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The situation in church-state relations that was inherited by Gierek in late 1970, therefore, was not wholly bleak, but needed to be imbued with additional good will and trust on both sides. There were early indications by the Gierek regime that several major symbolic gestures were being considered. An important sign was renewed speculation both in Warsaw and in Rome that Pope Paul VI would visit Poland, a papal trip that also was planned for 1966 but scuttled by the church-state crisis of that year. Moreover, new possibilities were raised in 1972 for the long-postponed visit to the United States by Cardinal Wyszynski. An invitation for such a visit was proferred to Wyszynski by John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia, when he visited Poland in October 1972. The notably warm welcome extended to Cardinal Krol by Polish officials as well as by the church reflected also the generally improved U.S.-Polish relations in the wake of President Nixon's visit to Poland on 31 May-1 June 1972.
Good will alone, however, would not have permitted the Gierek regime to seek a meaningful improvement in church-state relations were it not for a confluence of other events; the most important of these was the ratification by West Germany in 1972 of a treaty with Poland which it had signed 2 weeks before Gomulka's downfall in December 1970.
Throughout the postwar period, the Vatican had consistently adhered to the Western position that the permanency of Poland's postwar borders could be established only by a peace treaty. The attitude of the Holy See toward the ecclesiastical administration of the former German territories under Polish control (Figure 34) was a major irritant both to church-state relations in Poland and to the regime's relations with the Vatican. Both the regime and the Polish episcopate, in fact, had pressed the Vatican to "regularize" ecclesiastical administration in the former German territories in line with postwar territorial changes. In 1951, Cardinal Wyszynski, then an archbishop, persuaded the Vatican to appoint Polish bishops to the dioceses in these territories. The Polish regime of the period, however, spurned the papal nominees, and it was only in 1956 that they were permitted to assume their posts. The territories in question were subsequently administered by these "temporary" Polish bishops under Cardinal Wyszynski, but with only the de facto and not de jure Vatican recognition of diocesan boundaries corresponding to postwar political frontiers. Thereafter, the Vatican attempted to deal with the legal and emotional dilemma of its position, noting that church-state relations in Poland suffered because of this unresolved issue. In May 1967, Pope Paul VI took steps designed in part to withdraw this issue from contention by appointing the "temporary" bishops in these territories as apostolic administrators directly subordinate to the Holy See. This move, together with the simultaneous appointment of an additional Polish cardinal, the former archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla, tended to introduce new blood into the Polish hierarchy and to blur Cardinal Wyszynski's dominance of the episcopate. Wyszynski reportedly welcomed these moves as leading to diminished pressure from the regime; the latter, however, continued to maintain that the Vatican position on the issue of Poland's borders was essentially as unsatisfactory as before.
By early 1970, when negotiations on the West German-Polish treaty were underway, there were renewed hopes among Polish church sources that any form of West German recognition of Poland's western frontiers would ultimately affect the Vatican's position on this issue. In June 1971, the new Gierek regime took another major step toward the church—perhaps seeking to influence the Vatican's stand on the border issue in advance of West German ratification of the treaty—by granting the Polish church legal title to the former German church property in the territories gained by Poland after World War II. These properties were generally used by the church, but legally were part of all those former German properties accruing to the Polish state after World War II.
The Vatican was not swayed, however, and only following the treaty's ratification took the step, on 28 June 1972, of appointing the existing titular prelates, acting as apostolic administrators, to the status of bishops ordinary, and of reorganizing the diocesan administration in the former German territories to conform to the state frontiers. In general, the diocesan boundaries temporarily established after World War II in these territories remained intact. Three of the four dioceses in question—Opole, Wroclaw, and Warmia—retained their boundaries unchanged, while the fourth—Gorzow—was divided into three new dioceses—Gorzow, Szczecin-Kamien, and Koszalin-Kolobrzeg (Figure 34). From the Vatican point of view, however, four new dioceses were created: the three formed from the former diocese of Gorzow, plus the diocese of Opole which was the only newly created one among those temporarily established after World War II. The dioceses of Wroclaw and Warmia, by contrast, were created in the years 1000 and 1243, respectively. The elevation of the Archbishop of Wroclaw, Boleslaw Kominek, to Cardinal at the papal consistory in March 1973 seemed further to underscore
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