174 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
pora.” For this reason, the Church’s core mission—“mission in the
spirit of an ‘open’ attitude”146—needed to be adapted to the task
of winning back Catholics who had left the Church. Eska wrote
that “an ‘open’ program of renewal in the Church demands both
a new form of mission and a new form for the Church’s existence
in the world.”
It was this “updated” mission that demanded the most of the
laity. Eska wrote, “For spokespersons of the ‘open’ attitude, the
matter of the laity is not simply one of the principal objective
processes denoting a turning point in the history of the modern
Church. It is also the touchstone and condition for reform, one of
its core problems.”147 As the ZNAK movement had demonstrated
for years, “the apostolate of a layman is not a special, separate
task, but rather an organic element of the Christian relationship
to the human being and to people.”148
In addition to engaging the laity, pastoral and ecclesiological
reform needed to struggle against the ideologization of Catholi-
cism—what Eska called the “Constantinian Church.”149 As Eska
wrote, “Catholicism is not an ideology.... The Church is neither an
institution nor an organization.” Although he named no names,
his book argues against both “progressivism” and “integrism” as
ways of framing Catholic mission in the world. In other words,
Catholicism was to be neither a political football in the hands of
Communists masking oppression with words of praise for aggior-
namento nor a mere instrument of fundamentalist mobilization.
Dialogue
Eska’s sensitivity to “ideological” Catholicism was the product of
years’ worth of conversations between the Więź staff and the Pol-
ish school of revisionist Marxism. Więź’s two principal cofound-
- Ibid., 105. 1 47. Ibid., 127.
- Ibid., 105. 1 49. Ibid., 115.