Paul VI's Vatican Ostpolitik — Opening to Communist States
The Vatican spent the 1960s and 1970s negotiating with the communist governments of eastern Europe instead of denouncing them. The policy was a reversal. Pius XII had excommunicated communists in 1949 and treated the imprisoned bishops of Hungary and Czechoslovakia as martyrs of a confrontation, and the church in the bloc was left with no episcopal appointments and no legal existence. John XXIII opened the change with contacts in 1962 and the encyclical Pacem in Terris in 1963, which distinguished between false philosophical teachings and the historical movements that carry them, and thereby made negotiation theologically possible. Paul VI and his diplomat Agostino Casaroli made it a system. The argument for it was pastoral rather than political: without agreements there would be no bishops, no seminaries and no sacraments, and a church that ceased to function would be of no use to anyone. Agreements were reached with Hungary in 1964, and Cardinal Mindszenty — who had spent fifteen years in the American embassy in Budapest — was persuaded to leave in 1971 and removed from his see in 1974, which he regarded as a betrayal and which many Catholics did too. The criticism was that the church legitimised regimes in exchange for appointments they controlled anyway, and that its own most courageous clergy were sacrificed to the arrangement. John Paul II changed the approach again in 1978 by supporting the opposition openly, which was possible partly because the diplomatic channels existed. Casaroli's own defence of the policy was that he had not been negotiating about ideas but about the possibility of ordaining priests, and that a church without bishops has nothing to bargain with later. He became Secretary of State under the pope who took the opposite approach.
- Year: 1967 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
