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