1950 by the Communists, who allowed only the seminary in Litome˘řice to remain in operation, calls for its restoration 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 September 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 CyrilloMethodian Faculty in Prague with its seat in Litome˘řice, 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.

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Ministry’s opposition to granting it full independence, its operation 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 important Moravian leaders and teachers in the Church. The influence of the Second Vatican Council was discernible. Teachers at the institute 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 Unlike most of the other Church reforms, this one began in early 1965 when the Statewide Liturgical Commission was set up. Czechoslovakia’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 directives included a simplified rite and changes and additions to the 34. Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 289. 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.

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Mass, such as intercessory prayers and lay reading of the scriptures. 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 November 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 bearing on it, though “normalization” brought more priests into the process from Pacem in Terris, a group not known for its eagerness for reform. The issue of language also proved crucial. First, vernacular liturgy 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 Hussite 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. Sedlar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (Seattle: University of Washington 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 battle 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.

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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 Vatican II, could be perceived as a vindication of the Hussites. Arguably, it also removed an obstacle standing between Czech patriotism 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 Protestants 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 Hromádka, who reported on the Council in the journal Křesťanská Revue. As Czechoslovakia’s regime began to liberalize, ecumenical dia41. The second part of the Four Articles of Prague issued by the Hussite leadership 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 Jaroslav Krejčí, “A Culture of Ecumenical Convergence? Reflections on the Czech Experience,” Religion, State and Society 20, no. 2 (1992): 248. 42. Svoboda, Na strane˘ národa, 67.

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logue grew, and it became a regular part of Church life in the second 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 began to participate avidly, helping to organize the events. Instructors from the Catholic seminary at Litome˘řice 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 important foreign Catholic theologians such as Yves Congar, Hans Küng, and Karl Rahner. Growing out of the networks established at Litome˘řice 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 immediately following the Council, which overlapped with those leading 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, became the Prague Spring’s head of the Secretariat for Church Affairs 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.

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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 connected 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 societies, not pertinent to a situation in which the Church was fighting to survive and thus needed to rely on older tried and tested values.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 outside the Soviet Bloc were also impeded. Finally, there was the caution of clergy simply not wanting to draw to themselves the attention of the regime. However, despite these formidable obstacles, Vatican II continued to exercise at least some influence on Catholics 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 catechetical 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-

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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 Hussites, 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 acknowledged Hus’s “moral fervor,” his attempts to reform bad conditions 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 influence 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 people 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 Československu, 297–300. 48. Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 298.

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Christian interpretations of his message and to the teaching of the Church fathers. The White Book, the most theologically advanced, 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 textbooks 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 émigré theologian Skalický, for example, played a key role in one of the most interesting and fruitful postconciliar initiatives for Czech Catholicism—the reinterpretation of the Czech Catholic past in ways that reconciled Czech nationalism with Catholicism, thereby overcoming traditional Czech prejudices against the Church. Though living in exile in Rome, Skalický brought a Vatican II–inspired perspective on Czech history to the dissident community in his native 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 historicalnational consciousness” in September 1976.49 Through a kind of “historical-cultural geology,” he identified six “strata” of Czech history, which he connected with experiences of freedom in Czech national memory. He cited the traditions of Cyril and Methodius, of the medieval ruler St. Václav, of the Hussites and Bohemian Brethren, of St. Jan Nepomucký and the Catholic Reformation, of the national revival and Tomáš Masaryk, and even the Socialist tradi49. Tomáš Halík, Víra a kultura: Pokoncilní vývoj českého katolicismu v reflexi časopisu Studie (Prague: Zvon, 1995), 101–3; Balík and Hanuš, Katolická církev v Československu, 294–96.

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tion as manifested under Dubček. Each tradition, in Skalický’s estimation, 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 Catholic and Protestant traditions, he advanced the ecumenical mission of the Council. Back home, the most significant and prominent Czech Catholic theologian was Josef Zvěřina, released in 1965 from a lengthy prison term. His short samizdat work of 1980, Malý hovor katolického teologa o TGM, was another indication that the spirit of Vatican II was stimulating new thinking about the Czech past. Seventy years earlier, Tomáš Masaryk had been a fervent critic of the Catholic 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 Masaryk’s valid rebukes, responding to them with repentance and purification, while addressing his unjustified rebukes with an honest, 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.

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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 apostatized 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 characterize the postconciliar Church throughout the world was not without its impact in the Czech lands. Lay Catholics such as mathematician and activist Václav Benda and priests such as Zvěřina and Václav Malý became prominent figures in the Charter 77 human rights movement.53 Malý was also a cofounder of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (Výbor na Obranu 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 encour52. 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.

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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 policies. A petition by Moravian shopkeeper Augustin Navrátil garnered 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 protest 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 concerns for religious freedom and human rights and in their lay activism. Navrátil’s petition, for example, included among its demands 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 Czechoslovakia’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 Center, 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.

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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 Communists 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 Catholics 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 Communists 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, cooperation 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 between Czech patriotism and the Church. A particularly crucial vehicle 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 springtime of Czech Catholicism did not disappear entirely. Instead, it sustained itself in new ways during the closing years of Communist rule over the Czech lands.

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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 question 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 excommunicated “Lefebvrist” Society of St. Pius X—have seen to the translation and circulation in Polish of their diatribes against Vatican II.3 Even the Polish episcopate seems uncertain about the conciliar legacy: in 2014, its deputy head equated Catholic reformism 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,

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fiftieth anniversary of Gaudium et spes, Apostolicam actuositatem, Dignitatis humanae, and the Council’s other revolutionary teachings 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 monograph 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 theologian Henri de Lubac6—have been translated into Polish; a handful 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: Wydawnictwo Księży Marianów, 2001); Henri de Lubac, Medytacje o Kościele, trans. Izabela Białkowska-Cichoń (Kraków: WAM, 1997). 7. Bohdan Bejze, Kronika Soboru Watykańskiego II (Częstochowa: Niedziela, 2000); Jerzy Stroba, Zadania wyznaczone przez Sobór Watykański II (Poznań: Księgarnia św. Wojciecha, 1988). 8. While the weekly journal Tygodnik Powszechny featured continuous coverage 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-

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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 audience. 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 undocumented. Although brief mentions appear in various English-, 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 pontiff’s speeches and working documents for the Council, published 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 Poland’s longtime Communist-era head bishop (1948–81), Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński.11 Unlike the Hungarian or Czechoslovak presence at the Council, 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 journalists. Communist Poland was, in demographic terms, an overwhelmingly Catholic country, more confessionally homogeneous than at any other time in modern Polish history.12 Yet demographary 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: Konstytucje, 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

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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 necessarily 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 experience 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 metropolitan 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 action, 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/Uitgeverij 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 University, 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.

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set of primary sources (published and unpublished). The principal chronological focus will be the years 1958–68. In practice, however, 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 implementation of conciliar reforms were substantially conditioned by the dilemmas of life in Communist Poland: diplomatic doublespeak, secret police agents, and the need for what George Orwell once described as “ideological translation.”16 As the diary of Polish Catholic journalist and politician Janusz Zabłocki reminds us, the Polish experience of Vatican II was also inextricably embedded 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 holocaust, 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 geography 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 specjalnych w polskim Kościele—co już wiemy? Informacja na temat stanu badań,” Teologia Polityczna, no. 1 (2003–4): 57–70. 17. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:440.

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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 importantly 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 September 25, 1953, it seemed that the last bastion of Catholic autonomy behind the Iron Curtain had fallen silent. By this time, Josif Slipyj, Alojzije Stepinac, Josef Beran, and József Mindszenty 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 relationship between the Polish episcopate and Poland’s postwar Communist 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, imprisoned, or killed as part of an ongoing “civil war” between Communist 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 oth18. The Polish historian Jan Żaryn has described the approach as “salami tactics”; 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 Suppression of the Opposition in Poland, 1944–1946,” in The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, 93–110. 21. See, for example, Jan Śledzianowski, Ksiądz Czesław Kaczmarek—biskup

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er Communist-run countries with significant Catholic populations, Poland’s primate never stood trial after his arrest in 1953, which—unlike for Stepinac, Mindszenty, or Beran—was kept officially 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 Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal weekly), founded in April 1945 on the authority of Kraków archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha, appeared without interruption until March 1953, when editors refused to print an obituary for Joseph Stalin.24 The Catholic University 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 imposed 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 Polish public life. Even the agenda of “nationalizing” the Church was kielecki 1895–1963 (Kielce: Kuria Diecezjalna, 1991), 225–70; Żaryn, “Ostatnie wygnanie 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.

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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 theology faculty of Jagiellonian University and the Catholic theology faculty of Warsaw University with a state-run Academy of Catholic 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 nationalization. Competition from the independent Catholic University 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 assets, 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 Curtain 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 Archidiecezjalna, 2013), 376. 29. On PAX, see Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, 77–180.

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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’ unswerving 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 assumption 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 setting the Church in Poland at loggerheads with the Holy See concerned 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 occupation rights to Pomerania, Silesia, and the Baltic corridor, all held by Germany before World War II.31 Pope Pius XII refused to recognize 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 Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 73–89, 154–201; Hugo Service, Germans to Poles: Communism, 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 polskiej publicystyce katolickiej w latach 1945–1989 (Toruń: Europejskie Centrum Edukacyjne, 2004).

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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 repatriates, 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 presence in the territories was simply a transitional “occupation.” As Peter C. Kent has suggested, “The Polish church had left the Vatican the choice of either disavowing the Polish hierarchy or accepting 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 interna33. 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 apostolic 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.

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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, Wyszyński chose to interpret very liberally the Holy Office’s 1949 decree threatening Catholics with excommunication for cooperation with communism. The primate condemned patriot priests only in 1953, following their open revolt against bishops (himself included) persecuted by the state. Asked once how he justified concluding 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 Stalinism is, therefore, mixed. On the one hand, the bishops of Katowice and Kielce and top figures within the Cracovian curia were tortured and subjected to show trials, the country’s primate arrested and kept under lock and key for three years.38 On the other, resigned to Poland’s overwhelmingly Catholic population and unable to choose one consistent strategy of cooptation, postwar Communists never succeeded either in cutting the Catholic Church in Poland off from the Vatican or in alienating Poles from the Church. For evidence one need look no further than Częstochowa on August 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 preparation for the millennium of Polish Christendom.39 One month later, Wyszyński had left custody, and by the end of the year the episco36. 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.

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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 allowed 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 operating 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 secre40. It was the literary critic and satirist Stefan Kisielewski who coined the term “neopositivism,” but Stanisław Stomma emerged as its principal theorist and practitioner; 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 fundamental 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 uprising along the way; Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1996).

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tary, Władysław Gomułka, even suggested that the new movement—known as ZNAK—run a handful of parliamentary candidates 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 Polish 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 former 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. Political 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 Catholicism had also been undergoing its own process of aggiornamento.”42 And yet world-renowned Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski would have disagreed with this last statement. Though he began as a young Marxist firebrand who helped to justify Stalinism, 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 oneway 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).

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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 Polish 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-Stalinization. Religious education in primary and secondary schools, reintroduced into public classrooms in 1956, was threatened and ultimately phased out between 1959 and 1961. Permits for the construction 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 concluded a new memorandum of understanding with the partystate in late 1956 and had encouraged Catholics to vote in the elections of 1957, soon began to regret those actions. And yet Wyszyński proved extremely adept at mobilizing Polish 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 experi44. 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’: Children’s Retreats, Leisure, and Social Change in Poland,” Religion, State, and Society 34, no. 3 (2006): 271–86.

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ence of what Wyszyński called the Great Novena. The latter represented 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 servitude to the Virgin Mary.”46 Wyszyński’s campaign to mobilize clergy and laity alike for a singularly Polish version of Marian devotion 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 attacking 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 ecumenical council. Parish priests were called to deliver to their bishops 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 September 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.

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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 sessions.50 The Polish delegation amounted to only 2.6 percent of the total number of bishops at the Council. Meanwhile, the number 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 Council 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 confusion 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 Watykańskiego 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.

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The Public Relations of Primate Wyszyński In Rome, Wyszyński resided at the Polish Institute at via Pietro Cavallini 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 faces amidst a sea of nearly 3,000 Council fathers.54 Given his “celebrated 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 photograph. 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 independent 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 appointments: first, to the Central Preparatory Commission (1960); then, to the Secretariat for Extraordinary Affairs (1962); and, finally, 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.

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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 journal 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 Cardinal 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 Jesuit Church.”58 Back in Poland, in the three months that followed the First Session, Wyszyński delivered over 130 lectures and sermons 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 initiatives, but rather part of a concerted public-relations effort undertaken 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 representatives of the Polish laity who spent time in conciliar Rome, either as public figures or as journalists covering the Council, and public 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 Powszechny, December 23, 1962. 59. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 528.

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In 1962, the primate recommended Rev. Szczepan Wesoły, the pastor of the Polish émigré community in Rome, to head the Slavic 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 representatives 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 autonomous).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 episcopate 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. Janusz Zabłocki, an editor of the monthly Więź who covered three Council sessions for the journal, enjoyed long, almost weekly oneon-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 Universal Word). On the press of Communist Poland, see Alina Słomkowska, Prasa w PRL: Szkice historyczne (Warsaw: PWN, 1980). 61. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:558.

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The final means by which the Polish bishops attempted to steer the reception of Vatican II involved networking with Council fathers and Catholic activists from other countries. Émigré intermediaries 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 appeared in 1963, during the Second Session.63 Several months later, Winowska arranged an interview between Wyszyński and Antoine Wenger, AA, editor-in-chief of France’s highest-circulation Catholic paper, the daily La Croix. Its title, “France: Our Older Sister,” made clear the international relevance of Polish Catholicism in the time of the ecumenical council.64 When, in 1963, Primate Wyszyński concluded that the philoCommunist 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 Informations 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

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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 Internationales.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 message 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 visibility. 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 political spectrum. Maria Winowska, in particular, rubbed those journalists 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.

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The Business of the Council To determine which bishops would go to Rome, Wyszyński established several ground rules prior to the First Session. Their purpose 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 passport without having formally requested one, that bishop would not go. There was, however, one bishop for whom Wyszyński consistently went to the mat with Poland’s Office of Confessional Affairs: 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 territories. 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 topics that he had chosen for them, even if these were not their respective 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 “progressive” Domus Mariae and the “conservative” Coetus Internationalis Patrum (which included Holy Office prefect Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani and future Society of St. Pius X founder Marcel 71. Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 4:24.

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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 bishops must remain a “special group” conducting “its own affairs independently according to its own sensibilities and experience.”73 Like other delegations from behind the Iron Curtain, the Polish bishops were accused of being unprepared for conciliar work. As Polish Catholic journalist Jerzy Turowicz disclosed to his Flemish 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 automatically 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 ringleader of a band of doctrinal conservatives. Statistical data gathered 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 journalist before becoming one of its historians—suggests, “Examining 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.” 73. Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 4:35. 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.

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were more or less divided into two camps: a minority and a majority.”75 Grootaers’s point applies not just to the Polish primate. Aggregate voting results clearly demonstrate that the Polish bishops who attended the Second Vatican Council fell into neither a “conservative” 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 collegiality and Marian devotion, which was one of the declared priorities 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 fathers 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 Communist press and secret police, quickly came to identify Wyszyński with the Coetus Internationalis Patrum.77 In reality, the pri75. 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 compiled 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

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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 matter 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 sacraments should be spoken in the vernacular so that the faithful sharing in the sacrament can participate more actively and benefit more fully from its fruits.”79 And yet, once in Council, he refused, 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 endorsed the famed Schema XIII that ultimately became the 1965 pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes. Yet he did so with a measure of concern, shared in plenary session with the other Council 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 Oecumenico Vatican II Apparando, Series I, Antepraeparatoria (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1960), 2: 673–79. 80. Wyszyński, “Wypowiedź w związku ze schematem de Sacra Liturgia” (November 9, 1962), in Dzieła zebrane, vol. 9, Sierpień-grudzień 1962 (Warsaw: Soli Deo, 2011), 296–300.

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freedom of conscience: “One can speak of the existence of religious freedom only if all people as individuals, persons, and citizens 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 episcopate 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 bishops 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 Catholics 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 individualized relationship to the Church that to this very day is so often encountered among Catholics who approach the Church according to their own notions of it.”82 This “individualization” of the Church, in the eyes of the Polish 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 challenges connected to decolonization and globalization. 81. Quoted in Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 519. 82. Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 5:165.

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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 condemning communism. Although Wyszyński would on occasion side with Ottaviani in the course of the Council, he in fact worked to torpedo 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 Cardinal Döpfner to ensure that it never made it out of the Preparatory Commission. When Ottaviani’s Coetus Internationalis Patrum circulated a petition during the Second Session for a conciliar judgment 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 witness.”83 It would be a stretch to attribute similar thinking to Cardinal 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 everyday 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. 84. Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce, 147–63.

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reason that he had sought accommodation with the Polish Communist apparatus fifteen years earlier: a sense of pastoral responsibility 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 documents 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, however, 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, although 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 Po85. 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.

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land since at least the early-modern period. Mary was symbolically 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 surrender into maternal servitude to Mary, Mother of the Church, in return 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, independently 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 mid1950s.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 directly 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 millennium 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.

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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 ecumenical movement?”90 Complicating the debate further from the standpoint of the Polish Council fathers was a disinformation campaign spearheaded 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 escaped 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 latter would not forget this snub. Declassified documentation from the Polish archives shows that Kliszko directed the secret police to develop and circulate during the Second Session a scholarly memorandum—written by real Catholic theologians—criticizing the primate and his fellow Council fathers for their Marian devotion. The security apparatus used informants—including biblical experts from the state-run Academy of Catholic Theology in Warsaw—to string together the Memorandum on Certain Aspects of the Marian Cult in Poland.92 Commis90. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:546. 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

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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, especially those born of the unhealthy and exaggerated Marian cult.”93 This document circulated far and wide—in public and in private. 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 memorandum.”95 In response, Polish bishops in Rome for the Second Session 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 staczyli 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. 96. Quoted in Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 496.

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tus of “Mother of the Church.” The Polish primate clearly imagined 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 Domus Mariae network. Although the Council voted by a narrow margin on October 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 apparatus, 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 declaration. Wyszyński learned from an expert belonging to the Council’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 Primate of Poland that made the pope take this brave, independent decision. I underscore here that this was the great manly achievement 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.

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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 denunciation 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 episcopate 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 significant 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 genuinely 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 Republic 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 nonethe98. Friszke, Oaza na Kopernika: Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej 1956–1989 (Warsaw: Biblioteka WIĘZI, 1997), 34–54. 99. On Zawieyski, see Marta Korczyńska, Jerzy Zawieyski: Biografia humanistyczna 1902–1969 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2011). 100. Zawieyski explained his attempts at reconciling Catholicism and communism in Zawieyski, Droga katechumena (Warsaw: Biblioteka WIĘZI, 1971).

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less felt it his duty to enter public life following Gomułka’s return to power, with a mission of reconciling church and state in Communist 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 other 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 unilaterally abrogated the concordat of 1925.102 Given the warmth shown Pope John XXIII by Communist leaders worldwide, Zawieyski sought to pave the way for an agreement involving the Holy See, the Polish episcopate, and the PZPR. Other ZNAK activists 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 audiences, first with John XXIII and then with Paul VI. Their exchanges 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.

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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 attitude of necessity had to provoke the enmity of the People’s government. 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 understands 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 nonbelievers like me. He insulted me, an atheist. All the while, the pope represents a church of peace, wisdom, a church of love, as you people 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 Communist embrace of John XXIII marked a definitive break with 103. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:192, 194.

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the “Church of Silence,” with Communists instead trying to leverage 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 November 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 interest of achieving “peace and understanding between the nations.” Following the audience, Zawieyski immediately shared his impressions with the primate, with his ZNAK colleagues in Rome, and also with Polish ambassador to Italy Adam Willmann, underscoring 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 Communist 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. 106. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:203. 105. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:465. 107. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:449. 108. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 345.

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Two years later almost to the day, Zawieyski had another private 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 message 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 Communist 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 important 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 Father 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 responsibilities 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 playing. 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. Luigi 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.

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their primate’s permission before taking these meetings, yet the meetings were set up not through Wyszyński, but through backchannels. The most important intermediary proved to be Konrad Sieniewicz, a leader of Poland’s exiled Christian Democratic party, who in the 1950s had become a major player in transnational Christian Democracy.113 Noting Wyszyński’s “historic” opportunity to play intermediary between the Catholic Church and a Communist regime, Zawieyski 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 ‘martyrdom’ 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. Tygodnik Powszechny editor-in-chief Jerzy Turowicz covered the entire First and Second sessions of the Council, with his reporting appearing in a weekly front-page feature entitled, “Jerzy Turowicz 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 compromise 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 re113. Konrad Sieniewicz, W Polsce po trzydziestu latach (London: Odnowa, 1978). 114. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:199. 115. Ibid., 2:208.

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alistic, given the facts. Respecting some agreements is in the interest 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 relations. 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 bishops’ story, it becomes a tale of prelates trying to overcome resentment: 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 recurring tensions between the Polish bishops’ conference and representatives 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 significance for the Soviet Bloc has been largely misunderstood by existing 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 seminal 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 La116. “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 Rutkowski—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 Catholic lay activists; Rutkowski, Polscy biskupi jako ojcowie Soboru Watykańskiego II, 171.

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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 minister 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 Democratic 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 between Poland’s clergy and laity at any point in the whole Communist 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 memorandum 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 Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, New York, Karol Popiel papers, box 9.10; see also Gebhardt, “Działalność na forum międzynarodowym,” in Świadectwa/Testimonianze, 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. Umiastowskiej 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 Powszechnego” (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1990).

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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 intent to help normalize relations between Poland and the Vatican—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 Zawieyski’s papal audiences. In this poisoned environment, it was difficult for any autonomous initiatives to bear fruit. When Zawieyski arrived in Rome in the fall of 1964 for his private audience with Paul VI, he had to wait over a month in utter uncertainty. Preoccupied with the Affaire PAX, Wyszyński seemed also to be punishing his old friend, suggesting at one point that Zawieyski see the pope not as a member of the Polish State Council, but instead as a private citizen, an artist. To this, Zawieyski responded, “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, August 5, 2001; Friszke, Koło posłów “Znak” w Sejmie PRL, 53–57. 124. Quoted in Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:502. 125. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:376.

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Polish Workers’ Agency—was making the rounds of various Italian 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 pages of his diary his frustrated sense of mission on behalf of Polish 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 important 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 People’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 addressed 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 “nuncia126. 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 (Archive 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. 128. Zawieyski, Dzienniki, 2:380.

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ture of the first category,” restitutio ad integrum.129 The disagreement, 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 Ostpolitik—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 extensive 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 countries, with respect to Poland things are moving backward . . . I realize 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.”133 129. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:502. 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, “Esposto 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 Casaroli, Serie: Paesi del Est, Sottoserie: Polonia, Imm.12 (provisional document record). 132. Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 347–48. 133. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:510.

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“Open Catholicism” But the story of the Polish laity’s engagement with Vatican II is about much more than backroom negotiations. Ecumenism, modernity, the human person, the apostolate of the laity, Jews as Christians’ “elder brothers in faith”—this was a vocabulary deeply 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 engagement 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 outside Poland as mediators for the Council. On the one hand, with their reporting, they shaped Vatican II’s reception back in Poland. 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 officially sanctioned movement of autonomous associations operating 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.”

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both international and national. Its activists were happy to be “bringing much into the common good of the laity in the international arena,” while also intending “to serve and actually serving People’s Poland.”136 While Jerzy Zawieyski, Jerzy Turowicz, and other movement elders met with Gomułka and other highranking 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 Lubac, 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 recep136. “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.

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tion of the Council’s debates, teachings, and legacy. As the Council unfolded, Więź, Znak, and Tygodnik Powszechny published article 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 example, the late Polish politician Wiesław Chrzanowski, a longtime 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 inhabiting the ZNAK movement. Janusz Zabłocki, for example, became Więź’s conciliar correspondent only after Eska turned the assignment down for want of competency in spoken French and Italian.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.

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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 pointperson 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 announcement 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 became 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 “integrism” and “progressivism”) in the Church.144 The cornerstone of Eska’s open Catholicism lay in the recognition 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 reshape the world around them. Measured according to these criteria, most believers of “good will” found themselves at odds with some aspect of pre–Vatican II teaching, rendering them a “dias143. 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.

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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 Catholicism—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 aggiornamento 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 Polish school of revisionist Marxism. Więź’s two principal cofound146. Ibid., 105. 148. Ibid., 105.

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147. Ibid., 127. 149. Ibid., 115.

ers and intellectual architects were Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Janusz 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 harmonizing 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 Internationales, in which he argued that “Poland is changing from a Catholic country into a secular, pluralistic country”152 and that “one cannot fight for humanism within the socialist world while remaining completely apart from it.”153 Read together, Mazowiecki’s statements show that ZNAK took state socialism and its philosophical exponents seriously. Poland’s top lay activists saw Vatican II as neither 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 Juliusza 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 Brussels trip more generally, see Kosicki, “*,” Więź, no. 658 (2014): 123–26. 153. Mazowiecki, “Odnowa polskiego katolicyzmu,” 116.

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self-proclaimed “people’s republic.” When Mazowiecki spoke of Poland as a “secular, pluralistic country,” he meant not confessional pluralism — Poland was over 90 percent Catholic, following 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 country,” 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 Primate 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 possible 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.

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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 encouraging sign the Holy See’s 1964 Partial Agreement with Communist Hungary.160 Time in Rome gave the Więź editors real hope of making “open Catholicism” a reality. Mazowiecki traveled from Brussels 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 initiative 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 meeting with him.161 Wyszyński demurred, insensitive to the importance 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 Catholicism 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 intellectual 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.

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and Zawieyski up with Casaroli, Poggi, and Samorè in the 1960s had earlier facilitated most of the contacts that the ZNAK movement 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, Tygodnik Powszechny’s Jerzy Turowicz socialized with other Catholic 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. 164. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:492. 165. Vanistendael and Grootaers both also spoke at the same Brussels conference 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 mouvement inclassable (Paris: Cerf, 1994).

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into his hands.166 This illegal leaking of confidential drafts by a lay auditor made it possible for Zabłocki to write a serious intellectual 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 suffered by the Catholic Church in Poland during the Communist period, those same years were also a time of unprecedented cultural, 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 office, allowed to observe portions of the Council. Given this access, 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 Poland had journalists on the ground in Rome for all of the sessions of the Second Vatican Council. This on-the-ground presence clearly 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 166. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:561. 167. Zabłocki, Kościół i świat współczesny: Wprowadzenie do soborowej konstytucji pastoralnej “Gaudium et spes” (Kraków: Znak, 1967). 168. Friszke, Oaza na Kopernika, 75–87.

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Council was Jerzy Turowicz, who had access to the largest Polishlanguage 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 communism), 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 Polish 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 journalistic 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 sessions, 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 mise169. Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 40. 170. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:557. 171. Jerzy Eisler, List 34 (Warsaw: PWN, 1993). 172. For example, “Jan XXIII z okazji zamknięcia Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny, December 23, 1962.

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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 proceedings; 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 languages (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 brilliantly as he chronicled the statements of plenary session chairman 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 fathers, 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 International Eucharistic Congress in Bombay, where Pope Paul VI pre173. Turowicz, “Dzień powszedni Soboru,” Tygodnik Powszechny, November 18, 1962. 174. Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:561.

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sided, following preparatory sessions in Rome.175 One of the congress’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 commission work as the only nonclerical voices at Vatican II. In most cases, 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 Second Session featured twelve lay auditors (all men), while the Third Session included also women (seventeen out of a total of forty auditors).176 Poland had one auditor, a professor from the Catholic University of Lublin named Stefan Swieżawski. This historian was unique among his colleagues in the ZNAK movement, as his formal training in Catholic thought both far exceeded and substantially antedated that of his fellow activists. One of Poland’s most eminent scholars of Catholicism, Swieżawski had an international 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 Grootaers, “The Drama Continues between the Acts: The ‘Second Preparation,’ ” in History of Vatican II, 2:350–441.

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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 scholars outside the PZPR were able to preserve what the Polish security apparatus called “quite lively ties abroad” throughout the entire Communist period.178 Although he attended only the final weeks of the Third Session, Swieżawski made his mark one year later on a global scale. There, he joined fellow auditors Jean Guitton and Ramon Sugranyes 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 privileged 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, represented 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 attitudes toward philosophy.180 177. Stefan Swieżawski, Wielki Przełom 1907–1945 (Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw 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.

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Even though his time at the Council was limited, Stefan Swieżawski’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 behind the Iron Curtain. When the formation of a pontifical commission called Iustitia et Pax was announced to oversee the implementation 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 assure that Swieżawski would “be able to travel freely and to participate continuously in all of the work of the Commission.”182

Who Is Karol Wojtyła? Although Swieżawski’s activities at the Council have thus far received 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 cardinal, and young for a pope. When Vatican II began, Wojtyła was one of the Council’s most junior bishops. Nonetheless, having completed his doctoral dissertation 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. Cashman, “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 (Archives of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin), Lublin: File 311A.

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clearly felt at home at the Council.183 He could communicate easily 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 seating 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 opposed to the 1910s or 1920s (like Wyszyński). As Jan Grootaers writes, “the young generation found itself at the back of the basilica, and there the applause began for the more ‘audacious’ proposals 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 highlighted the putative opposition between Wojtyła’s supposed “progressivism” 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 postconciliar terminology and ecclesiology and the centralism favored by Wyszyński and most of the remainder of the Polish episcopate. . . . 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 Polish 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. 186. Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 47.

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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 plenary 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 journalists ranked him behind only cardinals Bea and König as a driving force behind Nostra aetate, the Council’s declaration on nonChristian 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 Christian sense, rather than derived from liberalism or indifferentism.”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 katolicyzmu.” 192. Quoted in Skrzypczak, Karol Wojtyła na Soborze Watykańskim II, 312–13.

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meant taking responsibility for one’s choices, especially “in religious 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 commentaries 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 leadership, Wojtyła was both a personal friend and their episcopal protector. In the Council’s immediate aftermath, he took advantage of ZNAK’s work to bring to Poland as its guests Catholic luminaries like Yves Congar and August Vanistendael, asking those visitors to smuggle materials back to Western Europe on his behalf.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 organize 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,’ ” Tygodnik Powszechny 16, no. 46 (1962): 3; Wojtyła, “List pasterski ks. biskupa Wojtyły,” Tygodnik 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. 195. Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 47. 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.

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the nature of their involvement in the life of the Church. The capstone 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 debate: 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 Vatican at the Council’s outset, work in successive Council commissions 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: Polskie 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.

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traveled to meetings of the Pontifical Commission Iustitia et Pax, one could see the growing interest in Rome in the person of Cardinal Wojtyła. He was becoming papabilis.”200 It was this emerging reputation, alongside his active sponsorship 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 reputation 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 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.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 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.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

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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.”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 expellees expelled by an inter-Allied order of the victorious powers 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 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.”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.

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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.206 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.207 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 antiecclesiastical 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 Com206. Basil Kerski and Robert Żurek, “Orędzie biskupów polskich i odpowiedź niemieckiego episkopatu z 1965 roku: Geneza, kontekst historyczny oraz oddziaływanie,” in Basil Kerski, Tomasz Kycia, and Robert Żurek, “Przebaczamy i prosimy o przebaczenie”: 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.

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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 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.209 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.”210 State officials disrupted Catholic pilgrimages to Częstochowa, and one of the cornerstones 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.211 It is in this context that one must evaluate the Council’s consequences 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.

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alike, the Council constituted an unprecedented space of transnational 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.212 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.213 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.”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 February 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 debate 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.

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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?”215 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.216 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 Polishlanguage 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, 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 ratio215. “W setną rocznicę urodzin prymasa Stefana Wyszyńskiego.” 216. Mazurkiewicz, “Recepcja Soboru,” 28. 217. Quoted in Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 532.

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nale 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.”218 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.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 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 antiSemitic persecution.220 For the laity, these events became entangled with the Council’s legacy. 218. Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 5:175. 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-

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A bird’s-eye view shows that Vatican II fundamentally reshaped 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.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 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.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). 223. Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce, 250–55. 224. Giorgio La Pira to Władysław Gomułka, April 10, 1966, Archivio della Fon-

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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 cooperation 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 Mazowiecki 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 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 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 Warsaw 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.

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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.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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CONTRIBUTORS Ivo Banac is Bradford Durfee Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University. 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 modernity] (2013). James Ramon Felak is professor of history at the University of Washington. 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, Geschichte: 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 (Warsaw), 134, 156 Accomodata renovatio, 176, 194–95 Action Program, 107, 110 Aggiornamento, 1–3, 5, 16–25, 99–100, 116, 138–41, 170, 173–74. See also Dialogue Agreements with the Holy See: Hungary (1964), 23, 60–67, 168, 177; Yugoslavia (1966), 87–88 Alberigo, Giuseppe, 16, 52 Atheism, 154, 161 Athenagoras, 29–32 Auditors, conciliar, 19, 129, 171, 178–79, 182–84. See also Swieżawski, Stefan Babiuch, Jolanta, 15, 141, 153 Bauquet, Nicolas, 54, 60, 63 Bea, Augustin, 30–31, 42, 186 Benedict XVI, 72–73 Beran, Josef, 6, 104–6, 111, 132–33 Bokor, 23, 72–74 Borovoy, Vitaly, 31, 177 Brezanóczy, Pál, 64–65, 67–68 Bulányi, György, 72–74 Caritas (organization), 110, 120 Casanova, José, 2, 19n55, 139 Casaroli, Agostino, 6, 22, 46, 49, 65, 87, 111–12, 163, 169, 178, 196. See also Ostpolitik Catechism, Catholic, 93, 121 Catholic Herald, 65–66 Catholic socialism, 134, 146, 175 Catholic University of Lublin, 133–34, 182–84 Cenckiewicz, Sławomir, 5n11, 195 Censorship, 52, 70, 102, 113, 129–31, 180, 194

Christian Democracy, 164–66, 177–79, 196 Christian Social Association (ChSS), 159 “Church of Silence,” 4, 14–16, 21–22, 133, 136, 162 Church-State Accord, Polish (1950), 132, 136 Cold War, 4–5, 7–8, 11–15, 20, 22–25, 131, 177, 190, 193 Collegiality, 18, 99–100, 150 Communism: Catholic alternatives to, 141; Catholic reconciliation with, 122, 137–38, 150n100, 164–65, 175–77, 180; condemnation in Divini redemptoris, 11–12; Ecclesiam suam on, 21–22; Vatican II debates on, 21, 150–54 Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 100, 107–8, 110, 114–115 Conciliar schemata: Schema “on the Church,” 152, 155, 158; Schema XIII, 67, 151, 154, 178–79, 183, 188. See also Gaudium et spes; Lumen gentium Concordats, 12, 160, 165 Congar, Yves, 128, 142, 147, 171, 187–88 Containment, 14–15 Cousins, Norman, 34–35, 41–44 “Croatian Spring,” 23–24, 93–95 Crown of Saint Stephen, 48–49 Cuban Missile Crisis, 19, 23, 32–41, 46, 161. See also Nuclear conflict Cyril (saint), 117, 122 Czaczkowska, Ewa, 151–52 Czechoslovakia, 5, 7–9, 12–14, 17, 24– 25, 54, 56, 99–126, 129, 168. See also 1968 Decolonization, 19, 152 De-Stalinization, 138–40, 153

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Dialogue: and Aggiornamento, 1, 4, 15, 99–100; Catholic-Protestant, 118–119, 124; Christian-Marxist, 16, 107–8, 118–20, 124, 126, 176–77; Ecclesiam suam on, 22; Pacem in terris on, 21; Polish-German, 190–96; at Vatican II, 118–19, 123, 124 Diaspora church, 173–74 Dignitatis humanae. See Freedom of conscience Divini redemptoris. See Communism Dobrynin, Anatoly, 35, 42 Draganović, Krunoslav, 77, 89–90 Dubček, Alexander, 107, 123 Dziś i Jutro [Today and tomorrow], 135. See also PAX Eastern Orthodoxy, 2, 9, 29–32, 42–43, 105, 155–56, 177 Ecclesiam suam, 20–22. See also Dialogue Ecumenism, 1–2, 114, 116, 118–19, 121, 123, 126, 128n8, 155–56 Education, 103–4, 106, 108–10, 120–22 Émigrés: Croatian, 77–78; Polish, 136, 145–46, 153, 157, 165–66, 177 Eska, Juliusz, 172–77. See also Więź Federal Executive Council of Yugoslavia (SIV), 78–79 Francis (pope), 4, 198n228 Freedom of conscience, 73, 84, 87–88, 99, 105–6, 128, 150–52, 186–87 Galuška, Miroslav, 110, 112 Gaudium et spes, 20, 80, 100, 128, 151, 154, 178–79, 184, 187. See also Conciliar schemata Germany, 8–9, 13, 54, 120–21, 135, 189–192, 194, 196 Glas Koncila [Voice of the council], 23, 75, 82–84, 93, 97 Glas s Koncila. See Glas Koncila Gomułka, Władysław, 139, 142n52, 159–63, 168–69, 171, 191–92, 196–97 Grabska, Stanisława, 193–94 Great Novena, 141, 155, 158, 160, 190– 92. See also Mary, Virgin; Millennium

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of Polish Christendom; Wyszyński, Stefan Greek Catholicism, 9, 16, 109–12 Grootaers, Jan, 130, 149–50, 164–65, 178, 185 Hamvas, Endre, 61, 64, 66 Holy Office, 13–14, 135, 137, 148 Hrůza, Karl, 110, 112 Human Rights, 22, 48, 84, 107–8, 124, 125, 126, 196–97 Humanism: of Leszek Kołakowski, 139; of Stefan Swieżawski, 183; of Więź, 175–76 Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 57, 58 Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, 62, 64 Hungary, 5–8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 22–25, 50– 74, 129, 168, 177. See also Agreements with the Holy See; State Office of Confessional Affairs Hus, Jan, 102, 106, 121 Hussites, 102, 117–18, 121–22 Index of Banned Books, 55–56 “Indifferentism,” 186–87 Informations Catholiques Internationales, 146–47, 175. See also PAX “Integrism,” 173–77 Italy, 13, 15, 28, 41, 45, 63, 65, 77–78, 94, 134, 162, 169, 178 Izvestia [News], 27, 45 Jaroszewski, Tadeusz, 176–77 Jesus, 121, 123 John Paul II (pope, saint): auxiliary bishop of Kraków, 29, 130, 184; election to papacy, 6, 97, 181, 189; and human rights, 124–25; and ideas of Tomislav J. Šagi-Bunić, 96; legacy, 197–98, 128–29; on legacy of Vatican II, 7, 24–25; at Vatican II, 132, 184–89 John XXIII (pope, saint): 1, 19, 27–29, 31–32, 34–38, 41–46, 49, 54, 57, 62, 70, 78–79, 99, 103, 113, 122, 131, 139–40, 142, 153, 160–62, 170, 173, 177, 194 Johnson, Lyndon B., 35, 46–47

Kadlecová, Erika, 110, 112, 119 Kardelj, Edvard, 78, 86 Katolické Noviny [Catholic news], 110n19 Kennedy, John F., 1, 19, 27, 33–36, 38–44, 46–47, 65 Kent, Peter C., 13–15 Khrushchev, Nikita, 19, 26–29, 31–33, 35–36, 38–45, 85, 103n6, 168 Klepacz, Michał, 137, 141 Kołakowski, Leszek, 139–40, 171, 176. See also Humanism Kominek, Bolesław, 148–49, 191 Komonchak, Joseph, 16, 52 Krasicki, Ignacy, 145n60, 167–68, 180 Křesťanská Revue [Christian review], 118 Küng, Hans, 19–20 Kustić, Živko, 82–83, 92 La Croix [The cross], 146–47 Laity, 20, 99, 109, 113–14, 116–18, 125–26, 129, 165–70, 174, 178–79, 182–84, 192–97 La Pira, Giorgio, 196–97 Latvia, 12, 16 League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), 77, 85, 88–89, 96, 97 Lefebvre, Marcel, 127, 148–49 Lékái, Lászlo, 48–49 Lidové Noviny [People’s news], 107 Lithuania, 12, 16 Liturgy: in Latin, 117; reform of, 3n6, 23, 71, 99, 116–18, 126; in Slavonic, 117; vernacular, 2, 116–18, 126, 151–52, 193–95 Lubac, Henri de, 128, 171 Lumen gentium, 72, 152, 158. See also Conciliar schemata Luxmoore, Jonathan, 15, 141, 153 Maritain, Jacques, 171, 183 Marxism: Catholic collaboration with, 134; revisionist approach to, 138–40, 170–77; Vatican II debates on, 153–54 Mary, Virgin: Black Madonna, 141, 155; coronation as Queen of Poland, 155n86; Great Novena dedicated

to, 141, 189–90, 192; as Mother of the Church, 18, 150, 154–58; Polish devotion to, 141; Polish secret police campaign against, 156–57, 159. See also Great Novena; Millennium of Polish Christendom Masaryk, Tomáš G., 102, 122–24 Máté-Tóth, András, 52, 59 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 131, 173–89, 197. See also Więź Methodius (saint), 117, 122 Millennium of Polish Christendom, 141, 189–95. See also Great Novena; Mary, Virgin Mindszenty, József, 6, 29–48, 57–58, 61, 65, 132–33 Missals, 151, 193–95 “Modernity,” 2, 20, 139–41, 153, 170–71, 188 Montini, Giovanni Battista. See Paul VI Moravia, 101n3, 116–17, 125 Morlion, Felix, 34, 41 1965 Polish bishops’ letter to German bishops, 189–92 1968: in Czechoslovakia, 24, 100–101, 107–13, 115, 117–20, 126; in Poland, 139, 195. See also Normalization; Prague Spring Normalization: imposed on Czechoslovakia after 1968, 24, 101, 112, 117, 120–21, 125–26; in Vatican diplomacy, 131, 163–69, 196 Nostra aetate, 20, 186 Nuclear conflict, threat of, 131, 161. See also Cuban Missile Crisis “Open” Catholicism, 138, 170–79, 182, 186, 198. See also Eska, Juliusz; Więź Ostpolitik, Vatican, 6, 15, 22–23, 53–55, 60, 65, 103–4, 106–7, 109, 111–12, 162–63, 169, 193 Ottaviani, Alfredo, 30–31, 148, 153 Pacem in terris (encyclical), 19–21, 41, 45, 62. See also Dialogue Pacem in Terris (organization), 113, 117

INDEX  223

“Patriot” priests, 58, 76–77, 104–7, 110, 113–14, 134, 137 Paul VI (pope), 6, 21–22, 46–48, 65, 70, 79, 90–91, 94, 104, 108, 122, 147, 154, 157–58, 160–63, 181–84, 189–90. See also Ostpolitik PAX, 14, 134–35, 138, 145–47, 159, 167, 169n130, 175, 178. See also Dziś i Jutro Peace Movement of Catholic Clergy (MHKD), 14, 104, 109–10, 113–14 Periti, conciliar, 3, 19, 141n67, 171–72, 188 Pius XI (pope), 11–12 Pius XII (pope), 1, 4, 12–15, 21, 58, 63, 77, 135–36, 173, 182 Poggi, Luigi, 163, 169, 178. See also Ostpolitik Poland, 6–9, 12, 14, 17, 24–25, 57, 62, 127–98. See also 1968; State Office of Confessional Affairs Polish Christian Labor Party, 164–66, 177–79. See also Sieniewicz, Konrad Polish Radio, 145n60, 167–68, 180 Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), 138–39, 145, 159–160, 168, 183, 191–94 Pontifical College of Saint Jerome (Rome), 77–78, 89–90 Pontifical Commission Iustitia et Pax, 184, 188–89 Porter-Szűcs, Brian, 2, 6, 180, 185, 187 Prague Spring, 24, 100–101, 107–13, 115, 117–20, 126. See also 1968 Pravda [Truth], 27, 37–38, 40n28 Priest Movements for Peace. See “Patriot” priests “Progressive” Catholicism. See Catholic socialism Protestants: in Czech nation, 102, 123; in dialogue with Catholics, 118–19, 124; and Eucharist, 118; and liturgical language, 117–118; and Tomáš G. Masaryk, 102; at Vatican II, 30–31, 118; and White Mountain, 102, 117, 121 Rahner, Karl, 71, 171, 173 Ranković, Aleksandar, 86, 88–89

224  INDEX

Ratzinger, Joseph. See Benedict XVI “Recovered Territories.” See World War II Regnum Marianum, 23, 55n13, 72 Religious orders, 60, 102–3, 106, 108–11 Rerum novarum, 154, 170 Ressourcement, 99–100, 121 Romania, 8, 9, 12 Roncalli, Angelo. See John XXIII Samizdat, 121–23 Samorè, Antonio, 163, 169, 178. See also Ostpolitik Secret police, 5n11, 16, 18, 23, 54, 56, 59, 60–65, 77, 88–89, 131–34, 148, 150, 156–58, 178n163, 183–84, 195 Secretariat for Church Affairs (Czechoslovakia), 110, 119 Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, Vatican, 30–31 Secretaries, church (Czechoslovakia), 104, 108, 111 Seminaries: Litoměřice, 114–15, 119; Olomouc, 115–16; Prague-Jircháře, 119; underground, 122 Šeper, Franjo, 79–80, 84, 90 Show Trials, 6, 57, 76–77, 108, 132–33, 137. See also Beran, Josef; Mindszenty, József; Stepinac, Alojzije Shvoy, Lajos, 55–56, 61, 64 Sieniewicz, Konrad, 164, 178. See also Christian Democracy; Polish Christian Labor Party Skalický, Karel, 119, 122–23 Skrzypczak, Robert, 185–86 Slipyj, Josyf, 23, 32, 42–45, 132 Slovakia, 100, 125 Socialism: Church statements on, 11; Jerzy Zawieyski’s version of, 159–60; PAX’s version of, 134–35, 146; Vatican II debates on, 153–54; Więź’s version of, 174–78. See also Catholic socialism; “Open” Catholicism Spellman, Francis, 29–30, 37 Stalin, Joseph, 133, 135 Stalinism, 132–38 State Office of Confessional Affairs: in Hungary, 52, 56, 59, 62, 63, 68;

in Poland, 134, 138, 148, 162. See also Secretariat for Church Affairs (Czechoslovakia) Stehle, Hansjakob, 6, 15–16 Stepinac, Alojzije, 6, 12n33, 13, 76, 77, 83, 85n30, 132–33 Stomma, Stanisław, 138, 166–67, 193n212 Swieżawski, Stefan, 182–84, 186, 188– 89, 193. See also Auditors, conciliar; Humanism Šagi-Bunić, Tomislav J., 81–82, 92, 95–96 Tardini, Domenico, 55–56 Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), 37–38, 45, 65 38th International Eucharistic Congress (Bombay), 181–82 Tito, Josip Broz, 8, 10–11, 23, 85, 87–88, 94, 96 Togliatti, Palmiro, 28, 32 Tomášek, Josef, 104–5, 109, 110n19, 113, 117n39, 124–25 Turkey, 39–41 Turowicz, Jerzy, 149, 164, 166, 171, 178–81 Tygodnik Powszechny [Universal weekly], 128n8, 133, 138, 144, 164–72, 178–81, 185–87 Ukraine, 8, 16, 42–43, 56 Underground Church (Czechoslovakia), 121–22, 125 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 7, 9–12, 16, 23, 45, 52, 54, 57–58, 62, 105, 112 United Nations, 35, 37–38, 41 United States, 7, 27–49, 56–58, 165 Vanistendael, August, 178–79, 187 Vatican Radio, 122, 147 Velehrad Monastery, 113, 125 Vietnam War, 19, 46–47 Warsaw University, 134, 171 Wenger, Antoine, 146–47

White Mountain, Battle of, 102, 117, 121 Więź [Bond], 128n8, 138, 145, 167, 169n130, 170–77, 186, 193n212. See also Eska, Juliusz; Humanism; Mazowiecki, Tadeusz; “Open” Catholicism Wilde, Melissa J., 2n2, 17, 21, 26, 149–50 Willlebrands, Johannes, 30–31, 42, 45 Winowska, Maria, 146–47 Wojtyła, Karol. See John Paul II Work of Conciliar Renewal (DKO), 111, 113–115, 118 World War II, 4, 7–11, 28–29, 34, 43, 51, 76–77, 135, 146, 155, 159, 182, 185, 191; border adjustments after, 135–36, 162, 190–92 Woźniakowski, Jacek, 180–82 Wyszyński, Stefan: arrest and imprisonment, 132, 134–36; and de-Stalinization, 139–40, 153–54; Great Novena created by, 140–41; and Hungarian “catacomb hierarchy,” 57; Marian devotion, 155–58; and PAX, 146–47, 159; on postwar border adjustments, 136–37, 148, 189–92; and ZNAK movement, 159–61, 163– 69, 193–94; at Vatican II, 129, 143–158 Yugoslav Bishops’ Conference (BKJ), 77–78, 84 Yugoslavia, 7–8, 10–13, 17–18, 22–25, 75–98, 168. See also Agreements with the Holy See Zabłocki, Janusz, 1, 22n64, 131, 145, 155–56, 163–69, 172–81 Zawieyski, Jerzy, 142, 159–69, 177–78, 189. See also Socialism Znak (journal), 138, 166–67, 169n30, 172 ZNAK (movement): activist laity of, 138–39, 159–89; projects in West and East Germany, 190–96; transnational dialogues of, 153–71, 192–93 Znak (parliamentary circle), 138–39, 166–67 Zvěřina, Josef, 123–25

INDEX  225

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