152 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
freedom of conscience: “One can speak of the existence of reli-
gious freedom only if all people as individuals, persons, and citi-
zens grant to every human being the right to believe and profess
belief according to his own free will.”81
The Polish primate’s reflections on the liturgy and on freedom
of conscience have received no attention from any scholar other
than his biographer Ewa Czaczkowska. Instead, scholars tend to
see Wyszyński—and, by extension, the rest of the Polish episco-
pate as well—as having been preoccupied with only two issues.
These were, on one hand, the Church’s stance on communism
and, on the other, the Virgin Mary’s place in Catholic ecclesiology.
These were, in fact, priorities for the primate and his episcopal
colleagues, but the Poles did not have tunnel vision. For the bish-
ops from behind the Iron Curtain, effective pastoral reform by the
Council was necessary to give meaning to any action on either of
its priorities.
It was the schema on the Church—which eventually became
the Council’s dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium—in which the
Polish bishops placed the greatest hope for reminding all Catho-
lics of what it meant to be part of the faith. Following his return
to Warsaw from the Third Session in 1964, Wyszyński revealed in
a meeting with seminarians high hopes for lasting ecclesiological
reform: “Perhaps this will finally bring to an end the individual-
ized relationship to the Church that to this very day is so often
encountered among Catholics who approach the Church accord-
ing to their own notions of it.”82
This “individualization” of the Church, in the eyes of the Pol-
ish Council fathers, was neither an Iron Curtain singularity nor
the product of Communist propaganda. Rather, it was a cause for
concern across the entire, universal Church at a time of new chal-
lenges connected to decolonization and globalization.
- Quoted in Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 519.
- Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 5:165.