VATICAN II AND POLAND 149Lefebvre).72 The Polish primate explained that, having come from
behind the Iron Curtain with the responsibility to bear witness to
the unique challenges faced there by the Church, the Polish bish-
ops must remain a “special group” conducting “its own affairs in-
dependently according to its own sensibilities and experience.”73
Like other delegations from behind the Iron Curtain, the Pol-
ish bishops were accused of being unprepared for conciliar work.
As Polish Catholic journalist Jerzy Turowicz disclosed to his Flem-
ish counterpart Jan Grootaers, “The majority of Polish bishops
have an outdated and impoverished theological education. Only a
few of the young are very open, for example Msgr. Wojtyła.”74 Only
three bishops from Poland—Wyszyński, Wojtyła, and Bolesław
Kominek of Wrocław—could speak conversational Italian. For
many others, even Latin was a tall order. Yet this did not automati-
cally reduce the other Polish Council fathers to mere tourists.
Mainstream media coverage of the Council—from both sides
of the Iron Curtain—regularly presented Wyszyński as the ring-
leader of a band of doctrinal conservatives. Statistical data gath-
ered by Melissa Wilde on the Polish bishops’ voting patterns at
the Council complicate this picture, however. Even though Wilde
posits clear divisions between “progressives” and “conservatives”
among the vast majority of Council fathers, her data for bishops
from behind the Iron Curtain suggests that their alignments were
not so clear. As Jan Grootaers—who covered the Council as a jour-
nalist before becoming one of its historians—suggests, “Examin-
ing the participation of Cardinal Wyszyński in Vatican II provides
grounds for the dismissal of one of the most lasting stereotypes of
the history of the Council, according to which the Council Fathers
- On these networks, see Wilde, “How Culture Mattered at Vatican II.”
- Quoted in Raina, Kardynał Wyszyński, 4:35.
- “Diarium Jan Grootaers” (personal diary, as yet unpublished), notebook 14
(version February 17, 2010), October 15, 1963, 1896. I thank Jan Grootaers for making
his diary available to me. It can now be found in the Archive J. Grootaers, Center for
the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.