VATICAN II AND POLAND 151mate’s position was far more complex. As his biographer Ewa
Czaczkowska has put it, “the views presented by the primate at
the Council ranged from conservatism to liberalism (with respect
to the matter of freedom of conscience), depending on the mat-
ter at hand.”78
The issue of the vernacular liturgy is a case in point. After
Vatican II, Wyszyński gained the reputation of opposing missals
and Mass in Polish. And yet, six years earlier, the Polish primate
had listed the vernacular liturgy among his greatest hopes for
the coming council. In 1959, Wyszyński wrote, “I believe that the
words of prayer and acclamation used in the ministry of the sac-
raments should be spoken in the vernacular so that the faithful
sharing in the sacrament can participate more actively and ben-
efit more fully from its fruits.”79 And yet, once in Council, he re-
fused, for example, to support a vernacular breviary, fearing that
“clergy of the Latin rite might lose the ability to use the Latin
language, that mighty bond of unity.”80
Wyszyński also had a very particular understanding of the
link between ecclesiological and pastoral reform. The primate en-
dorsed the famed Schema XIII that ultimately became the 1965
pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes. Yet he did so with a mea-
sure of concern, shared in plenary session with the other Coun-
cil fathers, that pastoral reform would only work if the Council
first succeeded in renewing Catholics’ sense of membership in a
universal Church. Similar concerns defined Wyszyński’s take on
press as the retrograde primate of a developmentally impaired episcopate”; quoted
in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, vol. 5, Czasy prymasowskie 1964–1965 (Warsaw: von
Borowiecky, 2001), 260.
- Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 499.
- Wyszyński, Votum (September 23, 1959), in Acta et Documenta Concilio Oe-
cumenico Vatican II Apparando, Series I, Antepraeparatoria (Vatican City: Typis Poly-
glottis Vaticanis, 1960), 2: 673–79. - Wyszyński, “Wypowiedź w związku ze schematem de Sacra Liturgia” (No-
vember 9, 1962), in Dzieła zebrane, vol. 9, Sierpień-grudzień 1962 (Warsaw: Soli Deo,
2011), 296–300.