Cathologic chapter V. A PROPOSAL FOR ACTION — ORDINARY THINGS AS SIGNS OF FAITH Jan Moniak

 author: Jan Moniak redaction: Copilot AI

V. A PROPOSAL FOR ACTION — ORDINARY THINGS AS SIGNS OF FAITH

The four self‑destructive convictions recalled at the end of the previous chapter correspond to four remedies:

1. Reconstructing the Grammars

We must restore the grammars into which we can inscribe the religious “lexicon” — images, actions, individual practices — that has been left to drift toward ruin according to personal whims and merely aesthetic criteria, and thus ceases to be understood or lived.
A small example of such a grammar is the grammar of space.

2. Grammatization Through Forms, Not Words Alone

These “grammatizations” must occur not only through words, but above all through forms that reach all the senses — and through ordinary, daily matters: human relationships, food, the home, clothing, work, signs referring to nature, and the organization of time (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and life‑long), dependent on overarching natural cycles.

3. Appealing Not to Innovation, but to Tradition

We must appeal not to our own inventions and changes, but to Tradition — the images, patterns, and artifacts shaped over millennia, which encode these orders in their very structure — and to objective, independent phenomena: the sun, the seasons, and so on.

4. Making These Signs Obvious Assumptions

These signs must become obvious assumptions, repeated by many members of society as tools of communication — not only verbal, but also non‑verbal.

In Summary

We must rebuild local communities with homes whose spaces carry meaning, with a kind of behavioral code, with relative freedom, self‑sufficiency, and control over the templates of the forms they produce.
These forms should be inherited not from anonymous mass instructions or online videos, but from one’s own Tradition, learned in one’s immediate surroundings, introduced at key points through rites of passage.
This enables a group of people living together (roughly 130 individuals) to gain a shared, native understanding — a shared cultural competence — and thus a shared understanding of words, and not only words.

The Need to Limit the Digital Sphere

I fear, however, that at some point we will have to confine the internet — and the habits that come with it — to a strictly defined niche, a separate time, a small house, a room, or even a group of specialists.
Our capacity for absorption is limited, and when we grow accustomed to being deceptively relieved of effort, unused functions atrophy like unused muscles.
This happens not only individually, but socially.

This outsourcing — the countless ready‑made patterns, ideal solutions, often “better” (in the sense of autonomy) than those we could reach within our own communities — this noise of ideals we will never realize…
All of this makes us accustomed to a distant, online source of authority rather than a local one.
And from such idealized patterns it is difficult to compose a system that expresses our own faith.

To do so, we must reduce the influx of external patterns to a natural level.
If we do not, we will never close the system.

It is like building a team: you cannot keep changing players, even if you have access to better ones, because then you will never establish a shared system of play.
And high‑quality elements often clash with other high‑quality elements; their competencies overlap, they interfere with one another, and one must decide which must yield.

Competence Before Access

It is unrealistic to expect most people to reach such a level.
I believe, for example, that the Church was right when it limited people’s ability to read Scripture independently.
Educated people — but not fully — can harm themselves more with partial knowledge than with none.

For reading, just as for navigating the internet, skill is not enough (skill can be dangerous, because it leaps over reflection).
One needs deep competence, testing by community members, painful trials, methodological reflection, and rites of passage rooted in tradition — where, in living and direct relation, one can receive feedback and test not only whether someone can use words and labels, but whether they understand how to connect them with the actions, objects, and concepts they signify.

Political Preconditions of Worldview Sovereignty

As we see, a crucial factor in maintaining control over one’s worldview is political: a system that allows freedom of production, ownership, self‑sufficiency, and locality.

“As you keep company, so you become”; “Among crows, you will caw like them.”
The remedy for worldview enslavement is a return to this old insight — with the correction that it concerns not only people, but also things, spaces, actions, and their forms.

An even more effective solution is action: expressing convictions through clothing, entertainment, forms of housing, food, and work.
This requires expanding local ownership while renouncing theft.
To shape the forms of daily life according to our faith, we must own them — not be slaves to fashionable, mass‑produced templates imposed by anonymous creators hidden behind the banners of corporations, states, and meta‑states.

The Ground for Discovery

Someone who confirmed the correctness of his conclusions through the remarkable success of the party he supported once wrote:

“It is enough to recall the distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ to see that every culture contains an area of social experience that has no conceptual representation, that is not present in words… Discovery is reaching truths for which the space has already been prepared, but which have not yet been articulated in that culture.” Zybertowicz, Andrzej. 1995. Przemoc i poznanie. Studium z nie-klasycznej socjologii wiedzy,Toruń, str. 130

Not only scientific, but also political or worldview “discovery” requires a kind of ground that prepares people to receive it.
A key element of this ground is precisely these non‑verbal forms of expression that precede verbal declarations, as well as the creation of real, compelling economic, social, and cultural conditions.

A Practical Path for Those Who Have Succeeded

If someone has prospered — whether through favorable circumstances in the early 1990s, through skillful navigation of regulations and “soft competencies,” or through exceptional abilities — and wishes to act for conservative values, the best way is to expand their activity into the production of real goods:
bread, cheese, wine, clothing, textiles;
construction services, craftsmanship, building settlements;
herbal medicine;
sponsoring artists, architects, designers who promote a world of ownership and honesty;
and supporting media sympathetic to this worldview.

The media should be open to such activities, eager to promote them — through engaging programs about cars, electronics, craftsmanship, construction, fashion, healthy water, interiors, and beauty.
It is in such programs that our values must be promoted, so that they appear convincing.
So that people will want to act similarly and vote for those whose policies allow honest work to flourish.

Right‑leaning circles often try to establish informational media.
Some timidly suggest adding “morning shows.”
But that is too weak; that path has already been neutralized by sheer abundance.
We must find something more distinctive.

I even have a specific idea — one that would embody the return to reality even more fully.
But I will not reveal it, because “they” have more resources and would steal it, and thereby ruin it.

Do Not Let Yourself Be Disarmed

We must not fall into the trap of being repelled from what “they” themselves do.
“They” will speak of these things precisely so that we become repulsed, so that we believe that managing health, herbal medicine, and similar areas is superstition incompatible with our worldview.

No.
We must shape these areas according to our own content, our own healing, our own healthy nourishment.
We must not allow ourselves to be disarmed by prejudices constructed through various forms of conscious and unconscious infiltration — voices that enter our circles only to ridicule these matters.
Their purpose is to discourage us from shaping these areas according to our worldview.

[2018]

“A New? Evangelization” Through Culture — The Mystical Style of Life

A certain piece of advice given by St. Francis of Assisi to his brothers comes to mind:
“Go and preach the Gospel — sometimes also with words.” — Pope Francis

Many Catholics today search for elaborate forms, concerts, dances, street evangelization, hoping to draw people to the Church.
They try to activate themselves as much as possible in the sphere of the sacred, believing that this will deepen their faith.
They feel guilty that they speak too little about God.

Hidden within these concerns of the modern person who wants to be religious are several traps (described earlier).
While warning against them, I would like to propose a return to a certain forgotten path — one written about, among others, by Pope Benedict XVI — a path that would also answer the call of Pope Francis and his holy namesake from Assisi to preach the Gospel “sometimes also with words.”

In my view, this path is the missing link of the New Evangelization.
It is also closely connected with the proper activity of the laity in the Liturgy.
This activity has recently ceased to be properly understood.
Benedict XVI, seeking to restore its true meaning, proposed the renewal of the Church and of faith precisely through the Sacred Rites.
But movement is needed in both directions.
The soil of ordinary life must also be prepared to receive the seed of the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass.

The path whose recovery I would like to propose to the whole Church is precisely mystical everydayness — popular piety.

What is this “popular piety”?
Is it flowers, patterns, and dressing up in folk costumes on feast days?

Popular piety is something more.
It is the making of one’s entire life into a Sign, a Book written “sometimes also with words,” a signpost pointing toward God, directing the soul toward Heaven.
Popular piety is the ever‑renewed attempt to create a fractal reflection of Heaven, Eternity, the sacred Beginning, on every fragment of daily life and passing time.

This attempt takes place through the Holy Mass, which for Catholics is the Perfect Rite — the only one that fulfills the longing expressed in the rites and rituals of all other religions.
This Rite, with a capital R, does not abolish the need for other rituals — quite the opposite.
These imperfect rituals, rooted in daily life, are needed as the soil that allows one to understand the essence of the Holy Mass, which is the essence of Christianity.

This is why the rejection of popular piety is so closely linked with the collapse of faith in the Old World.
As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, still as Cardinal Ratzinger:

“Popular piety is fertile soil without which the liturgy cannot grow. Unfortunately, it was often neglected or even disparaged by parts of the Liturgical Movement and during the post‑conciliar reform. Instead, it should be loved, purified where necessary, and guided — always, however, received with great respect as an expression of attachment to the faith, an attachment present in the heart of nations, even when this piety seems foreign or incomprehensible. It is an undeniable, inner rooting of faith; where it dries up, rationalism and sectarianism easily arise. The proven elements of popular piety can influence the shaping of the liturgy — not through zealous ‘manufacturing,’ but through a process of patient, gradual growth.”

The fascinating parallels between the Gospel, the Holy Mass, and the mythic imagery of many cultures — often preserved in folk culture — I have already attempted to describe earlier.
Now I would like to recall a certain harmful mechanism, which can be summarized as… (2012)

…throwing the baby out with the bathwater

Someone once came up with the idea that folk rituals and the strict rules of folk culture were empty forms or even magic.
And Catholics took this to heart and began rejecting all rituals together with the actual superstitions.

God created the human brain as it is.
And this brain — as it is — needs faith to express itself through external signs, rituals, and everything that reaches the senses.
If we avoid this omnipresence of faith, calling it magic, formalism, or “mixing into politics and other spheres of culture,” and instead confine it to words, parish rooms, and isolated moments of life, then this faith will begin to seem unconvincing, embarrassing, out of place in the world.

It will become difficult for us to make the sign of the cross in front of a church, a roadside shrine, or in front of friends — and we won’t know why.
And even if we do not have such problems, our children will.
What will be convincing for them is what the world expresses through its fashions.
Not only through words, but through songs on the radio, clothing available in shops, entertainment, films, newspapers, the internet.

All of this will be strong and persuasive because it repeats itself constantly, in many places, and moves the emotions.
Often it is not expressed directly — it is practiced.
This will become the new faith.
And even if we keep the words of the Gospel, we will give them the meaning that follows from the world’s practices described above.

Even if we go to church and experience communal uplift there, we will give it a form — and therefore a content — that is “worldly.”
To avoid this, make your whole life a story, a work of art.

When an unclean spirit leaves a person, it wanders through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none.
Then it says: “I will return to my house from which I came.”
And when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept clean, and decorated.
Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself; they enter and dwell there.
And the last state of that person becomes worse than the first.
So it will be with this evil generation.
(Mt 12:43–45)

Archbishop Fulton John Sheen said the same thing:

If you do not live as you believe, you will begin to believe as you live.

And St. John Paul II:

You become like those with whom you keep company.

If you do not make the world a sign of your faith, the world will drive a new faith into your head.
You will not even notice when it happens.
It does not matter that you keep the words of the Gospel, that you know verses of Scripture by heart.
You will begin to misunderstand them.
You will begin to use them to name what the world calls good and loving.
But this will have nothing to do with the love of Christ!

Exceptional matters — those important for our communities — we experience through rituals.
And these rituals are given from above by our ancestors, not invented hastily.

Monsignor Roman Kneblewski once said:
“The inner life does not tolerate a vacuum.”
Paraphrasing his words, one can say:

The ritual need does not tolerate a vacuum.
Even if we forget about it, it will not forget about us.
If we do not give it to our faith, other faiths will take it.
Faiths not necessarily professed in words, but practiced.

The ritual vacuum will be filled by anything — and that “anything” will fulfill our religious needs.
And if not “anything,” then — worse — a procession of evil spirits, or the cult of the temporal and of the self.

The place of the holy corner — the home altar recalling the altar in the Church and Heaven — will be filled with posters of film, sports, and music stars, with a television, a computer, feng shui trinkets, and statues of Buddha…
The place of the Ritual of the Holy Mass will be taken by concerts, discos, football matches.
The place of Catholic feasts will be taken by “days” of children, nations, women, cats, dogs, interreligious dialogue, and crocheting…

And our true feasts, our holy places, our principles of expressing faith in daily life — in building a home and arranging its interior, in baking bread and in clothing — will become empty forms, dead museum objects.
And although we will learn to talk about them beautifully, to write ornate stories about them, we will cease to understand them practically and vividly; we will cease to saturate our daily life with them.

To prevent this, do not let the so‑called Spirit of the Age toss you about like a blade of grass in the wind.
You must shape the Spirit of the Age with the teaching of the Church!

But how?
Build…

A MYSTICAL STYLE OF LIFE

In the film Into Great Silence, one of the few spoken lines was roughly this:

“There are many Signs in life. Some of them have no meaning. The point is not to remove them, but to give them the right meaning. For a person without signs feels lost.”

Therefore I propose treating “folk” rituals, the ordering of space, time, social and bodily relations as signs of God’s Loving Order.
And to introduce them into modern life — to build modernity with their help!
To blow into the flame, rather than surrender to the gusts of random “spirits of the age.”

If we do not do this, our culture will become like the swept‑clean house described by our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel.

In the name of rationalism, we reject the condition of rationality.
In the name of defending folk culture, we become the agents of its death.
In the name of purifying folk culture from its errors, we remove what is good — and the errors gain more room to spread and become the principle of a new order.
In the name of “valuing” the body, we deprive ourselves of proper respect and wonder for it.
In the name of the dignity of women, we deprive them of what expressed that dignity.
Seeking to overthrow formalism, we turn the word “content” into an empty form.
In the name of tolerance and religious freedom, we condemn those who wish to live their traditional faiths consistently.
In the name of “progress” and the “spirit of the age,” we fall into the dictatorship of chance — or rather of those who have the power, means, and money to shape cultural fashions.
Wanting to level the ground where a mountain stands, we dig a hole out of zeal.
We take medicine for a disease that disappeared long ago.
We treat a sick civilization with poison because someone poured it into a bottle labeled “medicine” and into bags labeled “food.”
Literally and figuratively. (2011)

We try to remove the weeds together with the soil on which they grew, leaving the seed of the Word on dry rock

We often fail to examine the tools we use for reflection and evaluation — and these very tools are sometimes the cause of the illness we attempt to cure with them.
The proper remedy would be to accept those tools we have previously declared to be poison.
Or, if not poison, then at least something neutral — a matter of taste.
We often reject them as “anachronistic and therefore harmful,” treating the mere lack of change as a pathology, as a refusal to follow the “Spirit of the Age.”

But perhaps these anachronisms are precisely the remedy — the way to heal the illness.

What, then, should we do?

Do the opposite.

Act and show before you speak.
And when you do speak, do it as a sapper disarms a mine: briefly, paradoxically, beginning with general slogans, exposing inconsistencies without directly attacking what your interlocutor is defending.
People carry stereotypical “mines” in their heads.

Only at a certain stage should one say something like:

“You probably want to convince me that faith is a private matter and that I should not persuade others. Let them believe what they think is right. But you persuade, and I persuade. Let’s not call persuasion coercion.”
“I want to convince you of Catholicism just as you want to convince someone close to you not to harm themselves — for example, with a destructive addiction, a poison someone poured into a bottle labeled ‘medicine.’ Remember that.”

Speak somewhat casually, calmly, with kindness and a sense of humor — sometimes a bit playfully — provoking questions.
Do not exhaust the topic; drop mysterious hints so that the interlocutor begins to dig on their own, to engage themselves.
Speak — but not too much, and concisely, not at length.
More often: make ordinary things a sign of Faith.

(These and other pieces of advice I give first to myself, for I struggle with them. Perhaps the Honorable Reader will manage better.)

Use what is good in contemporary cultural forms

Reorder reality — the place of things — because everything was given to us as good.
Only the ordering of these foundations can be evil: the secondary mental and practical schemes.

The condition for the existence of evil is good — good that can be violated, diminished, torn from its proper place, interrupted by a lack that breaks the order.
One cannot speak of the existence of evil — a lack — without good — fullness.
One cannot speak of a hole in trousers if there are no trousers.

Using what is good in the contemporary world, let us inscribe it into the structure of traditional folk cultures; let us use the ways of life and faith tested by time and many generations.

Why return to these old folk structures?

Because, as my good friend KonradTomasz once said:

“One human life is too little to grasp, understand, and reflect on everything necessary — we need transmission, we need Tradition. It lies in human nature and is inseparable from the phenomenon of religion — from community.”

The old forms of folk culture preserved principles of ordering the world tested by many generations and therefore relatively stable.
We can extract these principles from beneath the surface of those forms and — after proper testing — inscribe into them new objects, including technological achievements.

What Cardinal Ratzinger wrote about music can be said of all folk culture

“It is important that there exist outposts of popular piety and its music, and also, in a broader sense, sacred music, which should always remain in a fruitful exchange with liturgical music: on the one hand, they are inspired and purified by it; on the other, they prepare new forms of liturgical music. From these freer forms something may emerge that will enter the common treasury of the Church’s universal liturgy.”

Folk religiosity is not about labeling life with religious words

It is about the internal structuring of the forms in which a person lives, so that even without words they signify and express deep religious truths.

It is not about multiplying elaborate occasions or organizing loud events called evangelization or Catholic action.
There is too much of that today.
It should move to the background.

What is needed today is above all the transformation of the fundamental dimensions of life.

Let me emphasize immediately: this is not about everything that we associate with “folk culture,” not about any folk culture whatsoever — but about Catholic folk culture.

The same applies to contemporary ideologies and customs

We must identify the elements that are correct at a certain level, while showing their inconsistencies at a higher level — inconsistencies that require us to reject them as wholes.

If we assume that someone is mistaken, then there must also be a level at which they are right.
To show them their error, we must reveal the contradiction starting from that very level.
This is difficult — but who said it would be easy?

Words — including the Words of the Gospel — have the meaning shaped by cultural upbringing

The meaning of words in people’s minds is shaped by the example of their cultural environment.
Patterns of thought are usually formed on the basis of unnamed ways of life — entertainment, clothing, interpersonal relations, the organization of time and space, and work.

These are the things that determine what we consider good and sensible — and we consider good what aligns with these patterns and with the reality that shaped them.

Because of the fashionable contempt for external traditional form, we have lost control over the content of the Gospel Words.

[2011]

How can we regain that control?

The answer seems simple: influence the shape of everyday life, the culture of ordinary living.
Influence it by sanctifying it, by shaping its order according to the pattern set by holiness, and by symbolically expressing the Truths of Faith — the Divine Order — in the organization and ritual marking of daily actions:

• in relation to “our daily bread,”
• in building and organizing the home, which is a symbol of the Temple — the Heavenly House,
• in the organization of time,
• in relation to people, in social hierarchies reflecting the relationship between us and God,
• in clothing that expresses the sacred marking of the body and its relation to other bodies…

After all, each of us lives somewhere — let the home not end in itself, but let it be an image, an Icon of that Eternal, Heavenly Dwelling.
Everyone eats something — let bread be an image of that Heavenly Food.
Everyone works somewhere (or at least it would be good if they did).
Let work be sanctified as a reflection of Divine Creation.
Almost everyone dresses — let this element of culture express that the Body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and that this temple is different in a woman and different in a man…

We exist in matter, and we must not forget it or separate it from the spirit.
To repay Adam’s bondage, to walk upon the earth with our eyes fixed on Heaven — as Pope Benedict XVI said — we must make of this matter Icons, Symbols of the Heavenly Jerusalem, images of the Pastures of Zion… (2011)

Easy to write, harder to do

In the cultural crisis we are experiencing, a new purification and unification can emerge only from islands of spiritual concentration.¹

This sanctification of everyday life would have to be shared by a group of people and form a kind of system.
Such a group would need to be consolidated, persuaded, found, built.
It would have to control — according to established principles — the way essential goods are produced: food, housing, and so on.
It would also have to control forms of entertainment and harmonize them with religion.

Therefore, the greatest possible degree of self‑sufficiency must be preserved in our times.

Let us remember that the dismantling of systems in folk cultures — in order to absorb their members into modern states and ideologies — occurred through the gradual and clever removal of their self‑sufficiency.
This deprivation made them dependent on external authorities — on forms of life, clothing, income, housing, food, interpersonal relations — and thus they lost control over the transformation of their mentality, which took place imperceptibly through those supposedly “content‑neutral” forms. (2011)

How to persuade people toward cultural forms?

Do not begin with criticism, but with drawing out from contemporary trends what is good — and even praising it.
Present sacralized elements of culture as fulfilling fashionable modern slogans, while giving those slogans good meaning and cleansing them of harmful connotations.

I have in mind such popular attitudes as:

• originality,
• harmony with nature,
• the uncanny,
• the mystical,
• the folk,
• breaking conventions,
• “outsider‑ness,”
• primitivity,
• mysticism,
• eco,
• ethno,
• and so on.

Together with the weeds of certain folk “superstitions,” we destroyed the good grain as well.

We cannot repeat this mistake.
We must recognize what is good in today’s cultural field — and leave it.
Let it grow.
We must look forward — to the future, to new sowings.
The grain stored in the granary of modernity should be examined: the bad rejected, the noble preserved.

Let what is sown remain.
But let us sow only what has been carefully selected.

Let us get to work!
Let us draw out what is good from our times and supplement it with what was good in the past — and what we hastily rejected. (2011)

For this we need greater self‑sufficiency

Self‑Sufficiency

This quality allows us to harmonize many cultural products so that they form a coherent system — one that provides psychological stability and is grounded in an overarching religious principle.

Let us find such cultural‑economic niches in which self‑sufficiency can be expanded, and with it, control over customs and morality.
Let us find such forms of activity in which several seemingly different areas of culture can be combined.
We must search and improvise, because the contemporary economy in our country and global culture do not favor this.
We must gather the scattered grains from among the fields of weeds and find for them a single space — so that they may grow peacefully and have a place from which to spread into other fields of the world.

Family Businesses and Small Farms

Places where children would help, learning from their parents and remaining in close contact with them.
Parents could thus maintain traditional forms of sanctifying work through religious rites and gestures, and pass on their true meaning through close bonds.

Small farms would allow the production of old, non‑modified varieties of grain (leaving intestinal villi in peace) and plants grown without flora‑destroying or toxic chemicals.
Children, while herding cows, sheep, or goats, could invent games, play flutes, and sing.

Home Education

This would be a gateway allowing children to remain at home and be separated from harmful ideological and moral influences — at least during the time when their moral backbone is being formed.
For this, worldview coherence is needed — something the modern world lacks.
Education naturally woven into daily work, into nature, into the practical responsibilities of adults.

Family Children’s Homes and Catholic Schools

These should be the ultimate form of education — a complement to home learning.
There, knowledge and skills detached from practice should be refined, so that later they may serve that practice.

Priests and spiritual guardians of similar convictions are an indispensable support for such families, family communities, and entire villages.

A Community of Friends with Similar Moral and Cultural Views

Such an environment provides a child with potential peer contacts and gives the whole family support within a larger group — helping them resist the evils of the world and also persuade that world toward a change of values.
There is strength in numbers.

One cannot take away a child’s peer environment of bad patterns and give nothing in return.
An alternative peer environment is absolutely necessary.
Without it, mere protection from corruption will fail — and may even produce a “yo‑yo effect.”

Retreats, Pilgrimages, Mountain Trips, Discussions, Bonfires, Fairs

These would be opportunities to consolidate the community.
Into such a crystallized group one could gradually invite people of other views, so that by absorbing the categories of thought of the group, they would make them their own.

Daily work, clothing, housing, and food — everything necessary for life — should be shown during retreats and teachings as a way of ordinary, simple living of the faith.
Feasts should be the model and example for this very ordinariness.

Creating Villages, Settlements, Neighborhoods

If such an opportunity arises, if it becomes possible, members of these groups could create them.
This would be another stage of Evangelization (not necessarily the “New” one) through culture.

There various areas of professional activity — for which we previously found niches enabling at least a bit more self‑sufficiency than in mainstream culture — could be concentrated.
(Self‑sufficiency does not imply criticism of specialization or mass production in certain fields.)

There exists a concept of how such a village could function.
Choosing the right theme would allow such a village to become a testimony of faith — for example, a “mystical village.”

In this way we would refer to contemporary fascinations with folk culture, giving it its proper meaning — choosing not elements torn from the context of life, as has been done until now, but the principle of form‑giving and sacrality.

It would not be a dry, dead open‑air museum presenting historically finished regional cultures, but something that — despite changes in particular elements — remains stable:
a “museum” of mentality — living, dynamic, changing reasonably.

It is about a certain structure of organizing life oriented toward Holiness.

Better Than Feng Shui

Here we could refer to another contemporary fascination — Eastern principles of organizing space.

We would show that we have our own, native, Christian principles of ordering living space — that we search far away for what we have right under our noses.

This would correspond perfectly with the idea of:

psychological therapy in “open‑air museums,”
which is fashionable in the West and will soon be a “novelty” here.

Let us call it, for now:

Ethno‑Eco‑Therapy

Other Niches — Bridges to Modernity

There are other niches that can be combined into a single whole — a system enabling self‑sufficiency and, at the same time, expansion and evangelization.
These niches — or bridges to modernity — include, for example:

Shopping Malls

They fulfill the entire spectrum of human needs — from food, through entertainment and paid work, to social activity and pseudo‑religious experience.

One could refer to this multifunctionality of the shopping mall — but fill it with different content, fill its structure with good religious, not pseudo‑religious meaning, with simple mysticism.

It could be combined with the traditional formula of the fair, under names such as:

Market Gallery — Ethno‑Eco Gallery

To achieve this, one would need to set aside a square in the village

…or build market stalls along the streets; alternatively, the owners of larger properties could periodically make them available for such events, for a fair fee charged per stall.
One could organize performances, festivals, presentations of folk crafts, or displays of local products.
Such initiatives would be limited to “market days” for outsiders.
And the everyday reality would be:

the production of ecological food

Other areas of activity within the family, and possibly within the village or settlement, could include:

Agriculture and Animal Husbandry

• farming, herding, processing of agricultural and livestock products — e.g., milk, cheese‑making, meats, hams, wool;
• shepherding (also undertaken by children), connected with ritual, music, and play;
• orcharding and fruit processing;
• beekeeping, winemaking, herbalism;
• gastronomy (an inn‑restaurant for guests, using eco‑products);
• architecture (sacred, residential, interior, landscape);
• construction and finishing work;
• sculpture (e.g., crafting wooden casings for electronic devices);
• blacksmithing (including artistic);
• other traditional crafts.

Folk Religious Practices

• roadside shrines, May devotions, June devotions, caroling, Easter customs;
• Passion plays;
• rites of passage — births, baptisms, First Communions, Confirmations, weddings, funerals;
• building rituals;
• wreath‑making, St. John’s Night, Corpus Christi;
• agricultural and craft rituals;
• the liturgical calendar.

Textile and Fashion Arts

• weaving, tailoring, fashion design.

Visual and Media Arts

• graphic design — books, websites, music, film;
• radio and television broadcasting;
• a music recording studio, albums, composing and recording sound for films, program intros, advertisements.

Education and Scholarship

• schooling, academic work, novels, books, albums, guides;
• applying traditional rules of visual order in printed materials and images, and using them in films, websites, television programs, etc.

Symbolic sanctification of daily work

…through rituals and ceremonies connected with all important moments of life — from birth to death — and through protection against the elements, illnesses, and evil spirits by means of blessed objects and the Sign of the Cross.

Sanctification of time

Based on the liturgical calendar, to which the cycle of our yearly activities would be tied.

Building churches

In accordance with our climate — with high roofs — using and refining folk patterns, according to the traditional symbolism of sacred space in Catholic culture.

Building homes

According to a sacred layout, including a multifunctional room or hall, with a stove in one corner and, diagonally opposite, a home altar — the Holy Corner — where a table may stand (e.g., foldable and moved to the center for feasts), or a chest, or a table not used for eating but extended during holidays.

Such homes could combine the classical layout of Polish manor houses with folk architecture and the folk sacralization of domestic space.

Mystical Fashion

Expressing the Mystery of the Temple of the Holy Spirit that is the woman, in whom the Divine, Incomprehensible Image is formed.
Clothing should follow the parameters of modesty proper to Christian culture before the fashions against which Our Lady warned in Fatima in 1917 — that is, before the clothing revolutions of the roaring twenties.

For this, the ability to sew and weave must be slowly restored — skills once possessed even by queens.

Folk Music and Dance

• performing non‑trance folk music (not every drumming is trance);
• singing that is more communal than stage‑oriented;
• and…

…“taking flight from the earth with the folk song”

…by those who will professionally engage in literature, sculpture, architecture, painting, culinary arts, gardening, and music.

• modest round dances;
• men’s strength‑and‑skill dances (with a relative separation of men and women).

Organizing “unconventionally traditional” receptions and weddings

With mystical symbolism in clothing, proposed dances (separation of men and women), and music.
These proposals should be presented as a kind of style, fashion (understood as moderation), performance, narrative, musical form — in which Catholic mystical culture is obvious.

Example

Guests arriving in the village — tourists, customers, etc. — would first be directed to the inn, where, as part of a rite of passage into the “Village of Mystical Everydayness,” women would be discreetly offered the first attraction: changing into clothing consistent with the Catholic culture “presented” in the village.

Men could learn, for example, how to use a scythe (soon mowing and peening will be an exotic attraction), and at various times of the year guests would be confronted with rituals connected with the cycle of fieldwork and the liturgical year.

Groups could be invited for caroling, or one could go out caroling and show it on television (cooperation with existing Catholic media — and possibly persuading their creators to change their paradigm and adopt certain customs — is another task and challenge).

Similar initiatives could arise in various parts of Poland — or even the world. (2011)

Patriotism

Patriotism is an area of fulfilling the Fourth Commandment, and it cannot be forgotten when building such communities.
I believe it is worthwhile to draw upon both noble and folk traditions, and also to create and develop a national tradition rooted in folk cultures, according to the proposal of C.K. Norwid.
It is worth uniting the folk sacralization of life with the noble tradition.

We should refer to elements of folk culture that we at least somewhat know and with which we feel a connection.
Let us remember that under normal conditions, elements of cultures constantly mixed together as people themselves moved and mingled.

There is no need to create a special, separate community (though one may attempt that as well) with its own status and name.
It is enough to consider ourselves members of the Catholic Church and of the local community formed in the manner described above.

We should speak of these sacred cultural forms as if they were obvious, without unnecessary pathos.
And best of all — not speak about them, but through them, pointing to a content that transcends them.
To that Content — Christ — belongs a pathos that weighs its words, and a crystalline (that is, humble) love.

Let these forms appear often, mentioned without excessive commentary; let them serve as tools of life and reflection, not its object.

Let people be convinced of these cultural forms not by talk, but by their use — by various groups employing them as a kind of “language” for expressing love, joy, and the ordinariness of life.

Let those whom we wish to convert, whom we wish to help — also within the existing charitable and educational work of the Church, and within ordinary hidden Christian love — enter such an environment, so that they may see the coherence and joy of Catholic work (orthopraxy). (2011)

FORMATION

Moral and cultural formation, upbringing is the goal of all the above.

For it will often be difficult for us to rid ourselves of old, harmful habits.
Even if we manage to accomplish what I have written here, after the first fascination it may begin to seem unconvincing.
For we have already been demoralized by other, worldly conditions.
Trying to free ourselves from them, we will die like a grain.

At least let us ensure that the next generations absorb a good ordering of the world — so that evil does not “fit” them, just as good may no longer “fit” us.
The point is to teach children to relate everything to God, so that it becomes something obvious to them.

Do not think, however, that the above proposal will solve all problems.
You will never manage to accomplish it fully.
Perfect it will be only in Heaven.
On earth something will always be amiss.

We must also remember that the “mission of culture” presented above is a complement, not a negation, of the Church’s existing activity.
One thing is certain — we must constantly strive for improvement, climb upward, not adjust ourselves to the depths, listening to the words of Christ, who said:

“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
(Mt 5:48) (2011)

Introduction – 5

A Futile Fight Against Schemas – 11
Without Imposing, There Is No Formation – 11
DISCIPLINE – 12
More… Than I Can Bear: Stimuli, Information, Accusations – 13
The Desire to Judge — “More Than I Can Bear” in Accusing – 15
Blind Accusers Accuse Others of Blind Defense – 16
He Must Suspect, Otherwise He Will Suffocate – 17
Blind Trust in Accusatory Messages – 17
The More Accurate, the Less Convincing – 18
A Correct Diagnosis Generates the Most Intelligently Defended Errors – 18
A Theory Worth Nothing Without Examples? – 19
Not Too Little, but Too Much — and in the Wrong Place – 20
“You Become Like Those with Whom You Keep Company” – 22

I. THE ONE WHO INVENTED EVERYTHING. PROOF AND FAITH – 24

Facts Accessible to Everyone – 24
FAITH – 25
We Are Finite! – 25
What Is Truth? – 26
What Follows from the Principles of Thinking? – 26
I Will Reveal This Secret to You… – 27
Science Is Subjective – 28
Killing Animals Is Wrong Because They Suffer? – 32
How Do We Differ from Animals and Things? – 33
RELATION IS THE FOUNDATION – 36
Yet I Have Direct Access Only to My Own Consciousness – 38
Truth as Dependent on Consciousness — But Whose? Mine? Certainly Not Mine – 39
THE CONDITION OF RATIONALITY – 40
THE CREATIVE PERSON – 40
So What Should One Believe? – 44
St. Paul — A Philosopher? – 45
The Superiority of Tradition Over Scientific or Cultural Innovation – 46
The Principle of “Conservation of Energy” in Limited Systems – 47
Everything Is a Sign, and a Sign Arises in Thought – 49
The Capacity for Knowledge as a Sign of Reality — and Vice Versa – 49
The Nature of Error/Evil – 50
Subjectivity That Creates Objectivity – 50
In the Image of God He Created Him – 53
“God Thinks, Therefore I Am” – 54
Evil? Free Will? – 55
Authority and the Primacy of Tradition — The Fourth Commandment – 56
Communication and Objectivity – 56
The State of Endless Legislative Fantasies Is Evil – 66
The Irrationality of the Terror of Innovation – 67
Limitations as Training for Freedom – 68
Traditions vs. Novelties – 69
Hierarchy and the Unity of the Creator – 69
The New Creation and the Symbolism of the Cross – 70
Free Will and Order – 70
Solipsism Is Impossible – 70
The Primacy of Tradition as the Presumption of Innocence — In Dubio Pro Reo – 71
Media and Manipulation – 72
The Harm of Intuitively Suspecting Evil in What Is Normal – 72
Mutual Reinforcement of Errors and the Budding of Bubbles – 73
Higher Intelligence More Efficiently Justifies False Impressions – 73
“Fear” of Innovation Is Wise – 74
Reason, Relation, and Love – 75
Relation — Going Out of Oneself – 75
DETACHMENT / LONE‑liness (Autonomization / Monadization / “Alienation”) – 79
God‑Reason and the Sacred – 85
The Iconic Sign – 86

II. THE MYTH THAT BECAME TRUE – 90

Folk Rituals and Symbolic Cultural Forms as an Icon of the Divine Cosmos – 93
Traditional–Folk–Ritual–Sacred–Religious–Rational Cultures – 95
Recalling the Sacred Beginning as Renewal and Meaning‑Making – 95
Order, Boundaries, and the Center of the World – 97
Tradition — The Chains That Liberate vs. The Terror of Innovation – 102
Tradition — The Sense of Connection with the Beginning – 102
Bread–Body–Home–Temple–Cosmos–Heavens – 103
The Goal of Tradition Is Progress – 104
The Religiosity of Folk Cultures as an Innate Human Trait – 104
Religion Interferes with Everything by Its Very Nature – 106
Modernity? – 107
Christ as the Fulfillment of Mythic Longings – 109
Ritual Is Not Magic — Ritual Is Effective Action – 110
Rituals Are Not Formalism – 111
Lack of Words Is Not Lack of Understanding or Sincerity – 113
Folk Culture — Human Culture – 118
Folk Culture, Not Always Mass Culture – 119
A Cosmological Understanding of Reality as a Condition of Religiosity – 119
Ritual with Rituals – 121
On Traditional Folk and Ritual Principles – 122
On Moving the Soil with the Weeds and Sowing the Seed on Rock – 122
Guadalupe — Coatlaxopueh – 125
THE REMEDY – 127
The Mystical Style of Life – 127
Ordinary Things as Signs of Faith – 127
Healing Space — The Room in the Shape of a Cross – 127
DO IT! – 127
Binding Human Groups — Ritual as the Basis of Mutual Understanding – 135
Ritual‑Genesis – 137
Inculturation? Yes — But Not Backwards – 141
THE CATHOLIC — THE TRUE NATIVE BELIEVER – 144
What Belongs to Us: Norm, Judgment, the Terror of Innovation – 146
The Logic of Hierarchy and Primacy – 147
What Belongs to Us, and What Does Not? (2) – 148
How to Read These Principles? – 150
Pedophile — Meaning “Priest”? – 151
The Identity of an Institution Is Determined by Its Principles – 151
Christ Yes, the Church No? – 155
CATOLOGIC(k)A — Reasonable Humility – 158
Blind Faith… – 158
…In the Church? – 158
…In the Post‑Conciliar Church, the Pope – 158
Enslavement? – 159
Irrationality? – 160
Distinguish Principles from Their Violation – 162
Is Every Widespread Practice in the Church Its Custom? – 163
Bad Catholics = Bad Church (Bad Council, Bad NOM)? – 163
Fidelity to Living Norms — A Humble Defense Against Error – 165
Let Each Do What Belongs to Him – 169

III. THE WAWEL(ON) TOWER – 178

The Power of the Senses. Property and… Faith – 179
Four Diseases – 180
The Prescription — First Ending – 183
Justification of the Diagnosis – 183
Goebbels Was Right… – 185
The World Commission of Everything – 186
By Small Steps, by Contrast… We Will Do Whatever We Want with You! – 187
Enchanting Reality Away – 187
Property and Control over One’s Own Beliefs – 188
Legal Theft – 189
Restoring the Proper Meaning of Words and Overthrowing False Ideologies – 191
The Origin and Partial Truth of Postmodernism (Immanentism) – 195
Subjectivism — The Cult of the Self – 197
Autonomism — Forgetting Relations – 198
The Mystical Manor — Why Do We Need Feng Shui? – 200
The Spirit of the Age – 202
So How Is It? Free, or Enslaved by the “Spirit of the Age”? – 203
Freedom of Religion, Cultures, and Opinions – 204
Freedom of Speech – 205
Artistic Freedom – 205
The Definition of Art and the Creative Sacred – 206
Infant Baptism – 208
“Love Is Not a Feeling. Love Is a Decision.” – 208
Monocultural or Multicultural? – 209
Universal Values? – 209
They May — but Religion May Not? – 211
Is It Because Religion Concerns Something Else? – 211
Is Religion Forbidden Because It Imposes and Is Intolerant? – 211
Or Because Religion Is a Source of Conflict? – 211
Freedom, Equality, Neutrality? – 212
A Secular and Neutral State? – 212
Belief in Neutrality and the Loss of Control over One’s Worldview – 214
Neutrality vs. Formation and Cultural Schemas – 215
Is What I Write Nonsense? An Attack on Tolerance, Pluralism, and Human Freedom? – 216
Blessed Conflict – 217
Honest Pluralism – 218
“Is Expressing Opinions — Even Loudly — Automatically Imposing Them?” – 219
Relax – 220
Tolerance Is Part of a Worldview — Therefore It Has Limits – 220
Freedom without Limits Is a Fiction – 221
The Limits of Freedom Do Not End with Bodily Harm – 223
“You Become Like Those with Whom You Keep Company” – 223
The Power of Signs – 223
The Power of the Word – 224
The Over‑Linguistification of Culture, Social Order, and Sola Scriptura – 226
Over‑Linguistification and the Breakdown of Folk Cultures – 233
Over‑Linguistification or Re‑Linguistification? – 238
Ritual and the Corruption of Language – 238
The Origin of Over‑Linguistification – 239
Script‑Centrism and Overstimulation – 242
Subjectivization through Scripture – 244
(The “Protestantized” “Defense” of Thomism) – 245
Stupid Interpretations? – 246
“But It Says on the Label That It’s Medicine!” — Vigilance Put to Sleep by Labels – 246
The Essence of Ineffective Action: Slogans like “Red‑pill,” “Liberals,” “Socialists”… – 247
The Sacrifice of Precursors as the Condition for the Flourishing of Successors – 249
Inflation of Signs – 250
The Illusion That Internet Users Are Freer Than TV Watchers – 251
Power and Signs – 252
Religion – 253
Religionalization… – 254
…through Anti‑Ritualism – 254
…through Forgetting the Ultimate Meaning – 254
…through Stripping Religion of Its Total and Supreme Character (Secularism–Autonomism) – 255
…through Declaring Material Acts Morally Indifferent – 257
…through the Corruption of the Word – 257
The Corruption of the Names of Values (Benedict XVI) – 258
Religion in Politics – 260
The Necessity of the Intronization – 260
Crypto‑Religions – 261
A Catholic in Politics – 262
Fr. Piotr Natanek and the Healing Triad – 263
“My Kingdom Is Not of This World” – 265
The Intronization of Christ – 265
Outline of My Own Entanglement and Its Influence on My Methods and Conclusions – 269
The Cultural Principle of Uncertainty – 272
The Meta‑Method – 274
Errors of Researchers as the Basis for Priests’ Pseudo‑Remedies – 275
Norwid on Imitation Born of Aversion to “Being a Beginner — Creatively” – 276
Do Not Expect Ideals from Others or from Yourself – 279
False Alternatives… – 283
How to Destroy an Enemy? – 283
The Left First Named and Took Over the Methodological Obviousness of the Right – 285
On Adopting the Enemy’s Faulty Categories – 287
The Green Elephant Supporter – 288
Labeling (Boxing‑In) – 289
Victorious but Bent – 290
The Barabbas Effect – 291
Over‑Linguistified “Traditionalism,” Not Only among “Neophytes” – 293
Confusing Certainty about Principles with Certainty about One’s Own Applications – 294
Blind Kali Catching a Blind Thief — The Essence of Hypocrisy – 296
Blind Goodness vs. Evil Blindness — “Love (…) Believes All Things” – 298
One Camp’s Position Modified by the Other Camp’s False Opinion – 301
A Common Enemy Unites – 304
How Manipulators Reveal Their Own Methods by Projecting Them onto Others – 305
Negative Sectarians First Hunt Positive Sectarianism – 306
Blinded by the Speck of Love? Remove First the Beam from Your Own Eye – 307
Who Must Explain Themselves? The Accused or the Accuser? – 309
Certainty and Uncertainty — When Yes, When No – 311
Opinionism — “I Have the Right to Say It Because It’s My Opinion” – 313
Straining Out the Gnat While Swallowing the Camel – 316
The Substitute Devil — Putin, Hitler, Tusk, Kaczyński, etc. – 316
The Hypocrisy of Pro‑War Propaganda – 320
Who Started It? – 321
Sufficient Reason – 322
Divide and Rule — Gossip and Presumed Guilt as Tools of Revolution – 323
The Mechanism of Tribal Prejudices and Elastic Interpretations – 325
Sarcasm — The Strongest Argument – 325
Suspicion toward One’s Own Suspicions – 327
Simple Things Tangle Easily; Tangles Unravel Complicatedly – 328
Who Must Explain Themselves? A Critique of Rash Criticism – 328
The Devil Does Not Tempt Those He Does Not Need To – 329
Will the Honest Succeed? Fairy Tales – 329
The Multi‑Component Glue Method – 329
Conspiracy Theories – 330

RELIGION AND SUBSTITUTE MORALITY – 332

Info‑latry and the Cult of Science – 332
Substitutes for Religion – 332
The New Morality — The Cult of Football and Pop‑Culture “Stars” – 333
Substitute Morality of Clubs and Conceptual Sacks – 333
Sectarianism and Dogmatism – 334
Other Harmful Cognitive Errors – 336
The People and the Elites Complement Each Other – 342
Twisting an Opponent’s Words to Refute the Twist – 344
Repeating What Was on the Radio as If It Were One’s Own Thought – 345
The Field of Agreement as the Cause of Conflict – 346
Education and Erudition as an Argument – 347
An Intelligent Person Can Err as Much as a Fool – 347
Fact‑Worship and Emotional Manipulation – 348
What Favors Info‑latry? – 349
Abortion, Gender, LGBT, Vegetarianism — What Connects These Issues? – 349
“Don’t Kill Animals Because They Feel Pain!”? – 350
A Fist with a Rosary – 351
Self‑Fulfilling Prophecies (2020) – 352
The Disney Syndrome – 354
Logical Fallacies — Example: The Generalized Strawman – 356
Liberalism, Nationalism — Inconsistency and Generalization – 357
Easily Deceived — Like an Optical Illusion – 360

IV. Faulty Bodily and Material Forms of Our Culture – 364

“The Most Important Is What’s in the Heart — Form Doesn’t Matter” – 365
The Dispute over Form and Content in the Church – 366
But What Is the Proper Place? – 367
Does the Moral Value of Behavior Depend on Cultural Context? – 368
Faulty Forms of Our Culture – 373
The Broth‑Cube Effect – 377
The Mystery of Holiness and Bodily Modesty – 378
The Mystery of Holiness – 378
Proper Because in Accordance with the Divine Order — the Cosmos – 378
The Mysterious Holiness of the Body – 380
The Mystery of the Temple – 383
Non‑Clothing Factors Degrading the Mystery of the Body – 397
Walking – 397
Dance – 397
Habit, Innocent Embarrassment, and Awe – 403
Historical and Cultural Context vs. Moral Relativism – 404
That Which Transcends Our Earthly Existence – 406
Good Order Requires Effort; Bad Disorder Pulls Us In – 407
A Proposal to Attempt… – 408
Music — Can It Be Harmful? – 408
The Cult of Pleasure and Postmodernism – 415
4π — The Formula of Mystical Counter‑Revolution – 416

V. A Proposal for Action — Ordinary Things as Signs of Faith – 418

“A New? Evangelization” through Culture — The Mystical Style of Life – 422
Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater – 423
Removing the Weeds Together with the Soil – 425
How to Regain That Control? – 427
Easy to Write, Harder to Do – 428
How to Persuade toward Cultural Forms? – 429
Self‑Sufficiency – 429
Patriotism – 434
Formation – 434