Channeling Erasmus in Communist Poland: Leszek Kołakowski, Vatican II, and the Reinvention of "Counter-Reformation"

Abstract

Abstract: Polish intellectual historian Leszek Kołakowski proposed in the 1960s an innovative, now virtually forgotten, reimagining of a crucial concept in the history of Roman Catholicism: the idea of "Counter-Reformation." Kołakowski's lifelong affinity for early modern Europe's Catholic dissidents led him into dialogue in the era of Vatican II with Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the leader of a movement of young Polish reformers who styled themselves "Catholic socialists." Seeing them as the bedrock of a new Catholic Counter-Reformation, Kołakowski sketched the role he hoped Poland might play in reinventing not only Catholicism, but religious life in the modern world.