136 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
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 repatri-
ates, 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 pres-
ence in the territories was simply a transitional “occupation.” As
Peter C. Kent has suggested, “The Polish church had left the Vati-
can the choice of either disavowing the Polish hierarchy or ac-
cepting 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 interna-
- 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 apos-
tolic administrations currently in residence be recognized as permanent ordinary
dioceses.” - Pace, among others, Richard F. Staar, “The Church of Silence in Communist
Poland,” Catholic Historical Review 42, no. 3 (1956): 296–321. - Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 250.