UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE FORMATION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE POLISH COMMUNITY OF WEST PRUSSIA IN THE YEARS OF KULTURKAMPF IN THE CATHOLIC MAGAZINE ‘PIELGRZYM’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/SPLP.2024.025Keywords
religious upbringing, national identity, Kulturkampf, West PrussiaAbstract
The aim of this publication is to use the Catholic magazine ‚Pielgrzym’ (Pilgrim) to illustrate the understanding of religious education and its role in the process of forming the national identity of the Polish community in West Prussia during the Kulturkampf. Press texts published in the above-mentioned newspaper in the years 1871–1878 and related to the researched topics were the subject of the research. In the course of the research, the method of critical source analysis (typical for research in the fi eld of educational history) was applied. In the introduction, the political significance of religion in the processes of nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th century was presented (referring, among other things, to the phenomenon of the ethnicisation of religion and the sacralisation of ethnos). The specificity of the region under study was also pointed out. Then, the understanding and great importance of religious education by the editors of the studied press were shown. The main part of the article is an analysis of the texts published in ‚Pielgrzym’, which show the attempts to construct a Polish national identity in West Prussia on the basis of religious (implicitly Catholic) education. This education was understood as: the only right and ‚true’ one, a tool for the awakening of conscience, a condition for the achievement of happiness on earth, the most effective weapon against new, anti-Christian ideologies, and a recipe for a number of social and economic problems that the Polish population was struggling with. With regard to the formation of Polish national identity in religion, justifications were sought for the idea of a national community, special love for fellow citizens, the unique role of the mother tongue and the family land, the need to respect Polish culture, and the need to sacrifice and suffer for the motherland.References
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