INTRODUCTION 5ing witness to the Gospels under an openly anti-religious, Com-
munist regime—and John XXIII’s Church of aggiornamento.
In his ability to bridge East and West throughout the Cold
War, Wojtyła proved that the “Church of Silence” idea was inad-
equate to the task of capturing the historical reality of Roman
Catholicism behind the Iron Curtain. Each Communist country
had its own way of dealing with the Catholic Church, informed
by demographics, geography, and political tradition. Everywhere,
the Church was on the receiving end of political repression. In
Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Communist regimes had, for the
most part, succeeded by the mid-1960s in co-opting the Church.
And yet, even there, independent Catholic thought and activism
remained. Catholics continued to pray, to go to Mass, and even to
join associations—some regime-sponsored, some not. Notwith-
standing the very real state efforts to silence the Church behind
the Iron Curtain, Catholics remained active participants in the life
of the universal Church; they never became voiceless subalterns.
A substantial historiography has coalesced across national
and linguistic divides to document the Second Vatican Council.
Yet virtually no attention has been paid to the links between the
Council and the Catholic faithful who had found themselves liv-
ing behind an iron curtain by the end of the 1940s. In fact, his-
torians of the modern Roman Catholic Church—even, for the
most part, those based in Central and Eastern Europe—have
dismissed out of hand the possibility that Communist countries
played a role in the Council’s story or that the Council in turn
shaped the subsequent paths of those countries.11 Regrettably
Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of Eastern Europe (New York: Geoffrey Chapman,
1999), 103.
- The exceptions tend, on the other hand, to overdetermine the role of Com-
munist state actors in the story. A key example is Polish historian Sławomir Cenck-
iewicz’s insistence that reform-minded Catholics behind the Iron Curtain on the one
hand and Communist politicians and secret police on the other “complemented one
another in popularizing a singularly understood ‘conciliar thought’ ”; Cenckiewicz,