150 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
were more or less divided into two camps: a minority and a ma-
jor ity.” 75
Grootaers’s point applies not just to the Polish primate. Ag-
gregate voting results clearly demonstrate that the Polish bishops
who attended the Second Vatican Council fell into neither a “con-
servative” nor “progressive” camp. Nor, in fact, did they maintain
the voting discipline that Wyszyński had tried to introduce. The
Polish primate, for example, favored both the principle of collegi-
ality and Marian devotion, which was one of the declared priori-
ties of the Polish Council fathers. Yet the Polish bishops were not
unanimous in their October 1963 votes on collegiality: 12 percent
voted against the principle.
Even more striking is the division among Polish bishops in
the October 1964 vote to bestow on the Virgin Mary the title of
“Mother of the Church.” Namely, a full half of Polish Council fa-
thers voted “no.”76 Given the secrecy of the votes, there is no way
that Cardinal Wyszyński could have known the extent to which his
fellow Poles were breaking the discipline that he had imposed. If he
had known, he would have been devastated, and he may well have
changed the terms of participation in the Council’s final session.
Between Communism and Freedom of Conscience
The conciliar rumor mill, with some prompting from the Commu-
nist press and secret police, quickly came to identify Wyszyński
with the Coetus Internationalis Patrum.77 In reality, the pri-
- Grootaers, Actes et acteurs à Vatican II, 326.
- Because the bishops from Communist-run countries represented such a
small proportion of overall attendance at the Council, these tendencies become clear
only when one extracts those countries from the aggregate data. The author thanks
Melissa J. Wilde for the suggestion to examine the raw voting data that she has com-
piled from the Vatican Secret Archive. It is now available online: “Second Vatican
Council Votes,” Association of Religious Data Archives, http://www.thearda.com/
Archive/Files/Descriptions/VATICAN.asp; accessed January 1, 2014. - Wyszyński complained, “During the Council, I was always presented by the