146 PIOTR H. KOSICKI
The final means by which the Polish bishops attempted to
steer the reception of Vatican II involved networking with Coun-
cil fathers and Catholic activists from other countries. Émigré in-
termediaries frequently facilitated these contacts. For example,
Maria Winowska, an interwar Polish lay activist who had fought
in the French Resistance during World War II and remained in
France thereafter, served as Primate Wyszyński’s eyes and ears
throughout Western Europe.62 Winowska wrote two books in
French that stridently condemned the Polish Communist regime
for throttling religious life in Poland; the second of these ap-
peared in 1963, during the Second Session.63 Several months later,
Winowska arranged an interview between Wyszyński and An-
toine Wenger, AA, editor-in-chief of France’s highest-circulation
Catholic paper, the daily La Croix. Its title, “France: Our Older Sis-
ter,” made clear the international relevance of Polish Catholicism
in the time of the ecumenical council.64
When, in 1963, Primate Wyszyński concluded that the philo-
Communist Catholics of PAX had begun using their journalists in
Rome to discredit Wyszyński as a “retrograde conservative,” he
sent Winowska on the attack. She had published a book-length
exposé in 1956 denouncing PAX’s “Catholic socialism,” and she
was only too happy to bring the organization’s sins back into
the public eye. The French-language Catholic bulletin Informa-
tions Catholiques Internationales, which had taken PAX seriously
as a Catholic association for years, got caught in the crosshairs.65
- Krystian Gawroń, “Maria Winowska, grand apôtre laïque du XXe siècle,”
Homme Nouveau (June 6, 1993). - Claude Naurois [Maria Winowska], Dieu contre Dieu? Drame des progressistes
dans une église du silence (Fribourg: Éditions Saint-Paul, 1956); Pierre Lenert [Maria
Winowska], L’église catholique en Pologne (Paris: Centurion, 1962). - Stefan Wyszyński and Antoine Wenger, “La France—notre soeur ainée,” La
Croix, November 24–25, 1963. - Informations Catholiques Internationales published an extensive review of
its earlier writings on the Catholic Church in Poland, documenting assiduously that
since 1957 it had never cited any PAX writings, though it had regularly reported on