VATICAN II AND POLAND 135after the arrest of Primate Wyszyński, that the Catholic Church
had never fared better in Poland than it did in the early 1950s.30
This strategy relied on its cross–Iron Curtain partners’ unswerv-
ing faith that state socialism better served the goals of Catholic
social teaching than any other political order ever could. With
the condemnation of PAX’s weekly journal Dziś i Jutro ( Tod ay
and tomorrow) by the Holy Office in June 1955, many—though
not all—of its Western European partners began to call this as-
sumption into question. Yet PAX’s emissaries were sufficiently
well-read and outspoken, its influence sufficiently extensive, that
well into the 1960s it would continue to shape the reception of
Polish Catholicism in the wider world, including at the Second
Vatican Council.
The one area in which postwar state policy succeeded in set-
ting the Church in Poland at loggerheads with the Holy See con-
cerned postwar Poland’s new borders. Following Stalin’s seizure on
behalf of the USSR of the eastern third of interwar Polish territory
(roughly demarcated by the old Curzon Line), the Allies assembled
at Potsdam in August and September 1945 granted Poland occupa-
tion rights to Pomerania, Silesia, and the Baltic corridor, all held
by Germany before World War II.31 Pope Pius XII refused to rec-
ognize these border transfers, and—though the Holy See granted
the Polish episcopate in 1951 the right to nominate “temporary”
apostolic administrators—the Vatican held into the 1970s that the
relevant dioceses belonged to German bishops.32
- Kosicki, “Soviet Bloc’s Answer to European Integration,” 1–36.
- On these border changes, see, for example, Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruc-
tion of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2003), 73–89, 154–201; Hugo Service, Germans to Poles: Com-
munism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013). - Jan Krucina, ed., Kościół na Ziemiach Zachodnich (Wrocław: Wrocławska
Księgarnia Archidiecezjalna, 1971); Andrzej Ranke, Stosunki polsko-niemieckie w pol-
skiej publicystyce katolickiej w latach 1945–1989 (Toruń: Europejskie Centrum Eduka-
cyjne, 2004).