VATICAN II AND POLAND 187meant taking responsibility for one’s choices, especially “in reli-
gious matters.” This declaration came a mere two days after Polish
primate Wyszyński had warned Council fathers in plenary session
against “unwittingly furnishing totalitarian states with additional
ammunition in their fight against religion.”193
The future pope worked the hardest of any bishop to give
the fruits of Vatican II concrete form on Polish soil. During the
Council, he published a string of interviews, letters, and com-
mentaries in Tygodnik Powszechny, to whose staff he had once
belonged.194 As Brian Porter-Szűcs has noted, “back in the 1960s
and 1970s Wojtyła’s commitment to the ‘people of God’ helped
ensure that the Tygodnik Powszechny circle could elaborate their
views with the full support of their bishop.”195 To the ZNAK lead-
ership, Wojtyła was both a personal friend and their episcopal
protector. In the Council’s immediate aftermath, he took advan-
tage of ZNAK’s work to bring to Poland as its guests Catholic lu-
minaries like Yves Congar and August Vanistendael, asking those
visitors to smuggle materials back to Western Europe on his be-
half.196 Close cooperation between the Kraków archbishop and
the Polish laity assured serious Polish debate on Gaudium et spes
and the other key messages of Vatican II.
Wojtyła, in fact, became the only Polish Council father to or-
ganize diocesan synods on the Council’s teachings. Their purpose
was to give clergy and laity the opportunity to reflect together on
- Ibid., 94–95.
- Wojtyła, “List ks. biskupa Wojtyły do ‘Tygodnika Powszechnego,’ ” Tygod-
nik Powszechny 16, no. 46 (1962): 3; Wojtyła, “List pasterski ks. biskupa Wojtyły,” Ty-
godnik Powszechny 16, no. 47 (1962): 9; Wojtyła, “List pasterski z Soboru,” Tygodnik
Powszechny 18, no. 48 (1964): 1; Wojtyła, “Sobór od wewnątrz,” Tygodnik Powszechny
19, no. 16 (1965): 1, 3; Wojtyła, “Millennium a Sobór,” Tygodnik Powszechny 19, no. 18
(1965): 1–2. - Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland, 47.
- On Congar’s 1966 visit to Poland, see the correspondence in Archives de la
Province Dominicaine de France, Paris: Collection V-832 (Yves Congar papers), box
300.24.33.