INTRODUCTION 7Croat, Hungarian, or Slovak, Catholics behind the Iron Curtain
learned about the Second Vatican Council and responded to it ac-
cording to their particular circumstances. Their stories are as im-
portant a part of the conciliar legacy as the Polish story—which,
likewise, cannot be reduced to an account of the roots of Pope
John Paul II.
The goal of this volume is to begin the process of writing Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe back into the story of the Second Vatican
Council, its origins, and its consequences. Paul Blum was obvi-
ously not wrong to suggest that political repression constrained
the ability of Communist-controlled societies to respond to the
pastoral and ecclesiological revolution ushered in by Vatican II.
Yet it is important to disentangle traditional historiographical
suspicions, particularly among nonspecialists of Central and
Eastern Europe, of that region’s “backwardness” from the con-
tingent constraints imposed by Communist regimes after World
War II.16 The precise nature of those constraints is deserving of
extensive future research, as are the changes achieved in spite
of them.
This volume makes no pretense of being either exhaustive or
definitive. Rather, it assembles, for the first time in any language,
a broad overview of the place of four different Communist-run
countries—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia—
in the history of Vatican II. Framing these national stories is an
account of how the Cold War between the United States and the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics impacted the Council and its
reception. This book relies on both the history of ideas and the
Modernity in Eastern Europe,” in Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, ed.
Bruce R. Berglund and Brian Porter-Szűcs (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2010), 3.
- On the “modernity” or “backwardness” of Christianity in Central and East-
ern Europe, see, for example, Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction,” 17; Pedro Ramet, “Reli-
gion and Modernization,” in Cross and Commissar: The Politics of Religion in Eastern
Europe and the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 7–10.