VATICAN II AND POLAND 197Gomułka did not heed La Pira’s advice, but four years later he
would be out of power, having employed heavy-handed physical
repression against students in 1968 and workers in 1970, as well
as promoting an anti-Semitic campaign.225 His successor, Edward
Gierek, tried to clear the air with church and society alike. Yet it
was the increasing involvement of the Polish laity in shaping an
international discourse of human rights and East-West coopera-
tion that spoke loudest.226
As Wyszyński began to implement conciliar reforms in the
1970s, Wojtyła became ever more prominent within the universal
Church. Like La Pira, the future John Paul II genuinely believed
that Poland had a historic role to play in facilitating world peace
and solidarity. This is the same message that he would bring to
Poland as pope in 1979. This message also guided Tadeusz Mazow-
iecki and other ZNAK activists in 1980 as they helped to found
the Solidarity trade-union movement.227
Despite the postconciliar false starts for Poland, then, in the
long view Vatican II mobilized the players and shaped the mes-
sages that would guide Poland and the Church to the collapse
of communism in 1989. Still, the dark notes sounded in episco-
pal statements in today’s Poland demonstrate that the “spirit
dazione Giorgio La Pira, Florence: Box 10/6inse2/40. On La Pira’s aspirations for
“bridging East and West,” see Marcello Coppetti and Franco Vaselli, Giorgio La Pira
aggente d’Iddio: Dal “rapporto segreto di Kruscev” al viaggio ad Hanoi (Milan: Feltrinelli,
1978).
- Eisler, “Polskie miesiące” czyli kryzys(y) w PRL (Warsaw: IPN-KŚZpNP, 2008),
28–49, 91–96. - See especially the French publication of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s November
1977 talk at a session that he organized on “Christians and Human Rights” at the War-
saw Catholic Intelligentsia Club: Mazowiecki, “Les chrétiens et les droits de l’homme,”
in Nous, chrétiens de Pologne, ed. Jean Offredo (Paris: Éditions Cana, 1979), 159–67;
Friszke, Oaza na Kopernika, 168–96. - See especially John Paul II, Laborem exercens, September 14, 1981, http://
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-iienc
14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html; accessed September 2, 2014; Józef Tischner,
The Spirit of Solidarity, trans. Marek B. Zaleski and Benjamin Fiore (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1984); Kubik, Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power, 129–82.