176 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
self-proclaimed “people’s republic.” When Mazowiecki spoke of
Poland as a “secular, pluralistic country,” he meant not confes-
sional pluralism — Poland was over 90 percent Catholic, follow-
ing the Holocaust, pogroms, and border shifts154 — but that he
was recognizing that Polish society included many unbelievers of
good will.
Mazowiecki’s 1963 talk in Belgium matters in this context
because, to a great extent, the Więź editor was relying on Eska.
The point about Poland changing into a “secular, pluralistic coun-
try,” for example, matched word for word what Eska had written
several years earlier.155 It was Eska’s ideas that served the Polish
laity in their dealings with bishops and Marxists alike. Like Pri-
mate Wyszyński, Eska believed that Church reforms needed to
proceed in Poland according to an “accomodata renovatio.”
While his bishop meant by this phrase to justify a slower pace
of reform, Eska in fact saw it as a call for radical “social dialogue
between Catholics and Marxists” of good faith.156 The best pos-
sible outcome would be not the defeat of state socialism by a
reforming Church, but rather Catholicism’s “contributing to the
entrenchment and development of humanistic, natural Christian
elements in the structure of socialist society.”157
The potential roadblocks on this path were legion. Among
Polish Marxists and Western European Catholics alike, ZNAK
encountered fears that open Catholicism was merely a ruse. As
Mazowiecki noted during a 1964 discussion of Eska’s book, the
challenge was to convince interlocutors of one’s good will, avoiding
“the mere appearance of reform, masking actual neo-integrism.”158
Leszek Kołakowski’s disciple Tadeusz Jaroszewski argued that
such “neo-integrism” boiled down to treating “openness as a
- Kosicki, “Masters in Their Own Home.”
- Eska, Kościół otwarty, 142. 1 56. Ibid., 143, 145.
- Ibid., 145.
- “Motywy, dążenia i braki postawy otwartej,” 23.