VATICAN II AND POLAND 141ence of what Wyszyński called the Great Novena. The latter rep-
resented a decade’s worth of preparations for the coming 1966
celebration of the millennium of Polish Christendom. It was this
“novena” that had been launched at Częstochowa in August 1956,
the primate’s throne empty, with Bishop Klepacz presiding.
The key to understanding how the Polish episcopate squared
the circle is Wyszyński’s declaration at the outset of the Great
Novena that Poles were “surrendering Poland into maternal ser-
vitude to the Virgin Mary.”46 Wyszyński’s campaign to mobilize
clergy and laity alike for a singularly Polish version of Marian de-
votion conditioned the country’s response to aggiornamento. In
the words of Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch, Wyszyński
“knew the Church must offer alternatives, rather than just attack-
ing communism.”47 In particular, the Polish bishops hoped that
peregrinations of the icon of the Black Madonna would boost the
Polish response rate to the surveys sent out worldwide by the
Holy See following the 1959 announcement of an impending ecu-
menical council. Parish priests were called to deliver to their bish-
ops answers to the question: “What does the Polish clergy expect
from the upcoming Council?” Even though answers could not be
anonymous, the final response rate was impressive.
The Polish bishops collectively projected the impression in the
years leading up to Vatican II that they sought a genuine fusion
of Polish piety with an enthusiastic embrace of modernity in the
universal Church. As the Polish episcopate declared in a Septem-
ber 1960 pastoral letter, “We firmly reject the accusation that we
are somehow ‘backward.’ We in no way wish for a return to the
bygone (and not always good) social forms of the middle ages. We
look calmly to the future.”48
- Noszczak, “Sacrum” czy “profanum”? Spór o istotę obchodów Milenium polskiego
(1949–1966) (Warsaw: Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie/IPN-KŚZpNP, 2002), 75–
112; Raina, Jasnogórskie Śluby Narodu Polskiego 1656, 1956, 1966 (Warsaw: Pax, 2006). - Luxmoore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 84.
- Quoted in Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 112.