Kosicki / Caritas across the Iron Curtain?
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“seemed very disturbed” in the months following the German reply. He apparently took offense easily and lost the composure with which he generally carried himself in conversation.45 Wyszyn´ski later wrote to Julius Cardinal Döpfner, German primate at the time of the letter’s transmission by the Polish bishops, “the German Episcopate’s answer to our letter of reconciliation (of 1965) disenchanted not only Poles, but also public opinion worldwide.”46 The German response was particularly disheartening because it seemed to reverse recent progress in German Catholic receptivity to reconciliation with Poles. Döpfner had given a sermon in October 1960 as bishop of Berlin calling on Germans to make “sacrifices,” arguing that the “community of nations and states” was more important to the future than “the border question.”47 Döpfner and Wyszyn´ski had met and had productive conversations in Rome even before the convocation of the Second Vatican Council, at which they worked in the same Secretariat for Extraordinary Affairs of the Council. In 1963, the Polish and German Episcopates had jointly applied to the Vatican for the beatification of Maksymilian Kolbe, a Polish martyr who perished at Auschwitz. Given all of this apparent progress on both personal and ecclesiastical levels in the first half of the 1960s, Döpfner’s failure to spearhead a more enthusiastic reaction by the German bishops not only disappointed the Poles but in fact appeared to represent a retrogression.48 Kominek expressed his unhappiness with the German response much more directly than Wyszyn´ski. We should pay particular attention to the language of his public comment, for it makes a telling postscript to the discussion of forgiveness and caritas. In a January 1966 interview for German television, Kominek stated, “Forgiveness and apologies apply only to those ready to do penance, who in fact admit guilt. Where there is no confession of guilt, there is also no forgiveness.”49 Let us return for a moment to the asymmetry of forgiveness described by Ricoeur: in the Polish bishops’ letter, Kominek resolved that asymmetry, at once forgiving and asking for forgiveness, demonstrating caritas and doing penance. As he understood their subsequent response, however, the German bishops had done neither: for this reason, Kominek lost faith in the vision of Polish-German reconciliation that he had promulgated in the letter, based on forgiveness and forgetfulness in the chronos, rather than the kairos. In the interview, Kominek did not disavow the philosophical paradigm of reconciliation articulated in the letter, but he expressed a certain fatalism that Polish-German relations would henceforth be bound by the political rather than the ethical. Despite the best efforts of Catholic laity on both sides (and ecumenical efforts on the German side), the fatalism proved prescient.50 Indeed, the German press at times seemed more appreciative of the Polish bishops’ action than the German bishops had been. Die Welt acknowledged the Polish control of the western lands as “the factual reality, which we do not overlook,”51 and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung claimed that “the message of reconciliation can no more disappear from this world.”52 At the same time, however, elements of the Polish bishops’ historical narrative provoked offense. The very Die Welt piece that complement
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