170 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
“Open Catholicism”
But the story of the Polish laity’s engagement with Vatican II is
about much more than backroom negotiations. Ecumenism, mo-
dernity, the human person, the apostolate of the laity, Jews as
Christians’ “elder brothers in faith”—this was a vocabulary deep-
ly familiar to many of Poland’s top Communist-era lay activists
long before it was codified in the constitutions, declarations, and
decrees handed down at Vatican II.134 The ZNAK movement was
the product of several generations’ worth of transnational en-
gagement by Polish Catholic thinkers and activists, dating back
to Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum.135 When John XXIII
announced an ecumenical council in 1959, there were thus scores
of activists in Poland—some educated in the fin-de-siècle, others
in the interwar period, others under Stalinism—who felt that
their time had finally come.
Poland’s top lay activists had an impact both inside and out-
side Poland as mediators for the Council. On the one hand, with
their reporting, they shaped Vatican II’s reception back in Po-
land. On the other, they lived at the forefront of aggiornamento
in their encounters with lay counterparts throughout Europe
and the world.
These activists lived paradoxical lives as members of an of-
ficially sanctioned movement of autonomous associations oper-
ating within a Communist-run state. ZNAK activists considered
themselves obliged to pursue bona fide dialogue with Marxism,
both in academia and in power. As the leadership of the Warsaw
Catholic Intelligentsia Club reported to the government in 1965,
ZNAK saw its major contributions proceeding along two tracks,
- Jerzy Turowicz, “Antysemityzm,” Tygodnik Powszechny, March 17, 1957;
“Rozdroża i wartości,” Więź, no. 1 (1958): 5–13; Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Andrzej
Wielowieyski, “Otwarcie na Wschód,” Więź, no. 67 (1963): 7–13. - Kosicki, “Between Catechism and Revolution.”