142 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
When the Second Vatican Council opened on October 11, 1962,
twenty-six of Poland’s sixty-four bishops were present.49 These
bishops had arrived four days earlier. John XXIII granted them an
audience the very next day.
There was no point at which all sixty-four Polish bishops were
at the Council. Only ten Polish bishops attended all of its ses-
sions.50 The Polish delegation amounted to only 2.6 percent of
the total number of bishops at the Council. Meanwhile, the num-
ber of speeches given by the Poles represented 2.9 percent of the
total.51
These numbers might suggest that the Polish delegation could
not have played a serious role at Vatican II. Yet eight of the ten
Polish bishops who attended all four sessions served the Coun-
cil in an official capacity, whether as committee members or—in
Wyszyński’s case—in the Council presidium. Entirely wide of the
mark was the 1964 judgment by leading Polish lay activist Jerzy
Zawieyski that the Polish bishops “play no role and do not count
here at all.”52 This marks a striking contrast, for example, with
Yves Congar’s belief in the significance of the Poles’ participation
in the Council. Writing in 1963, the great Dominican theologian
was genuinely in awe of the prelates who had come to Rome from
behind the Iron Curtain.53
- There has been some disagreement about the numbers—the result of con-
fusion as to if and how to count émigré bishops. This chapter follows the detailed,
bishop-by-bishop breakdown in Rutkowski, Polscy biskupi jako ojcowie Soboru Waty-
kańskiego II, 87. - Ibid., 283.
- Bejze, Kronika Soboru Watykańskiego II, 98–99.
- Jerzy Zawieyski was, in fact, parroting the opinion that he had heard from
PZPR general secretary Władysław Gomułka; Zawieyski, Dzienniki, vol. 2, Wybór z lat
1960–1969 (Warsaw: Ośrodek KARTA/IPN-KŚZpNP, 2012), 377. - Congar, My Journal of the Council, 367.