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As a result of the Second World War and the subsequent expansion of communism, the Catholic community in Poland was divided into the faithful who remained in the country and those in political exile. Paradoxically, this division created the conditions for the emergence of global networks aimed at organizing aid to Catholics in Poland. A special case was the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), a unique institution of higher learning for the Catholic elite in Poland. Though its existence was threatened many times, thanks to external aid coming from Catholics in the West, and organized by Polish emigres together with e.g. the American hierarchy, the university survived and even gained international recognition.

The activity of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński as the Primate of Poland occurred in a period when Poland did not maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The period between 1948 and 1981 can be divided, from the perspective of the Warsaw authorities, into three subperiods: no relations and no talks (informal and official), 1948–1965; negotiations, 1965–1974; and working contacts, 1974–1981. The years 1964–1978 were also the period of the apogee of the Vatican's Ostpolitik carried out by Msgr Agostino Casaroli, under the auspices of Pope Paul VI. Cardinal Wyszyński was directly involved four times in talks on the arrangement of Polish–Vatican relations: in 1951, 1957, 1963, and 1965. With time, however, the primate gained more and more distance from the purposefulness of establishing relations between the Holy See and communist states. It should be added that from the beginning of the 1970s, the primate was quite critical of the effects of the Vatican's so-called Ostpolitik. At the end of the pontificate of Paul VI, an open conflict arose between the Secretariat of State and the Primate of Poland, which was resolved only with the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope.