16 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
tion of this “Eastern politics of the Vatican”: “defense of one’s
own interests through confrontation where coexistence is im-
possible, through compromises where they seem to be tolerable,
through cooperation where there are partners for it.”45
While it was difficult to dialogue with Communist puppets—
or outright agents of the secret police—among the bishops and
leading Catholic activists behind the Iron Curtain, theirs was
not the whole story. Although Communist regimes prevented
many Catholic leaders from attending the Second Vatican Coun-
cil, none of the countries discussed in this volume were walled
off from Vatican II. The situation was different within the Soviet
Union—notably, for Roman Catholics in Lithuania and Latvia or
Roman and Greek Catholics in western Ukraine and Belorussia.46
The fact remains, however, that residing behind the Iron
Curtain did not automatically consign Catholics to four decades
inhabiting a “Church of Silence.” John XXIII’s goal was to make
it easier for Christians in Communist countries to practice their
faith. As Stehle has put it, “The metaphysical significance of a
martyrdom did not replace priests and bishops for the faithful.”47
“Aggiornamento” behind the Iron Curtain
This book is not a history of the Second Vatican Council per se.
Rather, it attempts to engage the origins, substance, and conse-
quences of what Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak have
called the “spirit and dialectic” of Vatican II. As those scholars
- Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 5.
- See, for example, Christopher Lawrence Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics
of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2001), 384–446. On Lithuania, see V. Stanley Vardys, The Catholic Church, Dissent,
and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania (Boulder, Colo.: East European Quarterly, 1978).
On Ukraine, see Natalia Shlikhta, “Competing Concepts of ‘Reunification’ Behind
the Liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church,” in Christianity and Moder-
nity in Eastern Europe, Berglund and Porter-Szűcs, 159–90. - Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 6.