194 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
the liturgy, that they pronounce liturgy in the vernacular, and
that small-group pastoral work be introduced into the Church in
Poland. Responding to the request that priests face their congre-
gations, the primate was to have said, “You want people to see the
priests’ faces? I often tell priests: your backs, people can stomach
seeing, but your faces?”215
The message behind that caustic remark is not that Wy-
szyński was blocking reform, but rather that he had his own par-
ticular understanding of John XXIII’s principle of renovatio acco-
modata.216 In Communist Poland, the primate saw a need for evo-
lutionary, rather than revolutionary, change. Undoubtedly, the
failure of rapprochement with German bishops and the Church’s
unexpected confrontation with the PZPR over the Millennium
left Wyszyński bitter. Yet the primate’s understanding of the
proper pace and methods of incorporating conciliar reforms into
Polish Catholicism needed to take into account the material and
political constraints that the Church was facing. Printing Polish-
language missals and breviaries required access to paper and the
approval of censors, both of which the PZPR denied the Church
in the wake of the struggle over the Millennium. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Wyszyński repeated the adage, “When there will
be paper, then there will be reform.”217
Rather than privilege some and disenfranchise others, Wy-
szyński preferred for reform to proceed in tandem with pressur-
ing the regime to loosen restrictions on Catholic life. Over the
course of the 1970s, Wyszyński put his full weight behind litur-
gical reform, but the process took time. This delay fueled argu-
ments by his critics, both within the Party nomenklatura and
within Poland’s secular anti-Communist opposition.
Yet Wyszyński already had clearly explained in 1964 the ratio-
- “W setną rocznicę urodzin prymasa Stefana Wyszyńskiego.”
- Mazurkiewicz, “Recepcja Soboru,” 28.
- Quoted in Czaczkowska, Kardynał Wyszyński, 2nd ed., 532.