Search Results (3)

The article answers the question of how the custom of religious singing was created in Kashubia and constitutes an integral part of the worship of the Church and local piety/religiosity until modern times. Nowadays, musical worship is manifested both in family and rural life (religious singing at home, May devotions, Rosary prayer services, vigil for the dead) as well as in ecclesial sphere (church services, Calvary celebrations, feasts, processions, and pilgrimages). It integrates local communities and simultaneously “broadens” their relationship with the sacred (God). It is important to present the process of selecting leaders of folk singing, as there is no institutional support in this matter such as music schools, organ courses or choirs. It can be assumed that, as was the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the family tradition plays a decisive role in leading and animating collective singing. The changes which are taking place in this respect now require further research and may be the result of the transformations in the field of folk religious singing in Kashubia, which are the consequence of the dynamic social transformation in this region. This study is based on ethnographic field research conducted by the author in 2016–2021 and the literature on the subject. Full article

Members of the Catholic Church express their faith in a variety of manners, in general with a focus on liturgical and popular forms of piety. This article provided construction and initial validation for a brief questionnaire to measure Catholic religious practices. The authors used Sample 1 (n = 219) for exploratory factor analysis and Sample 2 (n = 181) for confirmatory factor analysis and to test the validity of a new scale. A model with two factors with five items each provided a good fit. The Catholic Religious Practices Questionnaire (CRPQ) consists of two subscales: official religiosity and folk practices. Both exhibit positive though varying correlations with the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) and Multidimensional Prayer Inventory (MPI). The new questionnaire has been confirmed as a reliable and valid measure that takes into account the distinctive features of the Catholic religious tradition. Full article

In the article, we present Polish Catholicism as an example of folk religion. As a result of a complicated political history, the Catholic Church became not only the depositary of Christian faith and morality, but also the mainstay of Polish national identity, shaped during the partitions in opposition to Russian Orthodoxy and Prussian Protestantism. It was then that Polishness became a stereotypical synonym of Catholicism. The stereotype of a Pole—a Catholic was consolidated. In Poland, as a predominantly agricultural country, folk religiosity was shaped, appealing to the sphere of ideas and emotions of the rural population or of those of rural origin settled in urban centres. This form of piety was reinforced by Polish Romanticism with its folk preferences. Romanticism, although often inconsistent with Catholic dogmatics, took root in Catholic circles. Its legacy is the messianism present in the Polish collective consciousness, which is also dear to many Catholic thinkers and clergymen. Poland, tormented under partitions, plagued by numerous wars, national disasters, betrayals, and harm caused by neighbouring nations, became an allegory of Christ suffering on the cross. This suggestive image appealed to the mass imagination of Poles, and the Catholic Church became its transmitter. The contemporary face of the Catholic Church in Poland was formed in the times of so-called real socialism, when the Church and its hierarchy once again became defenders of traditional Polishness and Polish national identity, opposing atheisation and the construction of a new identity based on Soviet models. For over three decades, the leader of Polish Catholicism was Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland, who became a promoter of folk piety, including, in particular, the Marian cult. Through the massive mobilisation of Polish Catholics united by common religious practices, he successfully prevented the secularisation of Polish society that affected other communist states. That is why, forty years after his death, Wyszyński can be considered the architect of contemporary Polish Catholicism with its dominant ritual form of piety and a nationalist trait. Full article