VATICAN II AND POLAND 145In 1962, the primate recommended Rev. Szczepan Wesoły, the
pastor of the Polish émigré community in Rome, to head the Slav-
ic section of the press office of the Council Secretariat. Wesoły
thereafter produced a weekly bulletin, and on every weekday of
the First and Second sessions of the Council, Wesoły held a press
briefing in Polish on the news of the day from both the plenary
session and the various conciliar committees. The extraordinary
achievement of these briefings was to assemble in one room rep-
resentatives of the émigré press from London, Paris, and Rome;
of the official Communist press from Warsaw; and of a range of
Catholic publications operating legally on Polish territory (some
seen as regime puppets, others as “concessioned” but autono-
mous).60 It was only in late October 1964—more than a month
into the Third Session—that the word came down from the PZPR
leadership that Communist journalists were no longer to attend
the same briefings as émigrés. To avoid playing favorites, the epis-
copate canceled the briefings altogether.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, it was actually much easier
for Polish Catholic activists who had managed to get passports
to travel to Rome to obtain face-time with Wyszyński and other
bishops there than under normal circumstances in Poland. Ja-
nusz Zabłocki, an editor of the monthly Więź who covered three
Council sessions for the journal, enjoyed long, almost weekly one-
on-one meetings with the primate, usually over a meal: “I arrive
for another prearranged meeting with the Primate on via Pietro
Cavallini. He arranged for me to meet him on a Sunday, as that is
a day free of conciliar events, and conditions are best for a quiet
conversation of some depth.” 61
- The émigré titles included the Paris-based Narodowiec (Nationalist). The
key Communist correspondent, Ignacy Krasicki, represented Polish Radio, but his
reports also made it into, among others, the Communist daily Trybuna Ludu (The
People’s Tribune). PAX’s daily newspaper was called Słowo Powszechne (The Univer-
sal Word). On the press of Communist Poland, see Alina Słomkowska, Prasa w PRL:
Szkice historyczne (Warsaw: PWN, 1980). - Zabłocki, Dzienniki, 1:558.