190 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
The May 3 event was to be the culmination of the Great Nove-
na. This was the focal point of Wyszyński’s pastoral and political
program. For one day, Poland was to be the center of attention
for the global Catholic Church. Poland’s Marian devotion would
take center stage, with Pope Paul VI journeying to Częstochowa
to celebrate Mass before the icon of the Black Madonna at the
historic Jasna Góra Monastery. In the end, however, the Polish
authorities would deny the pope’s visa request, preventing him
from making his planned pilgrimage to Poland.
On November 18, 1965, the Polish Council fathers sent a pas-
toral letter to their German counterparts. Its most important
sentence was, “We grant forgiveness as well as ask for it.”203 The
letter contained a long and intricate historical narrative in which
the Poles attempted to recapitulate, from their own perspective,
the history of wrongs done to their nation by Germans, before
saying, “we well understand that the Polish western border on
the Oder and Neisse Rivers is, for Germany, an extremely bitter
fruit of the last war of mass extinction. Part of the bitterness is
caused by the sufferings of millions of German refugees and ex-
pellees expelled by an inter-Allied order of the victorious pow-
ers at Potsdam in 1945.”204 Instead of reopening old wounds, the
Poles proposed reconciliation: “despite everything, despite this
situation that is almost hopelessly burdened with the past, we
call on you, highly esteemed Brothers, to come out and away
from precisely that situation. Let us try to forget: no more po-
lemics, no more Cold War, but rather the beginning of a dialogue,
such as that which the Council and Pope Paul VI are seeking to
foster everywhere.”205
and the Bishops’ Letter of 1965,” East European Politics and Societies 23, no. 2 (2009):
213–43.
- “Polish Bishops’ Appeal to Their German Colleagues,” November 18, 1965,
in German-Polish Dialogue: Letters of the Polish and German Bishops and International
Statements (New York: Edition Atlantic Forum, 1966), 7–19. - Ibid., 15. 205. Ibid., 16–17.