VATICAN II AND POLAND 171both international and national. Its activists were happy to be
“bringing much into the common good of the laity in the inter-
national arena,” while also intending “to serve and actually serv-
ing People’s Poland.”136 While Jerzy Zawieyski, Jerzy Turowicz,
and other movement elders met with Gomułka and other high-
ranking functionaries and party officials, the movement’s Young
Turks—assembled in the Warsaw-based monthly Więź, founded
in 1958—set up regular, structured debates with the students
of Warsaw University professors Leszek Kołakowski and Adam
Schaff, the leading lights of revisionist Marxism.137
The common ground forged by the ZNAK movement in both
its national and transnational dialogues on how the modern
Catholic layman should best serve the causes of social justice and
world solidarity gave rise to good conversations, deep friendship,
and—most importantly—an ideology that the Poles described as
“open Catholicism” (katolicyzm otwarty). Inspired by a range of
Catholic theologians and philosophers who later served as periti
or auditors at Vatican II—including Yves Congar, Henri de Lu-
bac, Jacques Maritain, and Karl Rahner—the entire movement
embraced the idiom of “open Catholicism” to describe its own
philosophy of engagement in the world. As the Warsaw Catholic
Intelligentsia Club’s leadership put it, “The attitude represented
by the Club should be called an ‘open attitude,’ for it is open to all
that is good and true and accepting of the principles of exchange
of cultural goods between believers and non-believers.”138
The “open Catholicism” of ZNAK preceded Vatican II, but it
became the single most important lens shaping Poland’s recep-
- “Sprawozdanie z działalności Klubu Inteligencji Katolickiej w Warszawie za
okres od 1.I.-31.XII.1965r.,” 9, AIPN, BU 0712/31. - These dialogues yielded, among others, Tadeusz Maciej Jaroszewski,
Nauka społeczna Kościoła a socjalizm (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1960); Tadeusz
Mrówczyński, Personalizm Maritaina i współczesna myśl katolicka (Warsaw: Książka
i Wiedza, 1964). - “Sprawozdanie z działalności Klubu, 1.I-31.XII.1965r.,” 6.