VATICAN II AND POLAND 137tional 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, Wy-
szyński chose to interpret very liberally the Holy Office’s 1949 de-
cree threatening Catholics with excommunication for cooperation
with communism. The primate condemned patriot priests only
in 1953, following their open revolt against bishops (himself in-
cluded) persecuted by the state. Asked once how he justified con-
cluding 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 Stalin-
ism is, therefore, mixed. On the one hand, the bishops of Katowice
and Kielce and top figures within the Cracovian curia were tor-
tured and subjected to show trials, the country’s primate arrested
and kept under lock and key for three years.38 On the other, re-
signed to Poland’s overwhelmingly Catholic population and unable
to choose one consistent strategy of cooptation, postwar Commu-
nists never succeeded either in cutting the Catholic Church in Po-
land off from the Vatican or in alienating Poles from the Church.
For evidence one need look no further than Częstochowa on Au-
gust 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 prepara-
tion for the millennium of Polish Christendom.39 One month later,
Wyszyński had left custody, and by the end of the year the episco-
- Quoted in Peter Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, vol. 3, Czasy Prymasowskie,
1956–1961 (Warsaw: Książka Polska, 1994), 63. - Ewa K. Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński: Biografia, 2nd ed. (Kraków: Znak,
2013), 123. - Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce, 80.
- Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 244–51.