VATICAN II AND POLAND 129sixteen documents produced by Vatican II were published in a
bilingual Polish-Latin edition in 1968, these texts were censored;
secret police insured that the volume would not reach a wide au-
dience. It was not until 1986 that the average Polish reader was
able to obtain the conciliar documents in his own language.9
Even the Polish presence at Vatican II has gone virtually un-
documented. Although brief mentions appear in various Eng-
lish-, French-, and Italian-language histories, only since the 2005
death of John Paul II have a small handful of published primary
sources (diaries, correspondence, speeches) appeared in Polish.
The most important of these is a collection of the future pon-
tiff ’s speeches and working documents for the Council, pub-
lished in a single volume alongside a monograph-length account
of Wojtyła’s participation in the Council.10 A similar volume has
recently appeared documenting the conciliar engagement of Po-
land’s longtime Communist-era head bishop (1948–81), Stefan
Cardinal Wyszyński.11
Unlike the Hungarian or Czechoslovak presence at the Coun-
cil, the Polish presence was substantial: twenty-six bishops during
the First Session, sixty-one in total over the course of the Council’s
four sessions—as well as a lay auditor and close to a dozen jour-
nalists. Communist Poland was, in demographic terms, an over-
whelmingly Catholic country, more confessionally homogeneous
than at any other time in modern Polish history.12 Yet demograph-
ary 1964); “The Decisive Phase of the Council” (October 1964); “The Vocation and
Liberty of the Laity” (March 1965); and “The New Consciousness of the Church”
(September 1965).
- Julian Groblicki and Eugeniusz Florkowski, eds., Sobór Watykański II: Konsty-
tucje, dekrety, deklaracje; Tekst łacińsko-polski (Poznań: Pallottinum, 1968). - Robert Skrzypczak, Karol Wojtyła na Soborze Watykańskim II: Zbiór wystąpień
(Warsaw: Centrum Myśli Jana Pawła II, 2011). - Stefan Wyszyński, Stefan Kardynał Wyszyński Prymas Polski, Ojciec Soboru
Watykańskiego II 1962–1965: Wybór dokumentów, ed. Stanisław Wilk and Anna Wójcik
(Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2013). - On the implications for Catholic life of postwar Poland’s relative confessional