14 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
interventions against some of the most flagrant philo-Communist
initiatives—like Czechoslovakia’s Peace Movement of the Catholic
Clergy, Hungary’s Kereszt and Opus Pacis, and Poland’s PAX.39
Peter C. Kent has suggested that Pius XII’s Holy See fought
its own “lonely” cold war that “was not in sympathy with the
[American] policy of containment which separated Catholic Eu-
ropeans of the West from Catholic Europeans of the East.”40 As
Communist regimes decisively attacked their countries’ most
outspoken Church leaders, they created what Pius XII described
in his 1951 Christmas message as a “Church of Silence”: “Hands
tied, lips sealed, the Church of Silence responds to our invitation.
She shows with her gaze the still fresh graves of her martyrs, the
chains of her confessors... her silent holocaust.”41
While Kent is correct that the postwar pontiff ’s principal
Cold War weapon was the threat and practice of excommunica-
tion, Iron Curtain regimes’ ability to make rising stars even of
excommunicated activists meant that this practice really only
worked in countries not yet controlled by Communist parties. As
a result, Pius XII’s “lonely cold war,” like the larger Cold War, fo-
cused on containing the Communist threat to Central and East-
ern Europe rather than pursuing an offensive drive to reestablish
pastoral control behind the Iron Curtain. The Holy See was es-
duced in Yvon Tranvouez, Catholiques et communistes: La crise du progressisme chré-
tien, 1950–1955 (Paris: Cerf, 2000), 42.
- On Czechoslovakia, see Bogdan Kolar, “The Priestly Patriotic Associations
in the Eastern European Countries,” Bogoslovny vestnik 68, no. 2 (2008): 231–56. On
Hungary, see László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, 1945–1956: Between the United
States and the Soviet Union (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), - On Poland, see Mikołaj Stanisław Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red: Na-
tionalism, Catholicism, and Communism in 20th-Century Poland; The Politics of Bolesław
Piasecki (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Piotr H. Kosicki, “The Soviet Bloc’s
Answer to European Integration: Catholic Anti-Germanism and the Polish Proj-
ect of a ‘Catholic-Socialist’ International,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 1
(2015): 1–36. - Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 5.
- Quoted at Luxmoore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 103.