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The article deals with the opening vision of the main part of Revelation (Rev 4–5). Together with 21:1–22:7 it frames the visionary narratives. The beginning and the ending visions give insight into heaven: the heavenly throne room in Rev 4–5 and the new heaven in Rev 22:1–22:7. The function, OT and liturgical background of the heavenly throne vision will be presented now.
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The main purpose of this article is to show the relationship between the liturgy and popular piety especially in the Middle Ages. Particularly at that time the unity of Paschal Mystery was broken up in the faithfull’s minds. Due to the religious and cultural changes in the medieval period the passion devotion was born as less theological form of experiencing the relationship with Jesus Christ focused more on its emotional aspect.
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One of the major mistakes in assessing the significance of medieval philosophy for the development of science is omitting all the historical context in which philosophy and sciences evolved. Meanwhile, medieval philosophy has made a synthesis of faith and intellect. It also distinguished philosophy from theology which gave the beginning of new branches of science. For this reason, medieval philosophers should be considered also as scholars in the contemporary sense of the word.
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It has been half of a century since the end of Vatican Council II (1962-1965) and it is often forgotten about the benevolence of the Council brought to the whole Church and made the life of faith and liturgy more active for believers. It was possibile by allowing to use national languages in the liturgy. The author of this article shows, on the example of Romany language, what is the role of a native language in faith and pastoral care for people, both clergy and laity, who speak this language and worship God in spirit and truth. The role of the mother tongue in faith and pastoral ministry should influence pastors in its usage for example in the ministry of the word, especially in performing the sacraments and liturgical celebrations. It is all to show to the modern man the truth, beauty, and joy experienced by the faith and makes it alive.
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Trzydzieści pięć lat temu, 12 grudnia 1981 r., kard. Józef Glemp powołał Prymasowską Radę Społeczną, tak określając jej zadania: „Rada studiuje aktualne zagadnienia życia społecznego i politycznego w świetle nauki Kościoła, analizując lokalne problemy społeczne, opiniuje o etyczności zachowań jednostek i grup społecznych oraz wskazuje — w porozumieniu z Prymasem Polski — kierunki służby Narodowi”. Rada miała pełnić rolę „swoistego pośrednika opinii między ludźmi świeckimi a hierarchami, także opinii politycznych”. Składała się ona prawie wyłącznie z ludzi świeckich, powoływanych osobiście przez prymasa.
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Wiara i radość są ze sobą ściśle powiązane. Pełnia radości zależy od stopnia wiary. Obserwacja współczesnego świata przynosi jednak niepokojące dane, według których wielu wierzących w Chrystusa zatrzymuje się na radości „chwilowej”, „płytkiej”, „niegodnej”, „grzesznej”. W konsekwencji traci związek z prowadzonym przez Kościół dziełem ewangelizacji. Będąc Bożym darem, wiara domaga się konkretnej odpowiedzi ze strony człowieka. Niniejsze studium jest przypomnieniem argumentacji teologicznej (szczególnie biblijnej i eklezjologicznej), według której głęboka wiara jest nieodzowna do dawania radosnego świadectwa o Chrystusie. Faith and joy are closely linked. The fullness of joy depends on the level of faith. However, today’s world observation brings alarming data, which show that many believers in Christ remain on a joy that is “temporary”, “shallow”, “unworthy” and “sinful”. As a consequence they lose connection with the evangelization promoted by the Church. Faith as God’s gift requires a specific answer from a man. This study is a recollection of a theological argumentation (especially biblical and ecclesiological), according to which deep faith is indispensable to give joyful testimony to Christ.
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In the study Suceviţa’s wheels of the sky I have undertaken a multidisciplinary investigation of some ornamental elements like the stars painted on the inside wall painting of “Învierea Domnului” Church of Suceviţa Monastery and which are quite common elements at first sight in the sacred art of the Romanian Middle Ages. These stars are spectacular due to their size, spontaneity and quantity of design in the „sky” and maybe, especially due to the structure and the painting manner chosen by painters. Suceviţa’s sky is unique among all the important churches and monasteries built by voivodes between the 15th and 17th century in the North of Moldova: the painters Ioan and Sofronie painted symmetrically lots of big stars with angles formed of six rays as thin from center to the end. By using a nail and a wire or a compass they sketched equally spaced circles on which they traced the angles of the stars. After the recent restoration we do not know for sure if the circles were also golden circles as the stars but with the lapse of time they have become noticeable and now we have the so-called wheels of the sky. “Suceviţa’s sky” uniqueness lies not only in the technical innovation regarding star representation but also in its ability to raise some questions: are the stars inscribed in the circle pure ornamental elements taken from somewhere or are they symbols within the context of the monumental assembly? Is their source of inspiration only technical or also ideological? Why take pains to sketch some circles which would become invisible? Could this have been sketched only to exercise a new technique ? If they sketched the circles only as a guide mark in order to paint the stars symmetrically, why did they leave the circles without covering them somehow? Were the painters so unexperienced or careless that they didn’t realise that in time the effects of such technique would become noticeable? Or maybe was this done on purpose? If that was the case, what was the source of inspiration and what is the message? We can answer these questions only by undertaking an investigation on this topic, especially as the whole painting of Suceviţa is the representation of an organic mix of tradition, influences and original creation. The multidisciplinary method allows me to gather information from certain fields like wall painting techniques and restoration, history of medieval art, history of Christian art, dogmatic and symbolic theology of byzantine tradition, ethnology, mythology and native traditions in order to create an overall perspective on this ornamental element of Suceviţa’s wall painting. This study may be further developed, and, thanks to the multidisciplinary approach of investigation, the issues raised here – regarding an apparently common ornamental element of wall painting of the Romanian Middle Age – may lead to an unexpected outlook on the medieval art research from a modern point of view.
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The Salesians took care of the Parish Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Maryand the Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows in Skrzatusz in the years 1952-2001. As a part of theirmission in the Church and the expectations raised by the dioceses and religious superiors theytried to promote the place of worship through the mass media. The study attempts to reflect onthe ground of the pastoral commitment of spiritual sons of St. John Bosco during their servicein the main sanctuary of the Virgin Mary in Koszalin-Kolobrzeg diocese.
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The history of the village of Klatwy, the seat of the Saints Cosmas and Damian Uniate parish, dates back to at least fifteenth century. In 1462, due to the incorporation of the Duchy of Belz into the Kingdom of Poland, the village of Klatwy became part of the Starosty of Tyszowce and as a royal village functioned until 1768 the first partition of Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, Klatwy was annexed by the Habsburg Empire, then it became part of the Duchy of Warsaw and following the joint resolutions of the Congress of Vienna it was given to Russia. Originally, the village of Klatwy belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church and after the incorporation of Red Ruthenia into the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland come under the influence of the Latin Church, therefore, the inhabitants of that region were of dual rites, both Eastern Orthodox (then Uniate) as well as Latin Church.
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In colloquial language as well as in the catechesis and religion lessons taught in schools, Confirmation is described as a sacrament of maturity. However, such description is incorrect as in the Polish Church Confirmation is received by young people of secondary school age. At such an age young people are still undergoing quite a dynamic development before achieving maturity in personality and life. For Confirmation to be considered as a sacrament of maturity it would need to possess some “magic” functions, for example, at the time of receiving Confirmation an immature young individual would immediately become a mature person. Therefore, Confirmation should be interpreted as a sacrament of coming of age, of emerging maturity. This is because in accordance with its definition, the purpose of Confirmation is to support the development, to stimulate Christian excellence. Consequently, it is necessary to move away from understanding Confirmation as a sacrament of maturity and to stress its developing functions in Christian education.
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The Khazars conversion to Judaism is reevaluated in the light of Byzantine and Islamic sources in this article, which was originally published in Harvard Ukranian Studies in 1978. Pritsak, who interrogates why the Khazars changed their religion and why this case do not so much attest in contemporary Judaic, Islamic and Byzantine sources, focuses on there stories of the term, and claimes that not missionaries but traders were influential in conversion.
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In the late 19th century, the larger cities in Galicia including the capital city of Lvov followed the example of large centres in the Habsburg empire where private, licensed funeral parlours were established, rendering comprehensive funerary services. In the first decade of the 19th century, the Lvov authorities decided to affect the prices of funerary services. One of the reasons was intention to offer standard funerary services to the city’s poor inhabitants. The magistrate’s goal was to have its own communal funeral parlour which would also handle funerals of the city’s less affluent inhabitants. In 1909, the “Concordia” Municipal Funeral Parlour started operations. In the Polish community in Lvov, the burial ritual was directly related to the Catholic tradition. In the last two decades of the 19th century, an obituary published in the press made its way to the burial ritual in Lvov in the form still used today i.e. information about the death and the date of the funeral, sometimes also about a memorial service, graphically marked with a thick black border with a cross. The funerary ritual which emerged at that time remained largely unchanged in the Second Polish Republic (1918– 1939). The situation changed after WWII when Lvov was under the Soviet and Ukrainian rule. While in this difficult time the Catholic church was persecuted, Poles living in Lvov made an effort to invite a priest to funerals of their next of kin.
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The current article aims to draw our attention to the fact that the Christian modern family from western countries is experiencing turning points, and these events bring their consequences not on the family only, but on the society as well. Family and society influence reciprocally, and within the current social and political framework, family has the power to do something to get rid of this crisis in which it has entered since the confusion between the symptoms of its decay and its authentic needs. Therefore, the power hunger, strong desire for welfare, redefinition of the family concept, child protection services and other similar issues represent the grievous side of the contemporary society and prove once again that the real needs of the family are from the spiritual zone among the most important ones are: faith in God, obeying and fulfilling the Bible, being involved in a local church’s life, understanding the marriage covenant, spiritual guidance, prayer and genuine worship before God. As soon as the family has a clear understanding of its real needs, it will be able to find fulfillment and happiness it deserves and dreams of, and society will be revitalized and consolidated by these families.
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This article focuses on the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary Turkish novel, based on Orhan Pamuk’s novelKar. The study aims to understand and explain paradigms of religion-politics relations in Kar, which approaches Turkey’s recent religious and political debates with a literary fiction, and reflects how religious and political cultures are reflected in Turkey in this frame. In the novel, a new development momentum after 1980, and with the right, conservative and Islamist circles that motivated politics more actively during the 1990s, the modernization that has not undergone in Turkey in a way, in fact, within the framework of the approach of the writer, the values of provincial representatives in Turkey conflicts have been brought forward. In a postmodern perspective, the Kar shared important photographs of religion and politics at this stage of the modernization struggle between Islamist-secular, Eastern-Western conflicts. Finally, religion in the novel was dominated ideologically by the instrumentalist of poverty and deprivation, rather than the character of preventing change according to its place. Politics is described as more Jacobean and secular, and also as provincial in relation to modernization there.Summary: There is no doubt that literature in the process of transition from the empire to the republic; the novel, especially as a Western product played an important role in the consciousness level of modern Turkey. This literary influence, rather than pursuing a certain line, took place within two centuries of adventurous journey, generally in harmony with the periodical historical, social and political conditions of the Turkish society. In this context, the Turkish novel was seen as a means of producing different powers and ideologies, especially at the points reached by the modernization in the last half century, while at the beginning adopting a legitimizing attitude to make politics more intense. But with it, as an important element of the cultural system, religion has always been one of the main themes in the journey of the novel.The article deals with the study of religion-politics relations in the contemporary Turkish novel in terms of sociology of religion. As an example of the study, Orhan Pamuk was chosen as the Snow novel, which made its first publication in 2002 and took the subject of tense religious-political relations matched by the 1980s conditions in Turkey with a broad cultural background. The aim of the study is to understand and explain the approach of the contemporary Turkish novel to religion-politics relations which always created a tension environment in Turkey. By making a historical comparison in this framework, the place of the Snow is glanced in the politics and religion perception of the Turkish novel, Orhan Pamuk was emphasized as a social personality and author, and then different levels of consciousness constructed by the social events, phenomena and processes in the novel have been evaluated from a phenomenological perspective.In this study, the Snow was regarded as a novel whose recent religion-politics relations of modern Turkey were treated with a postmodern allegory through different sets of meanings of religious and political cultures. In this regard, the Snow has presented itself as a literary product, as well as a text that sheds light on the fundamental problems of today’s religion-politics relations, which include different levels of consciousness about the religious, political and ideological knowledge of society. From here it can be said that the novel, in the context of literature-society relations, has brought wealth from the one side by organizing the events within the framework of the religious and political values of the society while offering postmodern points of view to these values from the other side. Finally, in the Snow, Pamuk realized a literary expression on the basis of society of religion and politics relations in Turkey. This expression, however, has not been independent of the religious and political accumulation that has been transferred from the Ottoman to the Republic, as well as the social personality that it shapes around an institutional baggage.Clearly, Pamuk has put a number of meanings in religion and politics and their relationship to each other, sometimes through different characters, sometimes through irony and criticism in the Snow. Around the postmodern paradigm, the Snow has presented different meanings worlds of religion and politics and the different images of these two old social institutions in a philosophical and sociological perspective. In other words, Pamuk deals with the novel’s event pattern, social typologies, social classes and their epistemological accumulations in their natural socioeconomic, cultural, religious and political environments. The Snow is fictionalized around an identity struggle shaped by the Islamist-modernist thriller. Here, although the individual-compromising aspects of religion and politics “Kemalist” and “Islamist” have emphasized the imperative, populist political understandings and the exclusionary and ideological aspects of religion. Thus, the novel inspired by the military intervention on February 28, 1997, shed light on the religious and political culture of Turkey, and finally attracted significant photographs of the society, which are reflected on the meaning networks of religious and political institutions.In the Snow, religion and politics are based on the meanings of concepts such as “coup”, “Kemalism”, “political Islam”, “turban”, “Islamist”, “secular”. In the novel, the social and political images put forward in the context of “coup” carried a number of symbols representing the last half-century of the Republic in the 2000s. As a matter of fact, the coup that was taken on the novel was made especially against the “religious” who organized and strengthened around the socioeconomic, cultural, political, religious and ethnic problems that occurred after 1980. On the other hand, in the novel “Kemalism” and his ideology have become another important theme in which politics is evaluated in Turkey. In this context, in general terms, the view of the “Kemalism” and the military bureaucracy on the public and its values have been presented in a Jacobean and elitist attitude, which restricts individual rights and freedoms to the state, with different categorical characteristics.In addition to stressing the characteristics of being a subclass of religion, compensating for the deprivations and preventing social change in place, in the novel emphasized the fact that, with its coup, it gained a political, ideological, populist and instrumental identity. As a matter of fact, girls with headscarves have been seen as a symbolic case by political Islamists and they have made this case a political material. In the Snow, religion and politics are regarded as social institutions that are separate and sometimes in conflict with each other, but also the mutual relations between the two institutions in the context of the interest relations of Sheikh Efendi and some bureaucrats. Thus, the novel also points to the old relations of religion-politics relations in Turkey that find their place on the symbolic plane.The Snow, which manifested itself as a literary attitude against all kinds of political and religious impositions have proposed for religion and politics a pluralistic view. This situation which can be regarded as new in terms of the Turkish novel has in fact provided new universes for the reader about religious and political culture. However, the proposals and perspectives are not shaped independently of their own dynamics of religious and political cultures.
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Mnogo godina prije velike reformacije koju je 1517. godine pokrenuo njemački svećenik Martin Luther, u Europi su se pojavljivala nastojanja i pokreti koji su imali za cilj Crkvu reformirati i pročistiti. Razlog takvim nastojanjima bili su istinski problemi koji su najčešće mučili vjernike na marginama društva. Svi ti pokreti i pojedinci imali su jedan zajednički cilj: pokušati unijeti duhovne i strukturalne promjene u Crkvu. Nažalost mnogi od njih su prenaglili i završili u herezi i apostaziji. Ono pozitivno što se mora priznati svim pokretima koji su prethodili reformaciji jest zanimanje za Sveto pismo i poruku koju je čovječanstvu donio Isus Krist.
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The apostolic activity of Redemptorists was resumed in the Polish territories in 1883 aside to national missions, and soon crossed the old Polish frontiers. Pastoral care for the Poles abroad started as early as 1891 from the „most abandoned” Polish workers in Germany, mainly in Westfalia and Nadrenia. Later on there were expeditions further into czarist Russia, as far as Siberia and the Caucuses, reaching the then groups of Poles. The first missionary expedition to the Poles in Germany was organised by Fr Bernard Łubieński who lived in Galicia and took up apostolic tasks in the Prussian partition. He soon realised where the Poles wandered „for bread”. In 1891 Fr Łubieński together with Fr Antoni Jedkie conducted a mission for 1000 Polish workers in Langendreer. After that Fr Bernard preached his famous sermon for Poles in the Redemptorist church in Bochum, the church called „Polish church”. Later on there were further missions and expeditions made by Redemptorists in 1899, 1900, 1901, 1910, and 1931. They travelled from one place to another. The German authorities, including some church authorities, were not very happy to see Polish priests who contributed to support the Polish spirit and thereby made the Germanisation of Poles difficult. In the context of the policy of Germanization, German Redemptorists would send from 1899 onwards their subordinates to the monasteries in Galicia and then in Poland to learn the Polish language. Among them we find Henryk Mann and Paweł Porbadnik. They were devoted to Poles with all their hearts. Polish Redemprists restarted pastoral care among Poles in Germany in 1945. These were prisoners of concentration camps: Jan Szymaszek, Wacław Pilarczyk, and Tadeusz Tybor. They were found by Jan Schultz, the chaplain of the American army, amongst several hundred priests from Dachau, and on 8the June they were introduced to Augsburg Bishop Kumpfmuller. The Bishop established pastoral care for Poles in Augsburg, and Fr. Szymaszek was appointed a parish priest. They worked together for a short period. Fr. Szymaszek still worked in Augsburg, Fr. Tybor went to Dillingen and there, on 2nd June 1946, he died in a car accident. Pilarczyk wandered from a centre to a centre, working were he was sent to work. In 1950 Fr. Szymaszek went to Denmark, and Fr. Pilarczyk to Argentina. The third period, the years from 1972 onwards, when the Redemptorists were employed to work in the Polish Catholic Missions in Germany, first in Landshut (1972), then in Munich (1978), and in Stuttgart (1981). Initially, they worked as priests, and then from 1978 onwards as parish priests and vicars. These missions work for several churches (Munich) or distant centres (up to 100 km): Landshut and Stuttgart. There special action in Germany was the „peregrination” of a cope of the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa in the Polish centres of pastoral care, preceded by missions or recollections (1979-1981).
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Wiosną tego roku mój dziewięcioletni syn przystępował do pierwszej Komunii Świętej. Kilka dni przed uroczystością dzieci zostały zaproszone do kościoła parafialnego na pierwszą spowiedź. Po wielu widać było, że to dla nich ważne przeżycie. Niektóre wyglądały na autentycznie przejęte i przestraszone, choć wokół roiło się od troskliwych rodziców.
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