6 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
representative—and inaccurate—is the blanket assertion that
“inside these countries there was no possibility of taking part in
the changes in ecclesiology and society.”
Historiographically, the result has been a narrative leap from
the show trials of Iron Curtain bishops at the turn of the 1940s
and 1950s—most notably, of Yugoslav primate Alojzije Stepinac,
Czechoslovak primate Josef Beran, and Hungarian primate
József Cardinal Mindszenty —to the election of Karol Cardinal
Wojtyła to the papacy in 1978. Even Vatican Ostpolitik—one of
the bedrocks of Paul VI’s papacy, led by the man who would be-
come John Paul II’s secretary of state, Agostino Cardinal Casa-
roli—has only recently been rehabilitated as a subject of inquiry.
For too long, it was consigned to the historiographical dustbin,
despite path-breaking research in the late 1970s by German jour-
nalist Hansjakob Stehle.
It is little wonder, then, that—like the Catholic faithful of
Communist Poland in 197814—historians, too, tend to see the
election of John Paul II as something of a miraculous deus ex
machina rather than the logical outcome of processes in the works
for two decades by then. Brian Porter-Szűcs has importantly cau-
tioned against “turning actual Christians into the passive objects
of broad cultural processes and patterns, obscuring the ways in
which people built and sustained (and resisted and manipulated)
the very generalities that were said to define them.”15 Whether
“Cisi sprzymierzeńcy reform,” Christianitas, November 19, 2010, at http://christian-
itas.org/news/cenckiewicz-cisi-sprzymierzenscy-reform; accessed February 2, 2014.
- Paul Richard Blum, “The Catholic Church in Hungary: A Case of Remodern-
ization?” Religion, State and Society 27, no. 3–4 (1999): 315. - Hansjakob Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 1917–1979, trans. Sandra
Smith (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981); Roland Cerny-Werner, Vatikanische
Ostpolitik und die DDR (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2011). - As Polish philosopher Rev. Józef Tischner put it fifteen years later, “Every-
thing that came later was one great miracle”; Adam Michnik, Józef Tischner, and
Jacek Żakowski, Między Panem a Plebanem (Kraków: Znak, 1995), 281. - Brian Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction: Christianity, Christians, and the Story of