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