VATICAN II AND POLAND 139tary, Władysław Gomułka, even suggested that the new move-
ment—known as ZNAK—run a handful of parliamentary candi-
dates in the January 1957 elections. All of these Catholic activists
won election, and the result was a small group of Catholic MPs in
the Sejm (parliament) of Communist Poland.41
By 1958, pressure from the Soviet Union and from other Pol-
ish Communists led to a retrenchment within the Polish United
Workers’ Party (PZPR, Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza—
Poland’s Communist party). Its leader, Gomułka—himself a for-
mer prisoner of Stalinism—turned against the Church once again.
Yet de-Stalinization had given the Church a firm footing in the
People’s Republic of Poland, and this would never go away. Politi-
cal repressions lasted until the collapse of communism in 1989,
but Wyszyński never again faced arrest. As José Casanova has
argued, the political choices and ecclesiological vision pursued by
Wyszyński following his 1956 release demonstrate that “Polish Ca-
tholicism had also been undergoing its own process of aggiorna-
mento.”42
And yet world-renowned Polish philosopher Leszek Koła-
kowski would have disagreed with this last statement. Though he
began as a young Marxist firebrand who helped to justify Stalin-
ism, Kołakowski soon became the clarion voice of de-Stalinization,
humanism, and revisionist Marxism. Criticism of political violence
by Gomułka’s security forces in 1968 would land Kołakowski a one-
way ticket out of Poland, from which he proceeded to a career at
the University of Chicago and Oxford. For Kołakowski, as for his
students, John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento within the Catholic
Church represented a modern reincarnation of an old danger, what
Kołakowski called a “new Counter-Reformation.”43 In both cases,
- Friszke, Koło posłów “Znak” w Sejmie PRL 1957–1976 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo
Sejmowe, 2002), 5–40. - Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 103.
- Leszek Kołakowski, Notatki o współczesnej kontrreformacji (Warsaw: Książka
i Wiedza, 1962).