This volume is a collection of five original studies concerning both the impact of East Europeans on the Second Vatican Council and, primarily, the impact of the Council on the four countries concerned: Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. No such compilation has ever appeared. Readers of English now for the first time may read a synthesis of vernacular scholarship made possible by the fall of Communism and the partial opening of archives after 1990.

Soviet domination and the repression of Christian churches across the region invite the comparative analysis made possible by this collection. The introductory chapter by Piotr Kosicki and survey of East-West relations in the 1960s by Gerald P. Fogarty, SJ set the stage, showing the crucial role of the encyclicals Pacem in terris (1963) and Ecclesiam suam (1964) in furthering dialogue among the representatives of different political systems and world views.

The results were strikingly different for the four countries studied. The suppression of the Catholic Church after 1948 had been harshest in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and consequently the delegation of bishops representing them at the Council was relatively small. Árpád von Klimó’s study of Hungary stresses that the extensive penetration of its delegation by police informants minimized any autonomous contribution at the Council, though the ideas of the Council did reach Hungary despite the muzzled press and helped inspire the pacifist basic community movement of Father György Bulányi. The voice of the Czech and Slovak bishops at the Council was more daring than that of the Hungarians, though evidenced chiefly by émigré bishops rather than those who came to the Council from the home country.

The study of Czechoslovakia (more precisely of the Czech portion of the country, as the author excludes Slovakia because “it was a different world,” [101]) by James Ramon Felak ultimately demonstrates more similarity to that of Yugoslavia by Ivo Banac. The Croatian Spring and the Prague Spring opened the possibility of relatively free expression by intellectual and ecclesiastical representatives of the Croats and Czechs. The Croatian journal Glas s Koncila (Voice from the Council), later Glas Koncila (Voice of the Council), began appearing in 1962, and it became increasingly bold, as did the country's bishops at the Council. There was lively engagement of the press, parishes, and the laity with the ideas of the Council, as documented by Banac with new archival research and his consultation of the contemporary press. Marshal Tito's coup that ended the Croatian Spring in 1971 left the Catholic Church “the only free institution in the predominantly Catholic parts of Yugoslavia.” (98) Among the Czechs, the relaxation of political control made possible an outburst of ecumenical dialogue in the press, the re-legalization of the formerly suppressed Greek Catholic Church, and the brief (1968–1974) reopening of the Olomouc seminary. The state sought to instrumentalize reform within the church against the theologically conservative episcopate. In both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia the crackdown could not completely eliminate the legacy of the Council.

Piotr H. Kosicki's chapter on Poland is the longest (127–198) of the book, as indeed the mutual influence of Poles on the Council, and of the Council in Poland, far exceeded that of the other countries. Political evolution had granted a greater freedom of action for the Catholic Church in Poland. This was partly achieved by the wily leadership of Primate Wyszynski, but also due to the existence of the clergy and laity of movements that, unlike the peace priests of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were not primarily informants, but in part genuine reformers. While the neighboring countries each sent less than ten bishops to the Vatican Council, Poland sent sixty-one in all. Wyszynski and Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, were very active and influential in the Council, but not only they; Yves Congar would write that he “was genuinely in awe” of the Polish bishops (142). Lay journalists, both from Poland and the emigration, also played an important role at the Council and especially in its interpretation for the Church at home. The Primate was unsuccessful in his attempt to control his delegation or the dissemination of Council news by the independent weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. For all the recognized authority of Wyszynski, it was Wojtyła who became the effective spokesperson of the bishops at the Council and “worked the hardest of any bishop to give the fruits of Vatican II concrete form on Polish soil” (187). Ironically, Kosicki argues that “the immediate consequences of the Council were . . . overwhelmingly negative” for church-state relations due to discord between the Communist Party and the episcopate, and the episcopate and the laity (193).

An important finding is the diversity of the Council's impact in these countries. Of course there were parallels in the contest between the Communist Party, the police, and the episcopate for influence on the laity, the introduction of the vernacular liturgy, and the role of Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Croatian theologians who conveyed the ideas of the Council to their countrymen. There is surprisingly little in this volume on contacts between the nations, among the bishops, Catholic laity, and officialdom, to which the Council might presumably have given occasion. This would be a worthy area for future research.