VATICAN II AND POLAND 185clearly felt at home at the Council.183 He could communicate eas-
ily with other delegations, and he already had extensive contacts
among even the more theologically progressive circles in France,
Belgium, and the Netherlands from time spent traveling around
those countries in the 1940s.184
Wojtyła’s junior status lent itself to easy contact with other
national delegations. As a young bishop, he was seated in close
physical proximity with the junior members of other national
episcopates from around the world. The spatial geography of seat-
ing within St. Peter’s Basilica placed Wojtyła in the back rows,
alongside others who had entered adulthood on the eve of World
War II and were mostly a product of the 1930s and 1940s—as op-
posed to the 1910s or 1920s (like Wyszyński). As Jan Grootaers
writes, “the young generation found itself at the back of the ba-
silica, and there the applause began for the more ‘audacious’ pro-
posals that would gradually engulf the whole assembly.”185
Particularly since Wojtyła’s elevation to the papacy, a notable
strain within the historiography of modern Poland has highlight-
ed the putative opposition between Wojtyła’s supposed “pro-
gressivism” and Wyszyński’s supposed “conservatism.” Yet, as
Brian Porter-Szűcs points out, “Wojtyła’s poetic, often mystical
language allowed him to finesse the tensions between the postc-
onciliar terminology and ecclesiology and the centralism favored
by Wyszyński and most of the remainder of the Polish episco-
pate.... At the same time, he would not abide any weakening of
his authority as bishop, and he fully accepted Wyszyński’s call for
unity and obedience in the face of the communist threat.”186
Wojtyła was no upstart. In fact, he delivered many of the Pol-
ish conciliar delegation’s most prominent speeches. As Robert
- Wojtyła, Faith According to St. John of the Cross, trans. Jordan Aumann (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981). - Wojtyła, “Mission de France,” Tygodnik Powszechny, March 6, 1949.
- Grootaers, Actes et Acteurs à Vatican II, 94.
- Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 47.