VATICAN II AND POLAND 153While the Polish Council fathers believed that the Council
needed to speak out on communism, there was some uncertainty
as to how far the Church should go. Archbishop Józef Gawlina—
a Polish émigré responsible for the whole Polish diaspora—had
worked for several years alongside Cardinal Ottaviani, the icon of
Catholic “traditionalism,” to prepare a draft declaration condemn-
ing communism. Although Wyszyński would on occasion side with
Ottaviani in the course of the Council, he in fact worked to torpe-
do that draft document. Fearing that a blanket condemnation of
communism could worsen the condition of the Church in Poland
and in the GDR, Wyszyński teamed up with Berlin’s Julius Cardi-
nal Döpfner to ensure that it never made it out of the Preparatory
Commission. When Ottaviani’s Coetus Internationalis Patrum cir-
culated a petition during the Second Session for a conciliar judg-
ment on Marxism, socialism, and communism, the Poles were not
among the two hundred signatories.
Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch have argued that
“John XXIII saw communism as an outgrowth of modernity with
its own roots and rationale—a ‘sign of the times’ that had to be
read and interpreted if it was to be countered by a prophetic wit-
ness.”83 It would be a stretch to attribute similar thinking to Car-
dinal Wyszyński: he himself had been a prisoner of a Communist
regime, and he was acutely aware of persecutions faced by the
Church in Communist Poland. Despite the hope that accompanied
de-Stalinization, the party-state was turning against the Church
once again just as the Council was opening. The latest sign had
been the banning of religious education in Communist Poland.84
And yet, the Polish primate still felt caught between the ev-
eryday exigencies of pastorship and the moral imperatives of
high politics. Wyszyński resisted the impulse to push his fellow
bishops toward wholesale public anti-communism for the same
- Luxmoore and Babiuch, Vatican and the Red Flag, 125.
- Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce, 147–63.