The Vatican ‘Ostpolitik’ 1958–1978

This book, edited by András Fejérdy, is a collection of twelve papers presented on the occasion of a conference that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘first and most visible manifestation’ (p. 20) of the Vatican’s Ostpolitik: the partial agreement between the Holy See and the communist Hungarian People’s Republic, signed in Budapest on 15 September 1964. The volume approaches three major themes, is divided into three sections and aims to provide the reader with a better understanding of the main events and developments that characterised the Eastern policy of the Vatican, as well as with the essential tools for obtaining ‘new perspectives for a balanced assessment of it’ (p. 11). The first four essays examine both the Holy See’s Eastern policy and the Soviet bloc’s Vatican policy in an international context, from the perspective of continuity and discontinuity, and suggests, among other things, that ‘the political and intellectual dialogue between East and West [fits] into processes that started earlier’ than the 1960s (p. 13). More specifically, in his contribution discussing the cultural and social background of the Vatican’s Ostpolitik, Hungarian historian Pál Hatos points out that, ‘in many respects’ (p. 13), Ostpolitik can be read and truly comprehended ‘if it is viewed not exclusively as a series of events in diplomatic or Church history’ (p. 13), but rather as the result of cultural and intellectual changes that reshaped West European society and Christianity after the Second World War. Indeed, as Roberto Morozzo della Rocca argues, Ostpolitik ‘was a new policy because it answered to a new historical context, but it had roots in the Vatican diplomatic tradition’. In this sense, Vatican’s Eastern policy ‘was no improvisation’, in that it was ‘grafted in the usual policy of the Holy See, driven, by virtue of its universality and its responsibility to individual Churches, to dialogue with any country regardless of the ideology professed’ (p. 51)

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