VATICAN II AND POLAND 183historian Étienne Gilson. At the same time, he also developed a
friendship with one of Vatican II’s most important forerunners,
Jacques Maritain, that would last more than forty years.177 He
was one of the few non-Marxist humanists in postwar Poland
who both maintained an international reputation and engaged in
substantial scholarly activity outside of Poland. Few other schol-
ars outside the PZPR were able to preserve what the Polish secu-
rity apparatus called “quite lively ties abroad” throughout the en-
tire Communist period.178
Although he attended only the final weeks of the Third Ses-
sion, Swieżawski made his mark one year later on a global scale.
There, he joined fellow auditors Jean Guitton and Ramon Sug-
ranyes de Franch on the preparatory commission for Schema XIII’s
subsection on culture. At the close of Vatican II, he shared with
Guitton and with his old friend Jacques Maritain the great honor
of personally receiving from Paul VI an appeal to “men and women
of science and culture.”179
Like his ZNAK colleagues in Rome covering the Council,
Swieżawski, too, mediated the event back to Poland. Yet the priv-
ileged access that, as an auditor, he enjoyed to conciliar debates
and documents meant that he was in a better position than any
Pole besides the bishops to assess the Council’s successes and
failures. By turns, Swieżawski assisted the Polish episcopate, rep-
resented the Polish laity, and acted autonomously of both. For
the Lublin professor, taking seriously the “signs of our times”
meant addressing what he perceived as a crisis in Catholic atti-
tudes toward philosophy.180
- Stefan Swieżawski, Wielki Przełom 1907–1945 (Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnic-
tw KUL, 1989), 104–7. - E. Mirowski, “Analiza materiałów operacyjnych dotyczących Stefana
Swieżawskiego,” February 21, 1964, 2, AIPN, BU 0192/168/1. - Paul VI, Second Vatican Council Closing Speech (December 8, 1965), http://
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6closin.htm; accessed September 2, 2014. - Georges (Jerzy) Kalinowski and Stefan Swieżawski, La philosophie à l’heure
du Concile (Paris: Société d’Éditions Internationales, 1965), 13.