II. THE MYTH THAT BECAME TRUE

author: Jan Moniak

In the beginning there is the Logos — that is, Meaning, Sense, Thought, Mind, Reason.
He is simultaneously the source of Nomos and Kosmos: Law and Order.
All other orders are His reflection.
So too are signs — insofar as they are built from the elementary “particles” of order and knowledge.

We call Him God.

God is the Beginning in relation to creation.
Within creation itself, however, we also distinguish a Beginning — the perfect, created state, the primordial fullness in which things were brought into being.
Through sin we began to move away from it.
We fell into earthly time: into barrenness, decay, death — into the continual loss of our own essence.
Into perforation.
Into lack.

The desired overcoming of this condition is happiness — the rediscovery of Meaning.
Where is it?
Where else? In returning to the Beginning.

Not denying this longing — the constant attempt to return to the Beginning — constitutes a “natural” (or more precisely: naturally cultural) attitude, present in most historical cultures.
It may be described as mythological or cosmological consciousness.

Modern Western culture often attributes irrationality to this attitude.
In fact, the opposite is true.

The Criterion of Rationality

What is rational is that which preserves the bond between meaning and the whole,
that which respects the fact that meaning does not arise in isolation, but only in reference to the Beginning, to order, and to the totality of reality.

Appeal to the primordial state is therefore not irrational, but rather a condition of the possibility of meaning itself.
Without it, one cannot speak of the meaningfulness of anything — for, as we already know, such is the genetic nature of the sign and of knowledge: meaning always arises through relation.

The cult of change and the “spirit of the age,” which expels the Beginning and Eternity from memory, is therefore simultaneously a rejection of meaning — and with it, of rationality.
This occurs paradoxically in the name of rationality itself.

This phenomenon is inseparably linked with autonomization — with contempt for the fact that reality is a system of interconnections — and with attempts to tear apart bonds.

As a result, value is assigned to all individual elements, while it is forgotten that they have no meaning unless they are strictly connected to the “Everything.”
This is an assault on rationality carried out in its own name.

G. K. Chesterton described this condition with striking clarity:

“The word ‘orthodoxy’ no longer means having the right opinion. Worse — in common speech it means having the wrong one.
All this shows only one thing: people care less and less whether their philosophical views are true.
(…)
Everything is important — except Everything.”

Forgetting the systemic interconnectedness of all things leads to chaos.

It is worth recalling that the Greek word χάος did not originally mean “disorder of elements,” but rather a chasm, a yawning gap, a rupture, an opening — a tearing of continuity.
Chaos is therefore not an excess, but a lack of bond, a fracture in being.

In this sense, chaos corresponds precisely to the classical understanding of evil as privatio boni — a lack, not a self-subsisting substance.

Chaos is the source of human misery, because every act of thought and every action arises through ordering, distinction, and relation.
Where relation is torn, the possibility of meaning disappears.

This sliding into chaos is also the cause of forgetting that religion — insofar as it reveals who God is and to what order established by Him one must conform — cannot be deprived of influence over other areas of human activity.

As I argued in my master’s thesis:

Liberation from the influence of religion — secularization — is the fundamental principle of autonomization in modern culture.
This autonomization permits a misconceived pluralism of religions, cultures, and worldviews.
It is possible only when, in people’s consciousness, what they still call “religion” loses its all-encompassing and supreme function — and thus ceases to be their real religion.

I referred to this phenomenon as religionalization.

The religious function does not disappear — it is an anthropological constant.
Nor does the religious need disappear.
It tolerates no vacuum.
If religion is removed, something else takes its place — something that is not religion.

Human beings sometimes try to extinguish a fire with gasoline, or stubbornly press the button that closes a gate while expecting it to open.
When it does not, they press harder.
It is difficult for people to realize their error, because their language has been detached from reality, and the verifier of truth relocated from reality itself to its media-, book-, and internet-based simulacra.

The forgetting of the importance of the Everything as Order is inseparable from forgetting God — who establishes that order and therefore ought to be the goal and point of reference for all human actions and all elements of culture.

Paul Ricoeur observed that in modernity the so-called hierophanies have faded: the signs of the sacred have been forgotten, and humanity has lost the sense of belonging to the sacred — though I do not claim that he shared the evaluative stance presented here.

The foundation of reality is bond.
Therefore, the tearing of this bond constitutes the fundamental error of modern Western culture.

The dissolution of natural social bonds — bonds with tradition and authority, with ancestors and successors, with the continuity of offices and institutions — leads to profound distortions of both communal and personal life.

The human being cannot exist in isolation.
Indeed, nothing exists in isolation.
The identity of things and persons emerges from relation.
The world is systemic — and this is the very foundation of rationality and science.

A generation that attempts to construct the world entirely “from scratch,” rejecting what is received, condemns itself to disorientation.
For it denies a fundamental truth: that we are constituted by bonds with what transcends us — with Tradition and with Transcendence.

Without an imposed — yes, imposed — language, communication would be impossible.
A Tower of Babel of individual expressions would arise.
The same applies to the “language” of culture, rituals, forms of worship, and non-verbal signs, which provide the context that stabilizes meaning and roots words in reality.

Even the sciences increasingly refer to attempts to reject transcendence altogether as the “Darkness of the Enlightenment.”

In this light, so-called “primitive” peoples, often dismissed as superstitious, appear more rational:
for them, the existence of mystery and higher powers was self-evident, as was the interconnectedness of all things.

The problem of Europe is not an external religion, but an internal logic of self-destruction, manifested in the systematic tearing of bonds:
the bond with God; the bonds between the spheres of culture; between symbol and practice; between worldview (including religion) and public life; between language and reality; between form and content; between body and soul; between temporality and Eternity.

The errors referred to here as diseases will be discussed in Chapter Three.
Here, let us pause for a moment to examine the nature of the Sign and the Ritual.

Folk Rituals and Symbolic Cultural Forms as an Icon of the Divine Cosmos

The relational structure of the segments of the Cosmos finds its expression in the Icon—a form that metonymically makes present within itself that which surpasses it.
Folk symbolism and ritual practice may therefore be called an Icon of the Divine Order: a “Holy Sign” through which we more easily remember and re-enact Meaning.

God has given us such minds—material minds, sensitive to external stimuli, clothed in concrete forms. There is no point in denying this.

Some scholars once claimed that so-called “primitive peoples” confuse the signified with the signifier. Similar claims were made about the attitude of Eastern Christians toward the Icon. And although these scholars were familiar with the mechanism of making-present (re-presentation), they seemed to forget it precisely when analyzing these cases.

I believe that this misjudgment of popular faith resulted from the inability of intellectuals to perceive, in concrete situations, that the “peasant” does not treat a roadside shrine as the shrine itself—
but, through it, sees Mary,
and through Mary, God.
(Three semiotic levels.)

A similar misunderstanding afflicted Protestants, and earlier the iconoclasts, when they objected to the “veneration of images.”
Yet the problem was an imagined one.

There was no idolatry here—only the strong and proper relation to symbols described above.
The same relation occurs when one carries a photograph or an object belonging to a beloved person.
From a distance, it may appear that one presses a glove to one’s heart;
in truth, one is embracing the living person.

(This becomes fully rational once we accept the conclusions concerning the iconic sign presented in the previous chapter.)

Cyprian K. Norwid expressed this intuition beautifully:

One who loves wishes to see even a shadow of the image,
A trace leading to the beloved’s dwelling,
Arms outstretched like a signpost,
A cross, a litany’s calling voice,
Even a stone tower rising into lightning—
To behold the face of God.
(…)
And every other Love without incarnation
Is but a ghostly thinking of thinking…

Representatives of former elites implanted in our mentality a suspicion that led us to suppress, both in ourselves and in society, behaviors wrongly interpreted as the worship of images themselves—as a confusion of signifier and signified.

We have been poisoning ourselves with a medicine for a disease we never had.
We fail to notice that the very remedy administered to us produces the illness we seek to cure.
And we take even more of this poison, believing it will help.

As a result, this “treatment” corrupts all signs.
We begin to focus on material symbols themselves;
we contemplate the beauty of the image as such, without passing beyond it;
we recognize the meanings of isolated signs, but fail to weave them into a coherent whole.

It is as if we knew every word in the dictionary, yet could not form a sentence—let alone a coherent narrative.

This false remedy is anti-formalism: the claim that “external form does not matter; only content does.”

Under its influence, we have forgotten that the human being needs external form precisely because he is weak, and without form he loses content.
We have torn matter away from meaning.
As a result, the word “content” itself has become an empty form.

An excess of words, verbal pedantry, an idealized fixation on language detached from reality—these have caused the word to lose its weight, to undergo inflation, and to lose its power.

We have yielded to the ancient temptation that C. S. Lewis placed in the mouths of devils:

“To the cruel ages we warn against Sentimentalism;
to the vain and slothful, against Respectability;
to the lustful, against Puritanism;
and when all are sliding into slavery or tyranny,
we whisper that Liberalism is the greatest danger.”

Therefore today the necessary remedy is the rehabilitation of material form, of ritual, and of embodied symbolic practice.
We must restore these forms to their proper place.
We must restore the folk way of seeing reality—the ordinary, familiar world—through ritual and symbol, as through an Icon of Heaven.

Traditional–Folk–Ritual–Sacred–Religious–Rational Cultures

“The myths were waiting for the One
in whom the object of longing
would become
reality.”
— Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth

Calling Forth the Sacred Beginning as the Way of Renewal and Meaning

One of the rational necessities (explored earlier in the chapter on knowledge) is deficiency — the structural lack that makes it possible for the human being to contradict himself.
The whole of reality and its order becomes ruptured whenever one attempts to step outside it, to abandon that order.
Outside the All, there is only nothing.

The order of reality is the whole of creation, whose coherence rests upon the Will of God.
Free will — the condition of the greatest gift, the most perfect Bond, which is love — makes it possible for us to renounce this order, to oppose it.
Such opposition can be understood as the making of holes in the created whole.
It is a breach of continuity, which leads to the disturbance of order — and thus to Chaos.

The world was created as Order — a sacred, desired, and domesticated space in which the human being flourishes.
And this Order, the Cosmos, wages an eternal struggle against Chaos.

Chaos — unlike Order — has no self-subsistence.
Its triumph is temporary and illusory.
To overcome it, ritual is required.

Rituals aim to restore the primordial order lost through the deficiency that trails behind the human being cast into the stream of time.
They are the cyclical attempt to participate anew in the Creative Act.
They accompany the fundamental events and actions of life: birth, marriage, death, work inscribed in natural cycles, the preparation of bread, the building of a home, the establishment of new states, transitions into new social roles.

Without them, the fragility of human effort and the constant experience of our own deficiency become unbearably inexplicable.
And so, quite irrationally, people expel from consciousness the ever‑present cognitive truth: the existence of error, toil, and death.

The conviction of the real power of ritual, shared by its participants, expresses a natural human need — a need that man could never fully satisfy on his own.
Ritual attempts collided painfully with their own insufficiency and incompleteness.
Their aim was the restoration of a world continually decaying — understood as a re‑creation, a calling forth of the state of the Mythic Beginning, before Time, before corruption.
It was in this primordiality that people located the perfect state of all things.

Christianity, in the Person of Christ, became — for Catholics — the real fulfillment of this longing.
It is no accident that Christ took up the pagan images summed up in the Cross‑Tree of Life.
It is no small detail that God became Flesh, descended into history, into the post‑sinful time that subjects primordial perfection to barrenness, death, and impurity.

Christ, remaining present in the Holy Mass, gave humanity the possibility of participating in the transforming, restoring Great Ritual.
And there are also rituals with a small “r,” whose necessity the Great Ritual does not abolish — on the contrary.
They form, as God Himself confirmed through word and deed in the Gospel, the fertile soil, the context without which the Seed of the Gospel and the Most Holy Sacrifice cannot be understood and cannot grow.

We must still bear the consequences of sin.
We therefore need to order every fragment of our daily life — along with our psychological condition and social order.

Abandoning ritual in everyday life destroys this context, and with it the understanding of the Gospel’s meaning.
Their presence allows us to remember the criteria of proper order, by which we can resist seductive proposals until the time of bearing sinful consequences comes to an end.
Ritual marking of life helps us truly live the faith.

Order, Boundaries, and the Center of the World

For this reason, it is essential for the human being to distinguish Cosmos from chaos, and the particular places within the Cosmos.
Hence the importance of boundaries — thresholds of homes, temples, windows, altar rails…

On thresholds a person feels “in‑between,” suspended between two states — or, in ritually charged situations, such a place may signify exceptionality, a connection with Heaven, as when we kneel at the altar rail to receive Holy Communion.

Without boundaries, distinction disappears — and thus order, and thus the proper place of things within the web of relations that constitutes reality.
Illicit presence on a boundary is a reminder of the danger of relativism — the loss of one’s proper place in the Cosmos.

This is symbolized by prohibitions against standing on thresholds, greeting someone there, or the custom of carrying a bride over the threshold to protect her from dangerous indeterminacy, contrary to the proper place assigned from the Beginning.
Where indeterminacy appears, temptation and subtle evil follow.

You may think this is superstition.
But let me ask you: are you not corrected when you repeatedly break linguistic rules in ways that irritate others and hinder understanding?
The prohibition of standing on a threshold is analogous — one element of a language built not of words but of things, spaces, time, clothing, interpersonal relations, and actions.
Words are only one element of this language.

Non‑verbal signs also have not only a lexicon but a grammar.
There are precise rules: who offers a hand first, who yields a seat.
These rules have established meaning.

And just as changing one letter in a sentence can alter its meaning entirely, so changing one custom or gesture can destroy the meaning of an entire culture — a meaning that always exceeds words.
All the more so when it concerns the Great Ritual, which concentrates the key values and worldview of a culture.

The Home, the Temple, and the Center

Why did I mention the threshold of the home?
Because in traditional cultures the home is meant to reflect the order of the universe and to serve as its center for those who dwell within it.
The universe, in turn, reflects the heavens, whose vestibule is the temple — the model for the home.
The temple is where the human being desires to see the Real presence of the One Holy, Creative, and Transforming God.

This Center, perceived in various fragments of the fractally woven universe, provides orientation points, enabling us to distinguish parts from one another and to assign them their proper places.

Thus the human being finds meaning — and therefore order — by establishing centers around himself.
They are the source of familiarity, of distinguishing one’s own from the foreign.

This is why churches were oriented toward the East; their altar was — in each case — the center of the temple and of the universe.
And indeed, it still is.
Likewise, the Holy Land — the symbolic East — was regarded as the center of the world.

For similar reasons, being on so‑called Calvaries can be understood as dwelling not only in the place but in the time of Christ’s life and Passion.
For Christians, this is the one time and the one place of genesis — identical with the trans‑historical creation of the world, yet concretely grafted into history.
It grants access to the Beginning.

Thus in the home the hearth became the central point, and the “holy corner” with sacred images — opposite the hearth, above the table — became the orienting point.
Cities and villages were likewise arranged around the temple.

One may say that in this way the religious person seeks to re‑create the work of God — the work in which he longs to dwell.

The Cross as the Center

For the Christian, the center became the altar, and thus the Cross.
The Cross expresses the truth that the human being cannot lift himself to the desired perfection and eternity — only the Perfect One can accomplish this.

The horizontal beam of the Cross, as Norwid wrote following ancient authors, is the image of human, alienated nature, lifted to its essence by God, who first had to descend to the human level.
It is a yoke raised upward along the vertical beam — the true axis mundi, the axis and stake of the world, and at the same time the Tree of Life at the navel of the earth — images present in most traditional cultures.

Upon it occurred the Perfect Fulfillment expressed in the words “Consummatum est.”
And in this mystical realization of symbols, the universal images of Bread, Table‑Altar, and kinship through the sharing of Body and the union of Blood were united.

A profound exposition of the symbolism of the Cross in Scripture and in the entire ancient world is found in Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy.
Allow me here to introduce an extended quotation:

Ritual as Semiotic Repair of Reality

Ritual is not primarily expression, performance, or symbolism understood in the modern, aesthetic sense.
It is an act of repair.

It is the repeated attempt to mend the breaches introduced by human deficiency — the ontological lack that accompanies man once he is cast into time.

Rituals do not merely represent order; they re-inscribe it.

They are cyclical participations in the Creative Act itself, enacted at precisely those moments when the fragility of human existence becomes most evident:

birth and death,
marriage and sexual union,
work bound to natural cycles,
the preparation of bread,
the construction of a dwelling,
the assumption of new social roles,
transitions across existential thresholds.

Without such ritual acts, the persistent experience of error, effort, suffering, and death becomes unintelligible.
Human consciousness, unable to bear this tension, then irrationally represses what it nevertheless constantly knows to be true.

The Natural Need That Ritual Cannot Fully Satisfy

The belief in the real efficacy of ritual is not naïveté.
It is the expression of a natural anthropological need.

Yet all pre-Christian ritual cultures encountered the same limit:
their rites were never sufficient.

They could point toward restoration, but could not finally accomplish it.
They attempted re-creation, but always encountered their own incompleteness.

What they sought was the state of the Mythic Beginning — before time, before decay, before death.
Perfection was always located in a primordial past, never fully reachable.

Christ as Fulfillment, Not Abolition, of Ritual

From the Catholic perspective, Christianity does not negate this longing — it fulfills it.

In the Person of Christ, the desire encoded in ritual becomes reality.

This is why Christianity did not reject the symbolic language of pagan cultures, but assumed and purified it.
The Cross as the Tree of Life is not an arbitrary metaphor; it is the convergence of a universal symbolic grammar.

God became Flesh.
He entered history — that post-lapsarian time in which primordial perfection is subject to sterility, corruption, and death.

By remaining present in the Holy Mass, Christ granted humanity participation in the Great Ritual — the only ritual that truly restores what was lost.

Small Rituals and the Semiotic Ecology of Faith

Crucially, the Great Ritual does not abolish the necessity of smaller, everyday rituals.

On the contrary.

As the Gospel itself confirms through word and gesture, these minor rituals constitute the semiotic soil without which the Seed of the Gospel cannot be understood and cannot grow.

The consequences of sin remain operative.
Therefore, the ordering of daily life — psychological, social, spatial — remains necessary.

When ritual disappears from ordinary life, the interpretive context of faith collapses.
The Gospel becomes opaque, moralized, or abstract.

Ritualized life preserves the criteria of order, enabling resistance to seductive but disintegrating alternatives until the time of final restoration.

Ritual marking of life is thus not decorative — it is existential.
It allows faith to be lived rather than merely affirmed.

Order, Boundaries, and the Grammar of Reality

Thresholds as Semiotic Danger Zones

For this reason, distinguishing between Cosmos and chaos — and between places within the Cosmos — is essential.

Hence the importance of boundaries:
thresholds of homes and temples, windows, altar rails.

The threshold is a liminal space.
Unregulated presence there produces indeterminacy.

In ritually framed contexts, however, such spaces can signify exceptional communion — as when kneeling at the altar rail to receive Holy Communion.

Without boundaries, distinction collapses.
Without distinction, order disappears.
Without order, things lose their proper place within the relational web of reality.

Illegitimate dwelling on the boundary becomes an embodied reminder of relativism — the loss of one’s place in the Cosmos.

This is why traditional cultures forbade standing on thresholds or greeting someone there, and why brides were carried across them.
These gestures are not superstition but non-verbal grammar.

Non-Verbal Language and Cultural Meaning

Reality speaks in more than words.

There exists a language composed of spaces, gestures, clothing, timing, roles, and relations.
Words are only one layer of this semiotic system.

Like verbal language, non-verbal signs possess both lexicon and grammar.

Rules governing who offers a hand first or who yields a seat are not arbitrary.
They carry meaning.

Just as altering one letter can invert the meaning of a sentence, altering one ritual gesture can destabilize an entire culture — especially when it concerns the Great Ritual that concentrates a civilization’s vision of reality.

Center, Orientation, and the Structure of Meaning

Home, Temple, and World

The home, in traditional cultures, mirrors the order of the universe.
It functions as a center.

The temple, in turn, is the vestibule of Heaven — the archetype of the home.

Centers provide orientation.
They distinguish the familiar from the foreign, the ordered from the chaotic.

This is why churches were oriented toward the East.
Each altar was — and remains — the center of the universe.

Similarly, the Holy Land was understood as the symbolic center of the world.

Calvaries enable not merely spatial but temporal participation — access to the singular moment of genesis where history and creation intersect.

The Cross as Axis Mundi

For the Christian, the ultimate center is the altar — and thus the Cross.

The Cross expresses the truth that humanity cannot raise itself to perfection.
Only the Perfect One can do so.

The horizontal beam signifies fallen human nature, alienated and dispersed.
The vertical beam is the axis mundi, the stake of the world, the Tree of Life at the navel of the earth.

Here, the impossible is accomplished.

“Consummatum est.”

In this act, the universal symbols of Bread, Table, Body, Blood, kinship, and sacrifice converge into a single, fulfilled semiotic reality.

A profound exposition of the symbolism of the Cross as contained in the Bible and in the entirety of ancient culture is found in Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy.
Allow me at this point to introduce an extended quotation:

We may therefore say that in the sign of the Cross, together with the Trinitarian invocation, the entire essence of Christianity is summed up, that what constitutes Christianity’s distinctive mark is here made present.
And yet — or rather precisely for this reason — this sign opens for us a path leading into the realm of the history of religions and into God’s message contained in creation itself.

In 1873, Greek and Hebrew funerary inscriptions from the time of Jesus were discovered on the Mount of Olives, accompanied by signs of the Cross. Archaeologists were compelled to assume that these were the graves of the earliest Christians. From around 1945 onward, discoveries of Jewish graves marked with the sign of the Cross have multiplied, dating roughly to the first century after Christ. These findings can no longer be interpreted as belonging to the first generation of Christians; rather, they force us to assume that the sign of the Cross was already at home within Jewish religious culture itself.
How, then, are we to understand this?

The key lies in the Book of Ezekiel (9:4ff.):
“Pass through the city, through Jerusalem, and mark a sign — a Taw — upon the foreheads of those who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.”

In the dreadful catastrophe that is to come, those who do not participate in the sin of the world but suffer because of it for God’s sake, maintaining distance from it, are to be sealed with the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Taw — written in the form of a cross (“T,” “+,” or “X”).
The letter Taw, which indeed had the shape of a cross, thus became a sign of belonging to God.

Erich Dinkler demonstrated that cultic marking — on the hands and the forehead — had various precedents in the Old Testament and that this custom was also known in New Testament times; in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation (7:1–8) takes up the guiding idea of Ezekiel’s vision.
Funerary finds and contemporary texts show that in certain circles of Judaism, the Taw was widespread as a sacred sign — a sign of confession of the God of Israel and at the same time a sign of trust in His protection.

In summarizing his reflections, Dinkler states that in the Taw shaped like a cross, “the whole confession of faith is condensed into a single sign,” and that “a reality filled with faith and hope is inscribed into a visible image — an image that is more than mere representation, an image from which one expects above all a saving power” (p. 24).

Christians, insofar as we can determine, did not originally adopt this Jewish symbol of the Cross; rather, they arrived at the Cross from the depths of their own faith, recognizing in it the sum of that faith.
Yet could not Ezekiel’s vision of the saving Taw, and the entire tradition based upon it, later have appeared to them as an anticipation of the future?
Was it not precisely in the Cross that the mysterious meaning of the Taw was finally “unveiled” (cf. 2 Cor 3:18)?
Did it not now become clear to whom this sign truly belonged and from whom it derived its power?
Could Christians not see in all this an approach toward the Cross of Christ, which truly transformed the Taw into a saving power?

The Fathers of the Church from the Greek cultural sphere were even more deeply moved by another discovery. In Plato they found a striking image of the Cross inscribed into the cosmos itself. Plato himself had taken this from the Pythagorean tradition, which in turn was inspired by ancient Eastern thought.

This concerns above all interpretations of astronomical phenomena. The two great movements of the heavenly bodies known to ancient astronomy — the ecliptic (the great circle on the celestial sphere along which the apparent motion of the Sun takes place) and the orbit of the Earth — intersect, forming together the Greek letter chi, which also has the shape of a cross (“X”).
Thus the sign of the Cross is inscribed into the cosmos as a whole.

Plato, following older tradition, connected this with the image of divinity. The Demiurge (the creator of the world) stretched out the soul of the world “in the shape of the letter X throughout the whole universe.”

Justin Martyr, a native of Palestine and the first philosopher among the Fathers († c. 165), discovered these Platonic texts and did not hesitate to relate them to the doctrine of the Triune God and His saving action in Jesus Christ.
Justin perceives in the image of the Demiurge and the world-soul a premonition of the mystery of the Father and the Son — a premonition requiring correction, but one that nevertheless allows such correction.

What Plato says about the soul of the world appears to Justin as a foreshadowing of the coming of the Logos, the Son of God.
Hence Justin states that the sign of the Cross, which holds together the whole of creation, is the supreme symbol of the dominion of the Logos.

Consequently, the Cross of Golgotha constitutes part of the structure of the cosmos itself; the instrument of suffering upon which the Lord died is inscribed into the very structure of the universe.
The cosmos speaks to us of the Cross, and the Cross unlocks for us the mystery of the cosmos.
It is the true key to all reality.

History and cosmos belong to one another.
If we open our eyes, we can read the message of Christ in the language of the universe — and at the same time, Christ grants us the gift of understanding His message present in creation.

From the time of Saint Justin onward, this Platonic “prophecy of the Cross” and the revealed bond between cosmos and history became one of the principal motifs of patristic theology.
How profoundly moving it must have been for the Fathers to discover that the philosopher who gathered and interpreted the most ancient traditions spoke of the Cross as the seal of the universe.

Saint Irenaeus of Lyons († c. 200), the true founder of systematic theology in its Catholic form, writes in his apologetic work Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching that Christ,
“because He is the Word of Almighty God, who according to the invisible plan extends everywhere in the world and embraces its length and breadth and height and depth — since through the Word God governs all things — was also crucified in these four directions, the Son of God already marked out beforehand in the universe according to the plan of the Cross.”

This statement of a great Father of the Church contains a biblical citation of immense importance for a biblical theology of the Cross.
The Letter to the Ephesians exhorts us, “rooted and grounded in love,” to comprehend with all the saints “what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (3:18–19).

Without doubt, this letter — originating in the Pauline school — alludes to the Cross and likely takes up religious traditions concerning the world-tree in the form of a Cross that holds the universe together — an image also known in India.

Saint Augustine offered a magnificent existential interpretation of this passage.
He sees here an image of the dimensions of human life and a reference to the Crucified Christ, whose arms embrace the world, whose path descends into the abyss of the underworld and ascends to the heights of God Himself.

Hugo Rahner gathered the most beautiful patristic texts on the cosmic mystery of the Cross. I would like to recall two of them here.

Lactantius († c. 325) writes:
“Thus God, in His suffering, stretched out His arms and embraced the circle of the earth, so as already to reveal that from the rising of the sun to its setting the coming people would gather beneath His wings” (p. 81).

An anonymous Greek author of the fourth century contrasts the symbol of the Cross with the cult of the sun, stating that Helios has now been conquered by the Cross, and that “the human being whom the created sun in the heavens could not instruct is now illuminated by the solar light of the Cross and enlightened [in baptism].”

The same author then cites Saint Ignatius of Antioch († c. 110), who calls the Cross the mechane — the lifting device of the cosmos toward heaven (Eph. 9:1), and exclaims:
“O truly divine wisdom! O Cross, lever toward heaven! The Cross has been planted in the earth [in the center of the world — my note], and behold, the cult of idols has been destroyed. This is no ordinary tree, but the Tree [the Tree of Life — my note] by which God achieved victory” (pp. 87–88).

In His eschatological discourse, Jesus foretold that at the end of time “the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven” (Mt 24:30).
With the eyes of faith, His sign could already be recognized as inscribed in the cosmos from the beginning of the world, and in the cosmos Christians could see confirmation of their faith in the Crucified Redeemer.

Thus they knew simultaneously that the paths of religious history had always been leading toward Christ, that humanity’s expectation — expressed in many images — was directed precisely toward Him.
Conversely, this meant that philosophy and religion — the mythologies of the various religions of our globe, their universal structures in different variations and fulfillments — bestowed upon faith images and concepts through which it could finally understand itself fully.

“You shall be a blessing,” God said to Abraham at the beginning of salvation history (Gen 12:2).
In the Son of Abraham, Christ, this word was fulfilled.
He is blessing — blessing for all creation and for all humanity.

Therefore the Cross, which is His sign both in heaven and on earth, had to become of itself the true Christian gesture of blessing.

By marking ourselves with the sign of the Cross, we enter into the power of Christ’s blessing;
with the sign of the Cross we mark those whom we wish to bless;
with the sign of the Cross we mark the things that accompany us in life and which we wish, as it were, to receive anew from the hand of Christ.

Through the Cross we may become blessings to one another.

I shall never forget the devotion and care with which my parents blessed us — their children — with the sign of the Cross when we left the house; and when we parted for a longer time, they traced the sign of the Cross with holy water upon our foreheads, lips, and hearts.
This blessing accompanied us, and we knew that it guided us.
It made visible the prayer of our parents that went with us, and expressed the certainty that it rested upon the blessing of the Savior.

The parental blessing was at the same time a kind of obligation upon us not to leave the space of that blessing.
Blessing is a priestly act, and in this sign of the Cross we felt the priesthood of our parents — its particular dignity and power.

I believe that blessing with the sign of the Cross, as a full expression of the common priesthood of all the baptized, should once again — and with greater strength — enter into daily life and permeate it with the power of Christ’s love.
(J. Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, from: „Duch Liturgii”, Dębogóra 2005, s. 196-202)

Tradition — the Bonds That Liberate vs. the Terror of Innovation

Tradition as the Sign of the Beginning — the Fourth Commandment and Hierarchical Obedience as the Reflection of Creation’s Dependence on the Creator

Tradition — the Sense of Connection with the Beginning

Creation expresses itself through intergenerational transmission. Together with social hierarchies, this transmission signals the relationship between the Creator and the created. Only what comes from God can truly be good.

Recognizing the tradition of our ancestors increases the likelihood that what has been passed down remains unaltered by arbitrary interference. If our ancestors conveyed the principle of transmission — reflected also in the Fourth Commandment — they likely received what was essential from their own predecessors, tracing back to the Beginning. At least, we have no better guarantee.

Christ did not reject this tradition, as selective quotations of Scripture might suggest. He condemned not tradition itself, but bad traditions, which can always arise. He revealed the true Law, in which not even a single jot may be altered.

Tampering with a single element of the interconnected whole risks disrupting the entire order — and with it, the meaning of reality. Only what aligns with the structure conceived by God is meaningful. God is the ultimate Meaning — the Logos.

This unspoken intuition led traditional cultures to guard the immutability of their inherited heritage, tracing it back to what was “in the beginning.” It was, in fact, rational. Mental projections are synchronic, suspended beyond time, as Leszek Kołakowski observed: “human thinking is habitually structuralist.”

The perfect fulfillment of the longings expressed in traditional rituals is Jesus Christ. He rooted the true Beginning in history, transforming humanity and opening a path to perfection that had previously been unreachable — rolling the Sisyphean stone to the summit… of Golgotha.

Bread — Body — Home — Temple — Cosmos — Heavens

Bread offers a vivid example. In many traditional cultures — not only Catholic — it symbolized Creation: transforming chaos into cosmos, formless matter into order and identity, anchored in the Logos. The shape acquired in baking, linked to fire, symbolized divine transformative power. For this reason, hearths and fires — sustaining the renewal of the world — burned continuously, except at liminal moments such as Good Friday.

Bread also symbolized the human body and creation, occurring in the woman’s womb as a direct act of God. Hence, in traditional cultures, women — often mothers — held the privilege of baking bread in secrecy. This secrecy reflected the transcendence of the Creator, the ontological gulf between God and creation, which had sinned and become unworthy of direct sight.

Christ fulfilled the longings expressed in the bread ritual. First, as the Logos, He became Flesh. Then He gave Himself to humanity as Bread, uniting perfectly with the faithful, renewing them and restoring them to original Grace.

The exceptional regard for women in traditional mystical cultures testifies to God’s activity within them, culminating in the Immaculate Conception and the Virginity of Mary.

Fire

A true dream my mother had years ago illustrates this: she dreamt she had died and floated near the ceiling of our childhood cottage. She begged the family to “turn on the light,” but it was dark. Finally, she clarified — she meant fire, a candle.

The psyche deeply needs living fire: visual, auditory, thermal, even tactile contact. It is among the most powerful therapeutic forces. No wonder fire, sacred flames, and the Sun were central to most cultures — in huts, palaces, and temples alike.

I suspect that depriving people of fire is one of the ways bonds forming the foundations of culture and civilization are severed. Eco-zealots who forbid fireplaces and stoves will one day grieve more bitterly than those who once discouraged breastfeeding under the guise of “scientific” data — data I would call grant-driven.

The Purpose of Tradition Is Progress

The Religiosity of “Folk” Cultures as an Innate and Proper Feature of Humanity

Tradition is the intergenerational transmission and preservation of what may be difficult or unpleasant in the short term, because it requires self-denial. Yet, such practices often prove better and healthier than innovations that bring immediate benefits but ultimately weaken or destroy individuals and societies. Our civilization is dying precisely because it has forgotten this principle and function of tradition. Worse, it has made the negation of tradition into a principle in the name of short-term results. Viewed humanly, this trajectory can only end in catastrophe.

“Traditionality” is a feature that can be attributed to nearly all cultures in history. Even the deliberate negation of tradition eventually becomes a tradition itself. Non-conformity inevitably hardens into a convention. Such paradoxes reveal the illogic of the attitudes people declare—anti-traditionalism, anti-formalism—and simultaneously reveal the internal logic of the attitudes opposed to them. These attitudes are often labeled, with equal perversity, as illogical, “pre-logical,” or irrational.

Traditionality is, in fact, rational. It enables communication. If language were not handed down from our ancestors—effectively imposed—we could never understand one another. Each person would babble in a private idiom, comprehensible only to themselves. In truth, language might never have arisen at all; what use is a language that only I understand? Anti-traditionalism—one of the four key diseases of the West identified here—leads to the disintegration and chaos of a civilization, despite the “tolerance” it flaunts. It functions exactly as in the biblical account of the Tower of Babel.

At its core, traditionality consists in transmitting between generations the means that bring one closer to the goal—perfection. These means serve as the engine of what we might today call “progress,” though understood in a very specific sense. This progress, or renewal, consists in a return to the state of genesis, to the primordial perfection eroded by the tooth of linear time. It is renewed symbolically by insertion into cyclical time, time that always begins anew from the moment of creation. One might call this renewal a re-beginning, following the terminology of C. K. Norwid.

People often clung to the means themselves as if they were ends, thereby negating the essence of their own tradition. True effort within religious cultures bore fruit only when they sought to bring “tradition” closer to “Tradition.” Such an effort constitutes the consistent realization of universal principles characteristic of these cultures. One of these principles states that there exists a higher order, a real essence of human beings and the world, toward which one must strive.

If one must strive toward it, one does not yet dwell in it—it is a goal. And if it is a goal, then the temporal human being, and indeed all of creation, is deficient, alienated from its essence. In Christian terms, this alienation is the consequence of original sin.

This assumption was rarely verbalized by those who lived within it. It was an obvious truth, so articulation was unnecessary except through practice. What mattered was that meaning was read from the entire structure of life, of which the spoken word was only one element. The word was not always required for transmitting content. Yet it possessed a higher, sacred status. It implied responsibility and carefulness in speech, encouraging verbal restraint.

Describing reality solely through words became a specialized domain, reserved for those who could devote themselves fully to it. Reflection—so heavily linguistic—was therefore the preserve of higher and spiritual classes. This specialization came at a cost: over time, these higher classes became increasingly blind to non-verbal signs.

During the rise of Protestantism, and later during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the aim arose to make the common people into a “higher class.” Consequently, it seemed obvious that the entire society must understand, describe, and organize its life through language, specifically written language. It seemed natural to seek the meaning of the Gospel only in the language of the Bible, excluding anything not sufficiently expressed in words (Sola Scriptura). Later movements sought to create “national languages” and instill them in the masses through schooling, press, and media.

Such verbalization ignored the fact of alienation. Language cannot keep pace with the Logos. Human understanding does not immediately grasp all the meanings contained in Scripture. The whole of human action ought to function as a kind of meaningful “language.”

Finally, this alienation was forgotten altogether when people were thrust into the whirlwind of lifestyle change. The whirlwind was so rapid and compressed that they had no time to inscribe the new way of life into mythic structures, no time to cosmize it, to order it, to orient it toward the Supreme Meaning. Attention shifted to the effects of human actions—effects that once depended on that Meaning—and these effects were mistaken for ends in themselves.

Religion, by Its Nature, Intermingles with Everything

Traditional cultures share yet another characteristic: the real presence of religion in every sphere of life.
The moral system is a subset of religion, and it is religion that regulates social relations, political structures, family life, and individual behavior.
Acknowledging the authority of the Sacred is taken for granted; the “Enthronement of God” is, in these cultures, something already accomplished by definition.
One could say that recognizing such a supreme, all‑embracing Authority is the very principle without which one cannot speak of religion at all — and certainly not of a transcendent religion such as Catholicism.
Here, worldview neutrality is impossible.
One is either a follower of the religion, or one is not.
And to be a follower requires fulfilling its commands in every sphere of life.

These cultures share similar questions and aspirations, as well as a distinctive way of classifying reality — one in which clarity and opposition are emphasized far more strongly than in the so‑called “progressive culture,” which blurs the boundaries between good and evil, woman and man, truth and falsehood, sacred and profane, beauty and ugliness.
The existence of clear moral boundaries goes hand in hand with a kind of “interpenetration” that offends the sensibilities of the progressive‑autonomist worldview: the interpenetration of religion with all other domains of life.

Traditional cultures also share:

a stronger centralization,
a sense of symmetry,
a cyclical ordering of reality (not mathematically precise, but “approximately”),
and a hierarchical structuring of oppositions, values, society, duties, and the surrounding world.

They are deeply attached to what, in their understanding, has been established by the Sacred as the proper place of things — something originating beyond time and space, and therefore unchangeable, non‑relative, enduring.

Modernity?

What we call “modernity” is largely the result of decisions and actions taken over several centuries, which — in the name of progress — sought to negate and eradicate the above traditional features, dismissing them as signs of backwardness, hypocrisy, or superstition.
There have been several such periods in history when the natural ways of classifying reality were rejected for precisely these reasons.

But was such rejection possible?
No.
A human being cannot rid himself of what is his necessary and primordial cognitive tool.
Yet within this necessity — after original sin — lies distortion, inconsistency, and self‑contradiction.
And such is the rejection of the categories by which the world was ordered in what anthropologists call “folk taxonomy.”

What is essential in this taxonomy — what is shared across human groups — was once the obvious way of thinking about the world, uniting all layers of openly hierarchical societies.
It remained obvious until these obvious truths began to be denied, and the denial itself was woven into the collective consciousness of a culture.

Unfortunately, this denial is the core of contemporary progressive civilization.
The rejection of so‑called “backwardness” has become an unquestioned assumption even among Catholics — an assumption that attacks the earlier, traditional truths shared by all humanity at its core.

Our understanding of the world is thus a constant struggle between what has been given to us — I do not hesitate to say, as an intended component of human nature — and what human beings, through the misuse of free will, have invented in an attempt to negate that primordial component.
Man imagined that his essence depends on his own will, that it is whatever the individual’s current whim declares it to be.

In Traditional Cultures, Everything Is Referred to the Sacred

In traditional cultures, most actions were undertaken in reference to the Sacred.
The sacred shaped the secular — not the other way around, as is often the case today.
In the modern desacralized world, there is a deliberate effort to strip everything of this reference.
Even what is called “holy” is deprived of most of the qualities that would indicate holiness.

Thus, even someone who sincerely believes that the sacred should guide the secular often cannot concretely understand this relationship, because he no longer knows where the sacred ends and the profane begins.
Or he accepts false criteria for these categories and unknowingly distorts the relationship in practice.

This is why contemporary Catholicism often appears externally less Catholic than traditional pagan religions.
This does not mean that Catholics who do not identify with traditional forms are pagans or inferior believers.
Even aside from the traditional Catholic principle of not judging our brothers, it must be acknowledged that such attitudes are often the result of innocent ignorance and the “deception” imposed by modern culture.

Experience shows that many Catholics who reject traditional features of Catholicism as backward, hypocritical, or Pharisaical are people who sincerely desire to fulfill Christ’s will in their lives — often with fewer faults in this regard than many “traditionalists.”
They should be supported, and often imitated, in this desire, for they are more victims than culprits.
They may suffer deep inner conflicts and doubts.
If someone has turned the signpost to heaven in the wrong direction, God will reveal the right path to them — in life or after death.

They will reach heaven if they desire it and believe, for none of us could complete the journey by our own strength.
Only Christ can lead us through the final stretch to the Gates of Heaven.
Only He can set the stone firmly at the summit of the mountain.
He already has — on Golgotha.

If they err without fault, He will bring them safely to that final stretch, and no innocent sheep will be allowed to fall into the abyss.
For He is the Good Shepherd.

In truth, every member of the Universal Church carries within himself some degree of the “modern Catholic,” for we were raised in modernity and have absorbed it, willingly or not.
Even if we consider ourselves “traditionalists,” we likely misunderstand traditionality in many areas.
Often the most obvious things — those we never analyze — contradict tradition, and we never even imagined it could be so.

The Rejection of Folk Culture Is the Rejection of Its Piety

The contemporary rejection of authentic folk culture is the rejection of its piety — and thus of true religiosity, which Joseph Ratzinger described beautifully:

"Culture—as the Greeks rightly understood—is primarily a form of education. In its deepest sense, the term signifies an inner opening of the human being to his own potential. At the same time, one’s external abilities develop in accordance with individual talents.

Within the sphere of religion, culture manifests itself above all in the growth of genuine popular piety. The fact that in Latin America, despite the many shortcomings of Christian missions and despite the work still to be done, the Christian faith took deep root in the hearts of the people is expressed in this popular devotion. Here, the mystery of Christ became intimate and close to the people. Christ truly became one with them.

Consider the Passion devotion, in which suffering nations, recalling the cruel deities of their past, found in God—who suffers with them—an answer to their deepest longings.

Or consider Marian devotion, in which the human being experiences profoundly the entire mystery of the Incarnation: the delicacy of God and the inclusion of man into the very essence of God, into the essence of His action." (Ratzinger, tamże, 216)

Christ as the Fulfillment of Mythic Longings

The efforts of pre‑Christian cultures to seek the longed‑for goal were, in truth, a kind of groping in the dark.

They were attempts to know despite the impossibility of obtaining a “purely rational” proof.

They were attempts made in full awareness that there is always something beyond, that immanence draws its life from transcendence, and that every human system of thought eventually collapses into contradiction, revealing its own insufficiency.

This contradiction was unavoidable.

For as many people as there are, so many conflicting foundational assumptions can exist.

And these assumptions must exist — yet their foundation lies not in demonstration, but in faith.

Thus the human condition appeared as a kind of cognitive night.

And yet, across cultures, certain directions of searching were chosen almost instinctively.

They were inscribed in human nature.

People sought the Source, the Beginning, the lost Home — the Sacred Home.

They sought the world‑pillar, the Tree of Life, the Cross, the Cosmic Principle they longed to keep near themselves.

Although this One Source follows from the necessities of human cognition — from the rational need for the coherence of all things — the human problem was precisely this:

that somewhere, always, a fissure remained.

Some inconsistency escaped notice.

And to perceive coherence, one must first find its foundations — yet the acceptance of such a foundation must be given from above, and received in faith.

Only then can it become the object of reflection, or the experience of coherence.

Which way should one walk when darkness surrounds everything?

When every choice may be a mistake?

The human being longs to walk toward that Home.

But why should one particular path suddenly appear in the mind — a path that reveals itself as light, as a torch, as the only rational way forward?

How is it that a logical solution can be brought back into human memory?

Brought back by Whom?

How?

Why should this meaning appear rather than another, this object rather than another, this life‑experience rather than another — and in this particular order?

A person cannot plan what he will remember at any given moment.

There is always an element of cognitive uncertainty — surprising, unpredictable.

There is always the possibility that we will fail to find in memory what would make our understanding meaningful and true.

We may err.

Such is the limitation imposed on us by time and space.

And yet the human goal is always something beyond, something enduring — independent of time and space, something that determines even these dimensions.

Is not the source of such a longing a Mystery?

And yet Someone came — Someone who is both Light and Goal.

Someone who revealed the truths needed to construct a coherent vision of all reality.

Someone who reminded humanity of what was necessary, in precisely that temporal and spatial order which allowed the Meaning of everything to emerge.

All that remained was to believe.

To believe in the Light that shattered the darkness.

To believe.

Christ — the One we confess — brought a teaching that fulfilled the deepest requirements of religious cultures.

More than that: it became their Perfect Fulfillment, making them even more traditional.

He led them to the ideal they sought but could never reach — symbolized by the mythic labor of rolling the Sisyphean stone.

A stone that forever slipped from human hands.

A stone that only Christ could roll once and for all to the summit of the mountain.

The Gospel fulfilled every expectation.

It answered the unanswerable questions.

It revealed what countless traditional cultures had sought through their myths, rituals, ceremonies, laws, customs, and practices.

This is likely why Christianity — despite persecution — spread so swiftly in its first centuries.

For in Christ — historical and accessible, entering into relationship with humanity —

“the object of longing became reality.”

(as Benedict XVI expressed it in Jesus of Nazareth) [2010]

this same:

Christ as the Fulfillment of Mythic Longings

The efforts of pre‑Christian cultures to seek the longed‑for goal were, in a sense, a groping in the dark. They were attempts at knowing, despite the impossibility of obtaining a “purely rational” proof. This was done despite the ever‑present awareness that there is always something “beyond.” It was done despite the understanding that immanence has its source in transcendence, and despite the constant experience of falling into contradictions that revealed error.

This contradiction was unavoidable. For as many people as there are, so many conflicting worldview assumptions can exist. These assumptions must exist, and their foundation lies not in proof but in faith. This impossibility appeared to humans as darkness.

And yet, certain directions of searching were intuitively chosen by most cultures. They were inscribed in human nature. People sought the source, the beginning, the lost home — the Sacred Home. They sought the world‑pillar, the Tree of Life, the Cross, the Cosmic Principle they wished to keep as close as possible.

Although this One Source follows from the necessities of human cognition — from the rational need for coherence in all things — the human problem was precisely that people always overlooked some inconsistency. To perceive coherence, one must first find its foundations. But the acceptance of such a foundation must be given from above, and received in faith. Only once accepted can it become the object of reflection or the experience of coherence.

Which way should one go when darkness surrounds everything? When every choice may be a mistake? The human being longs to walk toward that home. But why should one particular path appear in the mind — a path that suddenly reveals itself as light, as a torch, as the only rational way forward? How is it that a logical solution can be brought back to human memory? Brought back by Whom? How? Why should this meaning appear rather than another, this object rather than another, this life‑experience rather than another, in this particular order?

A person cannot plan what he will remember at any given moment. There is always an element of cognitive uncertainty — surprising, unpredictable. There is always the possibility that we will fail to find in memory what would make our understanding meaningful and true. We may err. Such is the limitation imposed on us by time and space.

And yet the human goal is always something beyond, something enduring — independent of time and space, something that determines even these dimensions. Is not the source of such a state a Mystery?

And yet Someone came — Someone who is both light and goal. This Someone revealed the truths needed to construct a coherent vision of all reality. This Someone reminded us of what was necessary in precisely that temporal and spatial order which brought forth the Meaning of everything. All that remained was to believe. To believe in the light that dispelled the darkness. To believe.

Christ — the One we confess — brought a teaching that fulfilled the deepest requirements of religious cultures. More than that, it became their Perfect Fulfillment, making them even more traditional. It led them to the ideal they sought but could not reach — symbolized by the mythic labor of rolling the Sisyphean stone. Only Christ could roll the stone permanently to the summit of the mountain.

The Gospel fulfilled every expectation, answered the unanswerable questions, and revealed what countless traditional cultures had sought through their many forms: myths, rituals, ceremonies, laws, customs, and practices. This is likely why Christianity, despite persecution, spread so rapidly in its first centuries.

For in Christ — historical and accessible, entering into relationship with humanity — “the object of longing became reality.” (as Benedict XVI expressed it in Jesus of Nazareth) [2010 corrected in 2025]

Ritual Is Not Magic. Ritual Is EFFECTIVE ACTION.

Ritual is an example. Ritual is action. Not merely writing or speaking, ritual does more than present what is most important for a given community. Above all, it establishes proper attitudes, forms, and orders for people, for things, and for their constellations.

Ritual restores decaying parts of the world to their proper place, to their primordial perfection. It is a multisensory act, engaging what is most essential for life. Because of this, it becomes a powerful and persuasive marker of the attitudes and roles that are important and proper for a community.

Through ritual, a society can act harmoniously, educate the next generations, and develop. Ritual is also a message from human beings to God. Exactly like prayer.

And just like prayer — or like the writing and contemplation of Icons — ritual reminds us of the Divine Order. Human beings must constantly return to this Order, because through sin, we continually drift away from it.

Ritual is indispensable to religiosity. It is an appeal to the Sacred Beginning, to Timeless Eternity. Ritual is both a sign and an effective action that helps sustain the world in existence. Its legitimacy rests on the fact that human beings are embodied, and therefore require embodied ways of remembering their duties and repairing what decays in the post-lapsarian world.

The Holy Mass is the ritual with a capital R. All other rituals are, in a sense, its faint echo. Small-r rituals are necessary because they root the action of the Eucharistic Sacrifice in daily life, memory, and consciousness. They help transform the world according to the Divine Pattern through ordinary decisions.

Some call the Holy Mass “magic.” From a Catholic perspective, magic is the turning toward “those who falsely present themselves as gods,” the belief in the power of one’s own actions. Only God has real power. Folk rituals have sometimes been interpreted by scholars as magic incompatible with Christianity.

Christianity indeed criticizes magical practices. Yet social sciences often define magic more broadly. They may classify as “magic” acts such as belief in holy water or the blessed candle. From a Christian perspective, however, these are forms of prayer — ways of turning to God and shaping reality according to the archetype He established. This is the essence of religiosity, not magic.

Even doctrinally correct words can be understood magically — as if they were substitutes for reality. Therefore, expressing faith through words versus actions is not a contrast between magical and non-magical faith, nor between sincerity and superficiality. Words are only one kind of action, and like any action, they can be lived authentically or remain superficial and misunderstood.

Rituals Are Not Formalism

A ritual that is misunderstood, superficial, or insincere is no longer a ritual. By nature, rituals are a search for ultimate meaning and a rooting of all elements of life in that meaning. The Ultimate Meaning is identical with the Creator.

The Creator’s Will is the Sacrum — the order assigned to creation in the act of creation, in His Thought. This order was established in the mythical Beginning. In Christianity, Christ becomes the historical rooting of that Beginning.

Victor Turner wrote:

“Ritual is the complete opposite of what Reformation-era Puritanism believed it to be. Ritual is, in essence, a symphony greater than a musical one. It is — or can be — a symphony of expressive genres, a work which, unlike opera (also a multiplicity of genres), avoids theatricality through the seriousness of its fundamental references.”

“Ritual is not only multi-layered; it is capable of creatively modifying itself on any or all of its levels. And because it conveys the deepest values, it has the function of a paradigm; ritual can anticipate change as well as inscribe order into the minds and hearts of its participants.”

Turner continues:

“As a believing Catholic and an anthropologist by profession, I could not remain indifferent to the many changes introduced into the Roman Rite after the Second Vatican Council. My research among the Ndembu in Zambia was largely devoted to the study of ritual processes. I found in them similarities to the pre-conciliar rites of the Catholic Church — as well as striking differences. These ritual systems had more in common with each other than either had with the post-conciliar Catholic liturgy.”

“Both the pre-conciliar rites and the Ndembu rituals were saturated with a vivid sense of invisible presences concerned with the moral and material well-being of life: ancestors (regarded as mediators between their living kin and the High God) among Africans, and the Trinity and the saints among Catholics. Both were complex structures, the clear result of centuries of religious and social experience, condensed into a relatively small number of focal symbols, arranged aesthetically and logically ordered.”

“Both types frequently referred to traditional stories and beliefs, whose dramatic reenactment formed part of the ritual. The ancient triumphs, struggles, and sufferings of the worshipping community were continually presented to its current members; its significant figures and events lived again during the ritual.”

“At the performative level, each of these systems distinguished itself from secular culture through an ‘elevated language’: certain passages might be in an archaic tongue, while sequences in the vernacular abounded in lexical and grammatical forms no longer used in everyday speech. Prayer formulas and lofty language lifted liturgical words above the speech of the marketplace, the political stage, or the home.”(
V. Turner, Ritual, Tribal, Catholic. Article translated by the editorial team of Christianitas. Originally published in Worship, Vol. 50, No. 6, November 1976. Available online: http://christianitas.org/news/rytualne-plemienne-i-katolickie (accessed: X. AD 2020).)

Lack of Words Is Not Lack of Understanding or Sincerity of Faith

Our evaluations of folk culture come from a time when it was being penetrated and examined by the elites of Western Europe and by representatives of the academic world. This world was shaped largely in contrast to Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish traditions, placing essential emphasis on the written word and later on other forms of simulacra.

It was then that the categories we still use today to judge folk culture were created. We often fail to take into account that many accusations arose from misunderstandings. In particular, they ignored the fact that in the mouth of a peasant, words and grammatical constructions similar to those of the “lords” could mean something entirely different.

For this reason, difficulties in communication occurred not only between social classes, but also between different villages, or even between families and individuals. Let alone between peasants and researchers or administrators arriving from distant regions. Cultural codes differ on many levels. Peasants could misunderstand the “lords,” giving quick answers just to say something, and the lords could misunderstand the peasants’ replies.

Those lords might have been insensitive to the deep, even mystical meaning of gestures, of the ordering of space, of time, of clothing, or of social relations. They might simply have had a different non‑verbal “language,” such as the etiquette of savoir‑vivre. They might also have resembled the priests who looked with disdain upon the Friday fast in 1960s Ireland — priests described by the British social anthropologist Mary Douglas:

“Those responsible for making ecclesiastical decisions are, most likely due to their education, insensitive to non‑verbal signs and indifferent to their meaning. This is a fundamental problem of contemporary Christianity. It is as if liturgical signals were being interpreted by an observer who is color‑blind.”
(Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols)

"A telling example is the recent renewed interest of the English hierarchy in the Friday fast. This rule is, on the one hand, dear to a large portion of the Catholic population. On the other hand, it is not treated seriously by the clergy. In their eyes, abstaining from meat on Friday has become an empty ritual, having little to do with true religion.
In this debate, the anti‑ritualists are the clergy, while the ritualist is the type condescendingly called the “backward Irishman” (Bog Irish). This “backward Irishness” appears as an irrational, non‑verbal culture, clinging to belief in magic.
The active movement of the new catechesis tries to distance its students from “magical thinking” in order to lead them to higher forms of religious practice."

Douglas continues, providing a vivid example of this reasoning:

“When I ask my friends why these new forms are considered higher, I receive an answer in the spirit of Teilhardian evolutionism: that rational, explicit formulation and personal dedication to God are obviously more developed than their supposed opposite — formal obedience.
When I question this, I am told that ritualistic conformity is not a proper form of personal engagement and does not accompany full personality development. I am also told that replacing ritual obedience with rational engagement will give Christian life deeper meaning.
Furthermore, if Christianity is to be saved for future generations, ritualism must be uprooted — as if it were a weed choking the spirit.”
(M. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 2004: 42‑43)

Douglas further notes:

“If symbolic actions are stripped of the value they possess in themselves, the gates protecting us from the flood of chaos are opened.
Symbols are the only means of communication. They are the only means of expressing values; the main tool of thought, the only means of ordering experience. Only a ritual structure makes possible a comprehensible, wordless channel of communication.”
(M. Douglas, ibid.)

And again:

“The convinced anti‑ritualist distrusts external means of expression. He assigns value to the inner convictions of the individual.
At the same time, he looks suspiciously at speech delivered in typical, polished formulas — the hard currency of social relations — and refuses to believe that it expresses the speaker’s sincere views.
By rejecting ritual forms of speech, he deprives language of its external dimension.
Probably all religious renewal movements reject external forms. In Europe, Manichaeism, Protestantism, and now the revolt of the New Left have historically affirmed the value of the believer’s interior — and the interior of all participants — while condemning everything external.
The paradox revealed by these studies is that those who most eagerly despise ritual are not free from a longing for non‑verbal communication.”

(M. Douglas, ibid., 92‑93)

They might also have thought that if someone cannot express dogmatic faith in words, it means he does not know its content. In reality, the opposite is true. He may even understand it better than those who use elaborate terminology. Why?

“The difference between the word of the people and the written, learned word is this: the people think in images. And the learned man adds images to his thoughts. (…) The people acquire knowledge through manual work, and therefore I need not explain why they think in images: they are constantly shaping reality, thinking through plastic, embodied action… Thus I have shown the difference in folk thinking and the cause of that difference.”

(C.K. Norwid, Promethidion)

A similar point about communication and the expression of meaning has been made by contemporary anthropologists:

“People raised in a culture dominated by oral transmission — even if they have never read the Bible themselves — often grasp its symbolism more fully than those who learned the Bible primarily through Scripture. This can be explained by the nature of oral transmission, characterized by the dominance of imagistic over conceptual thinking, or synthetic over analytic thinking — and the former is the natural environment of religious symbolism.”

(M. Zowczak, Biblia ludowa)

“In folklore, the text is weakly verbalized. The main ideas of a ritual are clearer to an outside researcher than to the participants themselves; they are contained not in words but in form — in gestures, actions, colors, and shapes.”

(W. Pawluczuk, Potoczność i transcendencja)

I am tempted to clarify this last quotation by noting that the main ideas of a ritual are often overlooked by researchers precisely because they are not spoken by the people. The people themselves often understand them very well — they simply do not need to express them verbally.

A researcher who does not take into account this “image-thinking” assumes that if the informant cannot articulate something, then he does not understand it. This stems from the hasty assumption that “natural language” (spoken and mentally imagined as sound-words) is the condition for thought itself — that it is primary in relation to non-verbal modes of thinking.

Experience shows otherwise: we can know something without being able to express it in words, and at the same time we can fail to live by certain principles even when we can verbalize them precisely. For this reason, I consider the criterion of “reflective verbalization” as a measure of faith to be misleading.

Proper participation in the liturgy does not require verbal explanation of everything. Celebrating the liturgy in an unfamiliar language does not imply misunderstanding. As Romano Guardini wrote:

“The liturgical act is realized already in the very seeing of liturgical actions. The faithful, perceiving what happens on the altar and speaking the words of the liturgy, are not merely spectators — they are already performing a religious act. I once experienced this in the cathedral of Palermo, where I tangibly felt the deep concentration with which the faithful followed the Holy Saturday liturgy for hours, without looking into texts, without any ‘introductory’ explanations. Their very watching was already an act, a participation in the realization of the sacred events. The essence of the act does not lie in explanations added to gestures — that this means this or that. When the priest performs a symbolic action as a liturgical act, and the faithful read that action, then the inner meaning is received through the outward expression. Otherwise everything is a waste of time, and it would be better simply to ‘say’ what it means. For the symbol is in itself something bodily-spiritual, an expression of the invisible in the visible.”

(R. Guardini, God Far and Near, transl. Jan Koźbiał)

Scholarly misunderstandings: Protestant assumptions, false dichotomies, and the blindness of literacy

Zowczak, in Modlitwa ludowa, notes similar hasty judgments and prejudices among researchers — often shaped by Protestant assumptions. These false alternatives appear repeatedly in the works of many scholars, such as Ludwik Stomma or Pascal Boyer.

Stomma, dissecting folk culture, lists as essential features of 19th-century religiosity: ritualism, morality, and sensualism. Ritualism, he claims, manifested itself in detachment from theological foundations and in the execution of “highly precise and coherent ritual scenarios,” which often became objects of belief in themselves.

Boyer, in turn, favors reductions and oppositions that I consider unwarranted:

“Religion has a practical character. This is true of all religious ideas, beliefs, and norms. For people raised in modern European civilization, where religion is primarily a doctrine offering precise explanations of how the world was created and what happens to souls after death, such a situation may seem strange.”

Boyer sees that a certain European intellectual tradition obscures the practical dimension of religion — yet he himself falls into that tradition by opposing doctrine to practice. He assumes, in an anti-ritualistic manner, that consciousness/thought/doctrine is something opposed to practice. But it is otherwise.

What he calls “doctrine” — abstracted thought — is not the absence of practice, but its reduction to the word (and the word is a kind of practice). More precisely: its reduction to the written word, whose specificity is fixation and the possibility of accumulation. The content of faith — the so-called doctrine — can exist even where it is not compressed into words, where it is embodied in practice, of which the word is only one element. It is difficult for us to grasp because it is fleeting, or difficult to translate into our categories, since scholarship — including anthropology — relies heavily on the written word.

The case of the Kwai people

“The Kwai of the Solomon Islands operate with the concept of ancestor spirits (adalo), which perfectly illustrates the contrast between a contemplative, theological vision and a more down-to-earth imagination of supernatural beings. According to anthropologist Keesing, the religious life of the Kwai centers on contact with ancestors. How and why do ancestors intervene? What are the Wild Spirits? Where do they come from? To these questions there are no answers.”

We know only that there is no verbal answer. But we also know — as Boyer himself admits — that obvious things are rarely spoken, often not at all. And we know that words are not the only carriers of meaning. If we cannot extract a verbal answer from informants, it means only that there is no verbal answer — not that there is no “content, doctrine, or reflection.” To conclude otherwise is hasty.

This error arises from treating content and its expression as dichotomous rather than parallel and complementary — and from linguistic reductionism. In the context of Boyer’s text, representing a broader trend, one must ask: Why do we call the Kwai belief in ancestor spirits “religion”? The word religion comes from European culture…

“Theoretical justification is not always the main or most important aspect of a religious idea. Many people consider a general theoretical and logical explanation of the features and powers of beings and phenomena unnecessary. Everyone, however, imagines precisely how these phenomena may affect his life and how one should act in relation to them.”

(P. Boyer, I człowiek stworzył bogów)

This opinion is hasty. For “theory” — meaning content — is not something beside practice, something separate, but something that is the meaning of practice. The fact that it is not expressed as compressed verbal doctrine does not mean it does not exist. Its material may be non-verbal forms of expression. We cannot judge whether someone “has” doctrine or not. We can only judge whether it has a form similar to the European academic compression into words. Nothing more.

Folk Culture — Human Culture

The word lud (“the folk”) is not accidentally linked to ludzie (“people”).
What is folk is simply human.

From this perspective, it might seem pointless to distinguish “folkness,” or to claim that today people try to deny it. Yet this is exactly what I claim.

In old folk cultures, no one had yet conceived the now-fashionable idea of denying the natural principles of human thought. Folk thinking is simply human thinking: mythic, sacred, cosmological, traditional — what cultural anthropologists and sociologists often label “magical.”

We, foolish Barabbases, failed to notice that this “magic,” as defined by sociologists and other -logists, is not the same as the magic Catholicism warns against — magic opposed to it. On the contrary! According to the scholars’ own categories, one would have to conclude that Catholic religion requires this so-called “magical thinking.” Not just any magic, but Catholic magical thinking, which excludes incompatible forms of “magical thought.”

We should give priority to the vocabulary of religion, for it is religion — not science — that is total, overarching. Catholicism calls “magic” only those other forms of thought that contradict it. It rejects them not for their mythic quality, ritualism, or ceremonial character, but because those rituals enact the wrong content.

Catholicism presents itself as the fulfillment of these rituals and myths. As Benedict XVI wrote in Jesus of Nazareth:

“The myths were waiting for the One in whom the object of longing became reality.”

The problem is not that these mythic principles no longer exist, but that they are denied as superstitious or backward. Pretending they do not exist does not make them disappear. All we achieve is losing control over them.

We become defenseless before any content that satisfies our unacknowledged ritual needs. Those who possess both the means and the awareness of this power can exploit it — injecting into our minds a worldview that conveniently justifies, for example, the purchase of their products and services.

And if not them, random content will elbow its way in, saying: “Please, don’t push,” into the space that is, by its nature, religious. It enters without resistance because we ourselves swept true religion from that space, leaving the room decorated — but empty. We let ourselves be convinced that this was necessary.

As Catholics, we know that into such a vacuum, specific evil forces may enter — fallen Angels — as Jesus warned in the parable of the swept, adorned, yet empty house. Let us not forget this.

(If you are not a Catholic, listen carefully and learn the Catholic perspective, so as not to form a distorted image. Hold back your judgments. Form an opinion only after reading the entire book attentively.)

In this misguided posture, Catholics (and not only they) believe they have rejected “superstitious mythicity,” ritualism, and “folk magic,” while in reality they have surrendered control of these forces to the dictatorship of chance. The rituals embedded in daily life become less oriented toward God, and more toward entertainment, parties, shopping, music and film celebrities…

The contemporary “voice of the people” is already shaped by what sought to reshape it — ideologically organized forms of life, offered as attractive, yet rooted in self-contradiction.

Folk Culture Is Not Always Mass Culture

Folk culture is a direct connection with reality;
mass culture is mediated by mass-produced patterns, services, and goods — including informational and worldview goods.

This false idealization — the mountaintop without the path leading to it — is one of mass culture’s key features.

As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

“The mode of expression of folk music (…) grows out of an authentic encounter with the elemental experiences of human existence, and therefore expresses truth.
(…) Mass society is something entirely different from the community of life that created folk music in its old and authentic sense. The mass as such knows no direct experiences — only reproduced and standardized ones.”
(A New Song for the Lord)

The People and the Elites Complete One Another

I am compelled to address a certain misunderstanding.
It is the criticism of popular rootedness — as though defending the “people” contradicted the necessity of forming elites.
The truth is precisely the opposite.
One requires the other.

Opposing them is a serious error of false alternatives, and a symptom of adopting the revolutionary understanding of “the people” — the understanding imposed by the spokesmen of “people’s power,” who hijacked the word and turned it against the real people.
It is the trap of allowing one’s opponent to impose false definitions on ancient terms.

Following that logic, one would have to reject the Cross as the Sign of Salvation simply because various sectarians, heretics, and criminals also use it.
They too speak of “good” and “love.”
Are we therefore to abandon the words good and love?

A leader must have something to lead, and those who are led must, by nature, be far more numerous than those who lead.

Christ revealed Himself to the world as the son of a carpenter; He chose many of His apostles from among the people — fishermen — and He taught using images drawn from the work of the people, from the symbolic universe of popular belief.

The peasant uprising in the Vendée demonstrates vividly that those who invoked “the people” most loudly during the Revolution simultaneously violated the very essence of popular culture — its traditionalism and integrity.
Modern folklorism and kitschy “folk‑art” (the cepelia phenomenon) parade “the people” on their banners while contradicting its foundations — as I have discussed elsewhere in this book.

For years I have heard suggestions that I should abandon the categories “people” and “popular,” usually accompanied by the insinuation that I treat “the people” naively or idealistically.
Some perhaps imagine that since I am an ethnologist, I must be enamored of the people simply because they are “the people.”
This would be a mistaken — even perverse — understanding of ethnology, especially in its contemporary form.

Perverse, because both before and during my studies I held a critical distance toward the romantic idealization and “peasant‑mania” so common among the elites of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I chose this field of study precisely with the awareness that forms of popular culture can be both good and bad.

One of my motivations was to acquire tools to examine the folk roots of contemporary popular music — guided by an emic, Catholic intuition (in which I was quite alone among my Catholic peers) supported by several analyses suggesting that something in that music was spiritually dissonant, something incompatible with Catholic experience.
(The reflections on music, dance, customs, and other cultural forms presented in the penultimate chapter of this book originate from that period.)

As someone who, since high school, criticized many folk dances as well as fashionable entertainments of the upper classes — often to the disapproval and, understandably, the incomprehension of most acquaintances — I am hardly susceptible to accusations of idealizing the people.

My position is fundamentally realist.
In any concrete situation, one must not attribute to the devil the evil he did not commit at that moment — for doing so only deepens falsehood by distracting from real errors.
If a criminal ate cheese for breakfast, that does not make eating cheese for breakfast evil.

To this principle I add caution: not to confuse essence with accident, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and to distinguish the general methods of popular culture from their local manifestations.

Distinguishing essence from accident is not enough.
One must also distinguish good accidents from bad ones.
And just as I viewed the bad ones critically through the lens of our faith, so I could not ignore the good ones — such as the stance of the defenders of the Vendée.

I recall a moment in high school during “French Day,” when everyone was to present something.
I proposed a song about the peasants who came to defend their king.
Everyone grimaced.
It disrupted the narratives glorifying the French Revolution and conveniently forgetting the phrase ou la mort.
Even those who quietly agreed felt their comfortable, well‑worn patterns shaken — patterns that were wrong.

From this starting point I arrived at a conclusion I have already presented:
that the general rules which may be called “popular” are precisely the remedy for the diseases of the West — the very opposite of what the PRL regime once called “popular.”

Affirming this general feature of popular culture does not exclude — indeed, it complements — elitism, anti‑ochlocracy, and even monarchism.

The common denominator and foundation of identity in all cultures I call “popular” is conservatism, even traditionalism.

As an elitist, I understand that the axis dividing elites and non‑elites does not run such that “the people” stand on the side of the non‑elite.
The people, too, possess a principle that sets and sustains the right direction — a principle we lack.
It is they who — as a result of the programmed anti‑traditionalism of the “elites” in a given cultural‑historical area — constitute the best developmental force and, paradoxically, the only condition for forming new elites.

Sourdough makes no sense without dough.
One needs both.
More than that: sourdough is dough — diluted dough — and in every healthy mass the sourdough must always be far, far smaller.

Strictly speaking, the people are everyone, and the elite is a subcategory of the people.
Hence we speak of the People of God, and the word people itself derives from persons, as I explained when analyzing the principles behind the use of the category “people” elsewhere in this book.

Ethnology is not the glorification of the people, but the study of the principles governing their culture — both in the dimension of the shared features of this category and in the specific features of particular peoples.

A Cosmological Understanding of Reality Is the Condition of Religiosity

A vast number of biblical expressions are incomprehensible to us — even if we insist otherwise.

Cosmological, mythological thinking is usually attributed to traditional, “primitive,” or folk cultures. It is characterized by a particular way of recognizing meaning — a way tied to one’s relation to time.

This cosmological relation to time is contrasted with the “cause-and-effect” model that organizes modern life. It rests on belief in an initial state — existing beyond earthly time — in eternity, of which our time is only a fragment. This state is determined by holiness, by the power of God, by the Will of God. Earthly time is not absolute; it is finite and only one element within the whole work of creation — an element of Timeless Eternity.

Thus, in folk cultures, it is both possible and rational to believe that on the paths of a Calvary, during the Mysteries of the Passion, one participates in the Time and Place of Christ’s Passion.

Indeed, this cosmological perception of time underlies the belief that the Last Supper and the Sacrifice of the Cross occur in the same Time and Place, and that every Holy Mass is participation in the One Event. This Event is the literal descent of Heaven onto earth. And this descent of Heaven — of Eternity, of “Sacred Time” — has real renewing power. It is a true re-creation.

All rituals in traditional cultures express the logical truth that earthly reality cannot simply be repaired. It must be reborn, “re-begun”… Only within such an understanding of time is the gift of bilocation conceivable. Only within it is the relativity of time intelligible — a relativity that modern people, discovering it through science, find difficult to grasp, sometimes interpreting it as evidence against God.

In cosmological consciousness — also called primordial or “primitive” — this relativity, this non-absoluteness of time, and the existence of eternity were obvious. Therefore, people sought eternity; it was eternity that was invoked in rituals, in orderings, in tradition — in the structuring of time and space — as the One that gives meaning to everything.

This way of giving meaning can be called an “obsession with origins” or genetic semiosis. For believers, religion is the supreme explainer of everything because it refers to what is Ultimate, lasting, and Eternal — what gives meaning to all things by assigning them their proper places in the Cosmos.

For Catholics, this is not something, but Someone — the Logos, God, Meaning. This Logos must necessarily be at the Beginning, beyond time. Therefore, to be religious is to think in cosmological — also called mythological — categories, which justify the existence of ritual in our lives. Without such an understanding of reality, it is difficult to speak of healthy, non-self-contradictory religiosity.

This Beginning is simultaneously the ultimate Point of reference.

“In the beginning was the Meaning. Not only Word. Logos.”

Ritual Against Ritual

Christianity fights against the occupation of ritual space by references other than Christian ones.
To do this, it must fill ritual with its own content.

This is exactly what happens in exorcisms: they are rituals, and they combat the effects of rituals filled with references contrary to the Will of God.

Therefore, the attempt to reject folk rituals altogether is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater — it leaves ritual spaces empty, ready to be occupied by any spirits whatsoever, instead of being filled with Christian meaning.

We surrender these spaces because we mistakenly assumed that material forms — gestures, signs, ceremonies — cannot influence the “heart” or the “spirit.” How easily we forgot that we are woven from material forms, that we shall rise again with the body, that our faith and love without material deeds are dead.

Because of this mistaken assumption, we stopped examining material forms, believing they have no influence on what is in the heart. In doing so, we became defenseless before those who wish to shape these forms — and through them, intentionally or not, to take hold of our very “heart.”

We do not even notice when what once seemed evil now appears good, and vice versa.

“For if you do not live as you believe, you will begin to believe as you live.”
(Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen)

Here a conclusion of great importance emerges. When we accept the idea that material forms have no influence on the depth of the heart, on intention — that they are morally relative — we become defenseless before them.

Similarly, when we do not believe in Satan, we allow him to attack us without resistance. He triumphs most when he convinces us that he does not exist.

The so-called “superstitious” folk never forgot this. They knew that

“you become like those with whom you keep company.”

Their actions had the character of rituals, often of exorcisms — they were simultaneously ways of turning to God.

Yes, they sometimes practiced erroneous references to demons (bearing Manichaean, Bogomil, Hermetic, dualistic, or even “semi-Platonic” overtones in Slavic lands). But precisely because they believed in the existence of these powers, and in the connection between ritual form and content, they could be convinced that demonic “power” is evil, and that in ritual one must turn to Someone Else.

They could be convinced that the shaping of material forms must also be subordinated to God. For they had no doubt that these forms mold the “depth of the heart” according to their pattern.

A heart that expresses the intimate unity of body and soul — inseparable in the integral nature of the human person, whose dignity Christ confirmed by becoming Flesh and rising with the Body, awaiting the passage of our own bodies into Eternal joy with Him in Heaven.

On Traditional Folk and Ritual Principles,
on Moving the Soil Together with the Weeds,
and on Sowing the Seed of the Word upon the Rock…

“In His eschatological discourse Jesus foretold that at the end of time ‘the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven’ (Mt 24:30).
With the eyes of faith, one could already recognize His sign inscribed in the cosmos from the beginning of the world, and in the cosmos see the confirmation of faith in the crucified Savior.
Thus Christians knew that the paths of the history of religion had always led toward Christ, that its expectation — expressed in many images — pointed precisely to Him.
Conversely, this meant that philosophy and religion had bestowed upon faith the images and thoughts through which it could finally understand itself fully.”
— Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy

Christ could have taken forms entirely unconnected with the symbols of older, pagan cults — but He did the exact opposite:
He inscribed Himself into the most frequently recurring images of the majority of religions known to us from all ages preceding His coming.
This could not have been accidental.
What did He show by this?
Only what He could show: that evil has no independent existence; that all these symbols were prepared for God, and that the devil — the Usurper, who loves to mimic Him — merely appropriated them for himself in various religions.

Disgust toward ritual and form is common among contemporary Catholics.
“Magic,” “superstition,” “empty form,” “Pharisaism” — these are just some of the verbal clubs used to beat “primitive people,” “those dug out of medieval graves,” and “peasants.”
In the name of such opinions, people are now urged to adopt a supposedly “conscious,” “active,” and “deep” faith.

Reading anthropological and history‑of‑religion works, I encountered several categories of “magical,” mythic, or sacred thinking characteristic of so-called traditional or folk cultures.
In them I recognized childlike intuitions — a fascination with Mystery, with the sun, the moon, fire, eternity, storms, the Christmas tree, the Elevation…
According to wise observers, humans have a need to live in a sanctified world; therefore they strive to make present, to re-enact, the works of God in every aspect of life.
In religious and traditional cultures, there existed certain domains of this sanctification — hierophanies.
Let me present some of them.

In most cultures, it is important to designate a center — a point of orientation.
People want this center as close to themselves as possible; they recreate it in every domesticated space.
Its representation in a village or town is the Temple; in the yard — the House; and in the home — the Holy Corner or a small altar.
Churches themselves were oriented toward the east, inscribing themselves into the sacred marking of space.
At this center — the “navel of the earth” — stands the Tree of Life, the world‑pillar.
Close relatives in our culture are the Christmas tree, the podłaźniczka, the sacred tree, or the ceremonial wreath.(Even today, we have household altars in the form of televisions, computers, or posters of our idols. We also have “temples” — shopping malls, stadiums, stages — and rituals: concerts, discos, football matches, or other events that take away from the Mass its emotions and role in our lives. This is exactly what happens when we suspiciously renounce a ritual approach to the religion we profess. That approach does not disappear; it remains like fertile soil. Yet we do not allow the Seed of the Gospel to grow in it! As a result, it becomes overrun with weeds — like the cleaning of the house that Jesus Christ spoke about!)

The Cross — a symbol in many cultures — signifies the Principle of the Universe: the four directions, and the raising of humanity (horizontal beam) to heavenly perfection (vertical beam, the descent of heavenly Power).
The Temple is an Image of Heaven — Imago Mundi.
Likewise, the house reproduces this image; building a house was a “repetition” of the creation of the world.
Indeed, every important action had a ritual character.
Ritual, in its structure, reenacts the work of creation — it is “myth in action,” and thus refers to the “Beginning,” to the Order God planned in creation, later disrupted by original sin.
This is why rituals exist: to return to that proper Beginning, to recall it, because in earthly time we constantly drift away from it.

The table in the home is an image of the altar.
Fire — the chimney or hearth — symbolizes the Divine Power of transformation, turning chaos into order, turning shapeless dough into shaped bread.
This bread — the source of earthly life — symbolizes the human body; its baking expresses creation from the dust of the earth.
Wine — sometimes representing human blood — was often used instead of blood in rituals of forming brotherhood.

Let us consider a few more examples.
The cult of sacred groves, stones, and spirits believed to dwell behind them: should these be eradicated or accepted?
This is a false alternative — it forces both sides into conflict.
The proper approach is to sense that trees manifest some Holiness.
But the trees themselves are not holy, and the spirits behind them may be usurpers.
They should be treated as Icons, as anticipations of the Tree of the Cross, which represents Christ.
Do we know who is the true recipient of veneration toward idol‑usurpers?
Christ — God, who on the Tree of the Cross redeemed us.

Even such remote examples — from folk ritual to contemporary practices — reveal the same underlying principle: that behind any symbol or act, there may be a deeper law or truth to discern.
In this book, we are concerned with seeing these deep principles, even in seemingly distant cases, including modern medicine, social responses to pandemics, or other aspects of daily life.

The Guadalupe example shows proper inculturation — proclaiming the Gospel through symbols intelligible to the people, here the Aztecs.
The image of the Virgin was understandable in their context, but its true meaning pointed to Christ as the source of life and sense.
The universal principle is clear: meaning is hidden in structures and symbols, and this is what allows real understanding — a principle visible even in seemingly unrelated modern examples, like medicine or public health crises.

Contemporary rejection of “folk faith” mistakes form for emptiness.
Magical or mythic categories of thought carried the soil on which the Seed of the Word could grow.
Christ sowed His Seed on this soil of intuition and culture — not to destroy it.
Cutting off forms in the name of progress is like bulldozing soil with the weeds, leaving only bare rock.
This principle — that the hidden order underlies apparent chaos — is universal, and it shows up in both traditional and modern contexts.

Rituals, space, gestures, bread, wine, altars, and sacred corners — all these structures allow humans to participate in Divine Order.
The folk culture expressed it in the structure of myth and ritual.
Christ confirmed and fulfilled this structure.
Ignoring it leads to a crisis: the seed of faith loses the soil in which it grows.
Words alone — “faith,” “love,” “intention” — cannot suffice without proper form.

As in The Great Silence: “Life has many Signs. Some have no meaning. The point is not in removing them, but in giving them proper meaning. For without signs, man feels lost.”

Thus, folk rituals, orderings of space, time, and relationships are signs of God’s Order.
Their nonverbal meaning conceals deep principles, visible even in the most distant, seemingly unrelated cases.
In this book, seeing such deep principles is the main task.

Whoever loves wishes to see even a shadow of the beloved’s figure.
And so we love Mother, Father, brothers, lovers, and God — even to the point of sensing the hidden order behind forms.
Is it not clear that Christianity is the Seed sown by Christ on the soil of simple, folk culture?
This Seed — the Logos, the Word, the supreme Meaning present from the Beginning — took shape in the fruit of human work: Bread and Wine.

Folk culture was partially overturned in its defense, yet in this book, we aim to discern the principles hidden in that soil — universal truths of God’s Order.

Guadalupe – Coatlaxopueh

In the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe we see the proper way of “inculturation” — or, more simply and more accurately, the proclamation of the Gospel.
But this is not the inculturation desired by the most zealous modern promoters, who pick and choose pagan elements without filtering them through the Catholic sieve. We must perform this filtering. We must find the hierarchy. Christian Tradition must act as the sieve, allowing nothing that contradicts it to pass through.

The image of Guadalupe, which at first glance looks like a painting in a style familiar to the Spaniards, contains an entire narrative built from symbols intelligible to the native peoples — largely of Aztec origin. The very material — agave — and the symbols used upon it allowed the tilma to be read as an Aztec codex.

Nahui ollin — the jasmine‑flower, symbol of the sun with four petals in the form of a cross — is placed on Mary’s womb, indicating that God is there — that the woman depicted on the tilma is His Mother. The blue‑green color of her mantle would, in Aztec language, indicate rulership. Her being shown before the sun’s rays and with the moon under her feet (elements possibly added later according to European canons) is interpreted by some as the dethronement of the moon and the sun. Others exclude the sun from this dethronement, for she is standing, not sitting — which in the indigenous grammar of posture means she is not the central figure. The New Sun is Someone Greater.

If something is the source of those rays, it is that little flower in the form of a cross — signifying the four ages, like our cross, and life, and the sun, and the four directions of the world. Her tunic has the color of dawn — the rising Sun, reddened by the blood offered to it daily to keep it alive. On Mary’s womb there is also a black ribbon, likewise in the form of a cross — a quincunx (one is reminded of Koneczny’s quincunx, the “five‑term structure of being,” whose symbolic analogy I will illustrate later). It signifies virginity and the crossing of the path of humans with the path of the gods.

Exactly the same meaning can be attributed — according to the ancient tradition invoked throughout this book — to the Christian Cross: the vertical beam represents the path of God from Heaven to earth and back; the horizontal beam, the yoke of fallen human nature, which Christ lifted toward Heaven. The Cross — the nahui ollin — and the cross‑shaped ribbon in her womb: Sun, dawn, blood, sacrifice… all these signs were immediately intelligible to Juan Diego himself, who had aristocratic lineage on two sides and princely lineage on one (descending from Moctezuma). He was therefore an authority for the people and a bearer of the interpretation of important symbols.

The scheme of the quincunx can be placed upon the symbolic map below, which summarizes the essence of this book:

MEDICINE
A Mystical Style of Life
Ordinary things as signs of faith
A space that heals — a Room in the Shape of the Cross
DO IT!
Without this there will be no healing of our homes and our worlds.

As I learned about various forms of “hierophany,” I recalled the depth of the Gospel’s content. Only within the so‑called “mythic” categories — mistakenly labeled “magical” — did vast regions of biblical meaning become clear to me. I understood that the modern rejection of “folk faith” rests on one great misunderstanding.

Why do I consider this rejection to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Because the mythic categories and ways of thinking shared by various traditional and folk cultures — especially the cultures of the little ones, the poor, of whom Christ spoke — carried within them soil, ground, fertile earth on which weeds had grown until now. Christ the Sower came to fulfill the role of this soil — to sow the seed of His Word, His Meaning. But He did not come to destroy the soil.

And we, “progressive” people, try to remove the weeds together with the soil on which they grew, leaving the Seed of the Word with nothing but dry rock. The soil will not disappear. The weeds will now spread even more aggressively on the very places where we bulldozed the earth in the name of progress. Because we forgot about it. Because we declared it “morally neutral,” an “insignificant form.” In doing so, we lost control over it — and with it, over our own consciousness, which is shaped by the forms we have neglected.

What does it matter that we know the entire elaborate theology of the seed, all the methods of cultivation and irrigation, if the seed does not take root in the soil of daily life — because that soil has been taken from it and handed over to the weeds? Christ came to sow in the fertile earth of the images of the Cross, the center of the world, the tree of life, the navel of the earth, the bread‑body and its eating — perfect brotherhood — and the wine‑blood, whose drinking or touching expressed, among some peoples, the making of two men into brothers.

Christ is the center, the meaning, the source, and the goal of everything. The one God in the Holy Trinity.

At the Center of the World —
At the Navel of the Earth
On the Axis of the Cosmos
On the World‑Pillar,
On the Tree of Life,
The Tree of the Cross,
Whose crossing of beams marks that Center
And upholds upon itself the whole Universe
Split by sin —
Its four ends embracing the four directions of the world,
And upward, upward toward Heaven lifting
With its horizontal beam, with its mighty arms,
The flatness of fallen creation.
It brings Eternal Life.
The King above Kings.
Creator and Redeemer, Alpha and Omega.

The earlier myths were attempts — clumsy, yet real attempts — to realize the natural intuitions that only Christianity fulfilled. Fulfilled in the cruciform Consummatum est. This fulfillment, this realization of the longings expressed in mythic images, is the very essence of Christianity. It is the foundation of its intelligibility to the little ones — those who thought in mythic categories. The Gospel images do not fit primarily into a scientific or “progressive” worldview, but into a cosmological, mythic one. Outside of that frame, they become faint, barely understood.

We, whose culture has given us as an “obvious” mental scheme the assumption that ritual in a Catholic context is “bad,” still struggle to understand the Gospel. We cut off our own roots, imagining them to be weeds hindering the growth of the tree. And yet the principle behind ritual, myth, and cosmological order is the same principle that operates in every human action — even the modern ones, even the medical ones, even those related to pandemics and public health. The same principle that shaped folk tradition shapes also — though unconsciously — the way societies respond to fear, crisis, disease. Always it is about order, meaning, orientation, a place in the cosmos. And when this frame is rejected, it returns in distorted, compulsive forms.

The Cosmological Vision of Time

In the cosmological vision of the world, whatever has meaning must have existed in the primordial time — and must be renewed in earthly time, which grows barren and requires restoration. This renewal creates the impression of cyclical time. Plato, who affirmed the superiority and reality of “ideas,” of what is unchanging, eternal, and lasting — was right. He erred only in his judgment of the body (if indeed we have understood him correctly).

For us Christians, that primordial time is the time of Eden and the time of Christ’s coming to earth. His transforming power is no longer symbol or longing, but reality:

On the A l t a r,
In the T a b e r n a c l e —
There is the C r o s s.

There, the time and place of creation are ever‑present — the time and place of the Sacrifice of the Cross and of the Upper Room.
The Mythic Center of the World.
The World‑Pillar.
The Tree of Life.
The Cross.
Perfect brotherhood through the Bread become Body and the Wine become Blood.
It Is.

Progressive Consciousness vs. Cosmological Truth

The “progressive scientific” consciousness of our age stands in contradiction to this understanding — an understanding Christianity shares with “natural,” mythic, cosmological cultures… “backward,” “superstitious,” “magical”…? Have we not thrown the baby out with the bathwater? Have we not removed the sick man together with the sickness — or perhaps instead of it?

We — progressive, modern, reflective Catholics — unlike those “shrine‑loving,” “superstitious,” “half‑pagan” folk… Has our reflection not confined itself to words, closing itself off from the “reflective and meaningful act,” dismissed as superstitious and magical? And yet:

“The myths were waiting for the One in whom the object of longing became reality.”
— Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth

The Crisis of the Church as a Crisis of Soil

Folk culture expressed itself in rituality based on the structure of myth. And that structure needed to be preserved, for Christ confirmed and fulfilled it. Denying it — even within the Church — led to the crisis of the Church. The seed of dogma lost its proper context — the soil in which it could grow.

Formalism existed in folk cultures. But it exists today as well. Among us, the empty form has become the words: content, intention, love, heart. If one says that only content, meaning, intention matter — that forms may be arbitrary so long as they express the right intentions — then paradoxically one loses the very content.

As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:
“A spiritual act must, by its very nature and because of the body‑spirit unity of man, necessarily express itself in a bodily gesture.”

Thus one cannot criticize the multiplicity of external symbolic forms in the Mass of all ages. Can one tell lovers that the words “I love you” are unnecessary because they have already said them once? Can one tell spouses that their kiss is meaningless because they have kissed before? Love desires to be expressed outwardly.

Structure, Meaning, and the Logos

Meanings express themselves through orderings — structures. And these can be recognized, remembered, and recalled only as orderings of material forms. These orderings have their source in the Will of the Logos — the One Person who is Holy and Primordial.

If there were no distinction between Creator and creation, the coherence of reality could not exist. We could not possess reason, whose foundation is coherence, agreement, non‑contradiction. The human being, who has a natural need for coherence, when deprived of its fulfillment, falls into a state requiring psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapies consisting of… living for a time in “open‑air museums.”

In the secularized West, this is how people are healed: in the spatial reflection of folk mentality. But space alone is only a temporary fragment of context. One must live in good air constantly, not inhale it only when suffocating in bad.

Norwid and the Path of Civilization

Why did we not make use of Norwid’s intuition, who sketched a vision of higher culture growing from the songs of the earth — from folk culture? From where else do the foundations of the greatest civilizations come, if not from the culture once lived by simple folk, later developed into higher culture and spread? Is this not the path of civilizational growth? Growth rooted in tradition, in memory.

Tradition is the shadow of a bond inscribed in memory, and a bond is a mode of the existence of love. And this bond, directed toward a person, leads us to the One who is the source of all bonding — to God living in the eternal Trinitarian Relation, which is Love. The earth does not answer our call, but reveals meaning — the answer of the One whose design it is.

Is this not the path of a nation — also of our Polish Nation? To build itself continually upon the bond and the meaningful forms of the culture of our land, our people, our history. Not to discard what we owe to Italians, Germans, the Dutch settlers — for it has already become the glue of our bond, inscribed in our collective memory. The interpenetration of cultures and multi‑layered identity does not negate identity.

paraphrase of Norwid

So that at least one Mazovian canvas
might be a banner in art,
so that churches might already stand
on Polish ogives,
so that the hewn Kraków stone
might remember conversations.
Who loves — wishes to see even a shadow of the beloved form.
And so one loves Mother, Father, brothers,
the beloved — even God…
So that the poet no longer sighs in sorrow
that not a single Mazovian canvas…
Take Promethidion, take it to understand —
and also Chopin’s Piano.

Can one really deny that Christian culture — brilliant in its depth — is the seed sown by Christ precisely onto the soil of the simple person’s care and bonds, the soil of folk culture? This Seed is the Logos — the Word of God — which at the same time signifies the supreme Meaning that was in the Beginning, without which nothing came to be. A Meaning that is simultaneously Love. A Love that took the form of the fruit of the people’s labor — Bread and Wine.

Folk culture was overthrown in the name of defending it, and here I must agree with Gellner, who describes exactly this mechanism in Nations and Nationalism. Nationalisms understood differently than they are usually portrayed…

Perhaps this is also what Fr. Georg Ratzinger meant, as quoted by Vatican Radio:

"Many people today have an allergy to popular piety. Many priests want to be modern, to go with the spirit of the age. They believe that popular piety is outdated and therefore gradually eliminate it from the life of the Church. In doing so, however, they forget that the Church is a reality that fills our entire life."

According to Benedict XVI’s brother, the most beautiful aspect of Catholicism is its ability to act upon the senses:

"Our faith is not limited to prayer, to spiritual life, or to rationality. Our faith speaks to the whole human being. The whole person is called to holiness."

Fr. Georg Ratzinger emphasizes that today we must resist the removal of popular piety from the life of the Church. We must keep in mind the good of future generations, so that they too may ‘touch the faith’. Can today’s youth still be moved by something like Corpus Christi processions, pilgrimages to Marian shrines, or the veneration of relics? He answers: Yes, they can. This book is the best proof. Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis is a young, modern woman. Her home is the world — writes Benedict XVI’s brother, encouraging the reading of this 28‑year‑old aristocrat’s apology for popular piety.

What is this expressing of faith through the senses? Is it not Norwid’s postaciowanie — the shaping of thought into forms — through which the people expressed deep truths even when they could not verbalize them? Why do we insist so obsessively that everything must be spoken or written? And if someone cannot say it the way we want, we assume they do not understand. What good does that do us?

What meanings can be expressed in spatial structures, in non‑verbal signs? For example, those described by Cardinal Ratzinger in The Spirit of the Liturgy:

"In the realm of religion, culture manifests itself above all in the growth of true popular piety… Popular piety is fertile soil without which the liturgy cannot grow… Where it dries up, rationalism and sectarianism easily arise… It must be loved, purified where necessary, guided — but always received with great respect as an expression of attachment to the faith present in the heart of nations."

Whether rituals become magic or not depends on the human being. But by the same logic, even dogmatically perfect expressions of love or good deeds can be understood magically. This does not mean we should reject dogmatic words or good works — but we must give them, just like folk rituals, their proper meaning.

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

"Life is full of Signs. Some of them have no meaning. The point is not to remove them, but to give them the right meaning. For without signs, a person feels lost."

Folk rituals, the ordering of space, time, social and bodily relations — these are signs of God’s Loving Order. The fact that people did not verbalize their meaning does not mean they did not understand it.

Some say pharmaceutical companies poison so they have something to “treat.” Some say firefighters set forests on fire so they have something to “extinguish”… with gasoline. And here the medicine becomes the cause of the disease.

(And in 2020, to the examples of the pharmaceutical industry, vaccines, and glyphosate, we add corona‑panic, masks, the paralysis of healthcare, and fear lowering immunity — magnifying ordinary flu symptoms into truly dangerous proportions. Self‑fulfilling prophecies.)

We trimmed the table leg that was too long — and trimmed it too much. And when the table still stands crooked, we keep trimming the same leg, making it even more crooked…

What matters is the intention to heal, to draw closer to Christ, to restore the table of faith to balance.

But can I remain silent when I have learned that what we considered medicine was the cause of the illness — that the leg should be lengthened, not shortened? Can I keep this knowledge to myself? I cannot. It was given to me not for myself. I did not invent it, it is not my merit, I did not earn it.

I want to share it, because I believe it is the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s Reminding. Many people shared with me the gifts and knowledge they received — knowledge that was Reminded to them.

So allow me to share as well. This is precisely why we are the Church — a community — so that we may share the Reminding. If each person received the fullness of knowledge and abilities, we would not need one another. But as it is, we can share — each bringing the gifts previously received, and we unite them into one. Just as we are meant to form the foundation of reality — the Bond in Christ.

Since I am already reflecting on the fact that we are a community, I must also speak of another function of fixed forms and rituals: the binding of human groups, the creation of a foundation for mutual understanding — one of the deepest purposes of ritual.

Rituals are rarely of our own invention. They are received from above, from the ancestors, just as language is. If we invented language privately, individually, we could never understand one another. Our understanding flows not only through words, but primarily through ways of acting: through movements, expressions, gestures, and other non‑verbal signs. These weave the fabric of culture. And because we express the same meanings in different ways, we can test whether we understand them as others do.

In communal prayer and action, rituals and other “fixed” forms often surpass spontaneous or “from‑the‑heart” expressions. Why? Because they can be performed together. They build unity. They create order — the kind of order that focuses the mind, the heart, the spirit, and guides us in the vigilance to which Christ called us. Even during Mass, spontaneous actions arise — remember the man who leapt for joy after St. Peter healed him — yet such acts are private, unplanned. To elevate spontaneity into a principle is to contradict its very nature; it ceases to be spontaneous and becomes routine.

Rituals, in themselves, find their true fulfillment and proper realization in Christianity. They are natural, fitting, and necessary forms of religiosity. That they were once misdirected does not make them evil — just as the falsity of pagan religions does not render religion itself meaningless.

Christianity is the fulfillment of the longings of all prior religions. It harmonizes what was previously incomplete, what contradicted itself, through the Consummatum est spoken by Christ on the Tree of the Cross. It fulfills — it does not abolish.

Those who claim that Catholicism “stole” from other beliefs speak nonsense. Christianity stands precisely in its claim to be the first real, unique, and perfect fulfillment of the longings, the images, planted in human nature. These longings appeared first in action — in ritual — and later in words, in the mythic images of all peoples: the Cross, the World‑Pillar, the Tree of Life, the Sacrifice, brotherhood through the sharing of Body and Blood, Bread, Fire, the Rising Sun.

It is Christ whom all peoples sought — in Swarożyc, Perun, Quetzalcoatl, Veles, Thor, Odin, Osiris, Prometheus, Viracocha, Kukulkan. It is He who hung upon the Tree of Life — the World‑Pillar — who offered Himself, who allowed His heart to be pierced, because our offerings alone could never suffice. And He saved us. Let us not wound Him by rejecting His Mercy.

Myth is humanity’s attempt to render reality meaningful, whole. Until Christ, it remained a longing without fulfillment. Christ brought the “Myth” that realized the structures generating the meaning of earlier myths. The Myth of Christ is no longer a false expectation misdirected; it is the fulfillment of all rightful longings. Not an abolition — but a fulfillment.

Let us then preserve rituals, rites, and the sacred ordering of symbolic time and space — ordered toward the Center of the World, present on earth in the Eucharist. The Sacrifice of Christ, the Holy Mass, is the fulfillment of the deepest yearning of humanity: to live around such a center. Traditional peoples glimpsed this center symbolically — in the home, the village, the stronghold, the temple — and believed it participated in the timeless heavens. Christ made this longing real. He did not abolish — He fulfilled.

We must return to these longings and their symbolic expressions. Without them, we cannot fully grasp what was accomplished on the Cross.

[Year: 2012]

Ritual‑Genesis

If a ritual were constructed by those who perform it, it would no longer be their ritual.
This is another of its constitutive features.
Those who enact it must be convinced that it was given from above, by the ancestors.
For this allows them to believe that if their ancestors practiced it, then they too received it from their ancestors, and so on, all the way back to the Beginning.
The Beginning — that is, the eternal state.

Historical awareness and a broad temporal horizon have allowed us to notice the variability even of such a Ritual as the Holy Mass.
But it is an error to let this obscure another fact: namely, that rituals were never simply constructed; their changes were so slow as to be almost imperceptible to the participants.
Unless, of course, they changed their religion or culture.
But even then they did not invent new rituals — they submitted themselves to others, likewise perceived as unchanging.

And yet there does exist something like a process of ritual formation — ritual‑genesis.
But this is not the same as constructing rituals by the adherents of the mythology, cosmology, or — if one prefers — religion encoded within them.
For in ritual‑genesis, ordinary, everyday actions, or actions woven into an older ritual, performed by a person regarded as Holy, Divine, and so on, are after the fact recognized as Primordial — as actions that establish the proper status of things by assigning them their place within the system of reality.
It is the recognition of the deeds of such persons as the mythic Beginning of the Cosmos.

This happened not only with Christ, but also (a Catholic will rightly shudder at the comparison) with Buddha, Lenin, Lennon, Elvis, Mao Tse‑Tung, Kim Il‑Sung, John Paul II (the tourist trails he walked, the impossible number of skis he was said to have used), and so on…
To the places they visited, to the objects that belonged to them, to the huts of their childhood, real pilgrimages march in tight formation, listening to mythologies recited by priest‑guides about how, in the place where they spat, a tree sprang up in an instant, from which a sick woman plucked a healing fruit (well… I made that one up, but the stories actually told sound very similar).

Christianity truly rests on the recognition that Christ brought a New Beginning — that He brought Heaven down to earth.
He Himself was that Heaven — that Eternity.
This is written in the Johannine Prologue:
In the beginning was the Word (…) and the Word was God (…) And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us…

Therefore, from His life we fashion the ritual that accomplishes Renewal;
we recognize the acts He performed as worthy of such repetition.
All the more so because Christ Himself said:
“Do this in memory of Me.”

Dead Latin?

The languages that, in the time of Jesus and His direct witnesses, were used in daily life later petrified into sacred languages.
So it was with Hebrew, Ge’ez, Sanskrit, Koine Greek, Church Slavonic, and Latin.
All of them remained liturgical languages even though the vernacular tongues continued to change.
This does not mean they ceased to live or ceased to be understood.
On the contrary: they gained a new life, a new sacred meaning.
As wholes, they began to signify the Logos — Meaning — Holiness.

The fluidity of vernacular languages exposed the faith to errors in translation, and thus to the loss of the identity of Christ’s message.
Moreover, translating the Holy Mass into the national tongue would strip it of a deeply experienced component of meaning: Mystery — which expresses the profound theological truth of the ontological abyss between God and man, and which makes it easier to awaken gratitude for the immense Grace shown to us in the Incarnation and Resurrection.

Therefore, the claim that liturgical languages are “dead” and should be discarded in favor of national languages is false.
Such claims are yet another unjust accusation — as if those who use these languages neither experience nor understand.

Inculturation and the Holy Mass

A change in the form of the Ritual of the Holy Mass acts upon our minds in such a way that we perceive it as the creation of a new religion.

This impression must be produced when converting pagans.
To receive a new content, they must be given a form that is new to them (and at the same time ancient to the missionaries).
It is not merely about new words placed upon local customs.
No!
Words are themselves forms, just like non‑verbal gestures.
They express meaning in the same way; in many cultures they are special signs — signs of meaning itself, of the very capacity to signify.
Hence their weight, expressed in proverbs such as:
“weigh your words,”
“don’t throw words to the wind,”
“give your word,”
“make a vow”…

How does this relate to so‑called inculturation?
In transmitting the new faith, it is worthwhile to search for its anticipations in native cults and to refer to them when explaining the new faith.
To refer to elements — but not to affirm the entirety of the old systems.
For Catholicism, as a monotheistic religion whose mythology is anchored in a concrete moment of history, is incompatible with every other religion.
It introduces a new vision of the world.

Eric Voegelin identifies the cause of evangelizing success as the “absorption of movements by institutions.”
This mechanism, described in The People of God, is an example of discovering and using such anticipations.

This absorption is neither unique nor strange.
We must remember that total contradiction between religions does not imply contradiction at the level of elements.
Nor is it true — as today’s anti‑ritualist mindset claims — that strict rules prevent multiplicity and change.
Rules simply give them the right measure, boundaries, and criteria.
Within them, infinitely many possibilities exist.
Infinitely many — but not arbitrary.
Without boundaries, elements lose identity, and thus there is no system — no shared cultural “language” in which we can understand one another and live together.
Without boundaries, it is also difficult to speak of freedom, for we fail — if we manage at all — to distinguish the objects of choice.

If, in the name of “new times,” we reject rules — including customary and symbolic ones that form the boundaries and framework for multiplicity and change — we lose the identity of the content of our Faith.

One such rule is the Friday fast.
It is not individual, because one of its important functions (just like the given‑from‑above, not self‑constructed forms of the Holy Mass) is to unite the community called the Catholic Church through a shared physical act of renunciation.

Rules do not forbid everything in a given culture — only what contradicts the professed religion.
Everything else is usually recognized as a genuine anticipation.
Therefore, many cultures can exist within the doctrinal boundaries of the normative religion, and change can be absorbed — though not every change.
Difference between cultures — the evangelizing and the evangelized — is not the same as contradiction.

Indeed, more things can usually be accepted than rejected.
But we pay less attention to what can be accepted, because it is obvious.
It is much easier to point out what contradicts doctrine, because such elements become the axis of dispute and the focus of attention.
Rejecting them means that everything else is acceptable — or that its incompatibility has not yet revealed itself.

This is the positive meaning of “negative” statements — so often criticized today.
This criticism arises, like the criticism of supposed formalism or “blind” obedience, from a failure to understand that the human mind needs all these things in order to express meaning properly.
Defenders of “experience” and “understanding,” having rejected “dead” forms, “blind” obedience, and “rigid” tradition, end up killing what they believe they are defending.

Returning to the Meeting of Cultures

The possibility of partial reconciliation between cultures — exemplified by inculturation — arises from the layered nature of cultures.
But inculturation should not consist in attempting to abolish boundaries (which is never fully possible anyway, for without boundaries and distinctions there is no human thought or action).
Rather, it should consist in examining what, in the existing culture, can be harmonized with our own — in this case, Catholic culture — and in transmitting to others the cultural, external, and ritual frameworks of Catholicism.
For these frameworks are the foundation for the proper understanding and experience of the Essence of Faith.

Cardinal Ratzinger wrote of these frameworks:

Here an objection may arise: that these gifts possess symbolic power only in the Mediterranean region and should therefore be replaced by local equivalents in other climates… Yet the principle remains that in the interplay of culture and history, priority belongs to history. It was through history that God acted directly and gave meaning to the gifts of the earth… The Incarnation does not mean arbitrariness but the opposite: it binds us to that history which outwardly seems accidental, yet is the form of history chosen by God… Through the specificity of what happened here and at that time, we leave behind the arbitrariness of the mythical “always and never.” In this particular face, in this particular human form, we meet Christ, who thus makes us brothers beyond all divisions. And so we can recognize Him: “It is the Lord!” (Jn 21:7).
— The Spirit of the Liturgy

And further:

The decision of faith contains within itself a cultural decision; it shapes the human being and thus excludes other cultural forms as distortions. Faith itself creates culture… When we demand a new dialogue between the Church and culture, we must not forget that this dialogue must be two‑sided. It cannot mean that the Church ultimately submits to contemporary culture, which, having lost its religious foundation, lives largely in a state of self‑doubt.

Inculturation? Yes — but not upside‑down.

One may say to the natives (directly, in words, or in a message spread across various verbal and non‑verbal media), for example:
You say there is Piorun (Per(k)un), Swaróg and his Son Swarożyc, Weles who grazes souls on the pastures of Nawia… But how exactly it all works — that you do not fully know. Long ago He spoke to a certain people and came to earth to free humanity from deception, from the soil growing barren, and from death. He is one and the same God! You have your Żmij. We too had a serpent — the Evil Spirit — who twists everything! He twisted this story as well. And it was like this…

Let us assume that the scholarly hypotheses and interpretations of the old Ruthenian records of Slavic beliefs present them correctly.
Then one can proceed to “retell” the entire mythology using native imagery.
Thus Satan may be the Żmij, for in Slavic belief he coils around the Cosmic Tree — just as Satan in Eden coiled around the tree of knowledge.
One may speak (or let it be understood through gestures and non‑verbal signs) of the two trees, of the Tree of Life, of the coming of the Son of God who is the true Swarożyc.

After all, the word Bóg (Baga), used by Catholics, also comes from pagan belief — perhaps Indo‑Iranian, ultimately Proto‑Indo‑European.
But such translation into native categories cannot replace the concrete Catholic forms, even if they are foreign to the natives.
For in Catholicism this cultural‑historical concreteness is itself a testimony of truth — as Cardinal Ratzinger expressed so forcefully in the passage quoted earlier.
Therefore the Slavic divine names mentioned here cannot replace the concrete “foreign” terms such as Christ, Kyrios, Alleluia, Amen, Tabernacle, Angel.
In time, even these terms will become familiar, understandable — and at the same time mystical, mysterious.
And this paradoxical union is precisely what holiness requires:
Near, yet Distant; understandable, yet surpassing comprehension.

Catholic forms and, in this case, Slavic forms must create two layers of culture.
The dominant layer must be the culture that carries the cosmologically essential new content — Catholicism — and the subordinate layer the native culture.
There is no other way.
Of course, this does not mean that the elements of the old culture must disappear — not at all!
They may remain numerically dominant, just as subjects outnumber their king.
The point of introducing the new faith is to reorder them under the rule of the Catholic core.

An example of this is the coexistence of Christian rites with folk culture, songs, and native language.
In the Latin rite (before the 1969 reform) this coexistence looked different than in the Byzantine rite, but in both cases it existed — only in different ways.

In the rite after the liturgical reform, however, we encounter a lack of proper relation between the ordering form (which carries meaning) and what is ordered.
As if form were indifferent to content.
We also encounter a denial of the ritual character of the Holy Mass by creating the impression that it is something constructed by the present community and dependent on the personality of the priest (more spontaneous commentary, more optional elements), rather than something given from above.
This strips the Mass of its power, its credibility, its ability to transform the human being.

Someone will say that this power lies in God’s Might.
Indeed — but God shaped the human brain to be sensitive to certain ritual factors for a reason.
He did so precisely so that people could receive the Holy Mass, in which the entire history of salvation is condensed!

By reconstructing the form of the Mass according to the whims of a given era, we may lose something to which we currently — under the influence of intellectual and mass fashions — pay no attention, yet which proves meaningful in the long run, as intended by the Creator.
This, unfortunately, is what happened in the practical dimension of the so‑called liturgical reform.
We turned our ritual sense away from the Mass because we removed from it what activates that sense — what allows the content carried by the form to be received more deeply.

Paradoxically, replacing the liturgical language and certain non‑verbal signs with verbal commentary in the vernacular does not increase understanding — it obscures everything.
It produces the opposite of what was intended.
For we do not understand only with words.
Sometimes mystery speaks more than a thousand explanations.

Added to this is the sense of constructability, which destroys one of the most essential factors of ritual credibility:
the sense of its unchangeability, which allows it to transmit the Primordial State — the proper, ordering, meaning‑giving structure of the universe.
This reference to the Beginning is the foundation of the Gospel.
This is why the Johannine Prologue begins with “In the beginning was the Word,” and why Christ says, “but from the beginning it was not so.”

Cultures are — let us repeat — multilayered.
Meaning can be transmitted only when it emerges from cultural wholes.
Within these wholes occur paraphrases between ways of expressing meaning through different senses, between meaningful forms of movement, distance, spatial arrangement, clothing, organization of time, smells, tastes, and so on.

These multisensory dimensions of life are always present — and if we do not encode our faith through them, something else will.
And then we will lose control over the meaning of the words that still call themselves Evangelical, Catholic.
By adopting an anti‑ritualist stance, we lose principles — and in the name of inculturation we often accept what contradicts Catholicism.

Consider the example of Archbishop Lefebvre’s mission in Gabon.
There, crowds flocked to the Tridentine Mass; the natives sang the Sung Mass with a volume and fervor unheard of in Europe.
The Novus Ordo (the form of Mass now common) produced dissatisfaction and attracted only small groups — despite all the “inculturational” attempts to make it appealing.

Recall Cardinal Sarah, who in his interview with Nicolas Diat (God or Nothing) spoke of the difficult and beautiful moments of encountering the European, exotic‑to‑him mysticism of the pre‑conciliar Mass.
One may say that the imitation of native cults robs the Church of credibility, making it an object of ridicule.
A native may think:
“Do they have nothing of their own to offer, that they must imitate us, that they want to please us?”
or:
“If this is so similar to our cults, then it is nothing new. So we can keep believing what we believed.”
More likely, the resemblance is clumsy and caricatural.
Then the native may laugh as a highlander laughs at a city dweller trying to speak in a highlander dialect.

A new faith must carry a clearly New Form (new to the neophytes).
It must require a metanoic renunciation of oneself.
It cannot “adapt” — whether to local cultures, to children, or to new times.

Cardinal Sarah points out that a rite artificially “Africanized” is less intelligible to Africans than the form before the post‑conciliar ritual revolution:

“I am an African. Let me say this clearly: the liturgy is not the place where my culture is to be promoted. It is rather the place where my culture receives the grace of Holy Baptism, where my culture is elevated to the level of God. Through the liturgy of the Church, which missionaries carried to the ends of the earth, God speaks to us, He changes us, and enables us to share in His divine life. When someone becomes a Christian, when someone enters full communion with the Catholic Church, he receives something more — something that changes him.”

Therefore, there is no evangelization without persuading people to concrete cultural forms.
Yes, one must take local culture into account.
But this means searching within that culture for what is compatible with the faith we propose — what can express it well.
And today we often reject what could express Catholic content beautifully, calling it superstition or “magically understood faith,” while accepting what contradicts Catholicism.
This perversity would be amusing if it did not have such tragic consequences.

Pay special attention to this fateful paradox:
Liturgical reformers often propose adapting liturgical forms to local cults — while simultaneously criticizing folk piety.
They turn everything upside‑down:
they reject the good coexistence of native and Catholic culture, and propose instead a bad coexistence that leads not only to the dilution of Catholic faith, not only to the loss of its persuasive power, but also to the very aversion described above.

CATHOLIC — THE TRUE NATIVE BELIEVER

Various neopagans and “native‑faith” revivalists share one thing with liturgical revolutionaries: archaeologism.
It is the conviction that we can reconstruct the original Rite of the “first Christians,” or the pre‑Christian beliefs.

We cannot — because what we possess are only artifacts, fragments:
words, lexical roots, statues, buildings, residual customs preserved (ironically!) in the culture of Catholic peoples and in Christian writings.
But what exactly they meant, how they fit into meaningful structures, how people understood them — we do not know.
These are guesses.

All the more so because history shows us repeatedly that “new data” can overturn the previously assumed — and confidently asserted — picture of things.

A grid laid over an image hides parts of it, and the brain fills in the missing pieces with imagined shapes.
But what if the hidden parts contain the crucial points?
And this is entirely possible, because we know well that history is written by the victors.
This is not some grand conspiracy — it is simply the normal consequence of the fact that not everything can be recorded.
And since not everything can be recorded, people record what they consider important.
But if someone else had been recording, they might have considered something entirely different important.

What is “important” is whatever supports one’s worldview, one’s interests, one’s position.
The media oligopolists of any era do not need to conspire about what to hide or what to preserve.
Those who want to “ride the wave” intuitively sense what to transmit and what to keep silent about, what to write and what to omit, in order to remain “on the wave.”
And most people want to be on that wave — simply to make life easier.

If, for example, people 500 years from now were to excavate a Catholic church in some village, they might interpret the statues and images of saints and popes as deities and conclude that they had discovered a polytheistic temple.
Likewise, we do not truly know what status the “gods” of the pre‑Christian Slavs held in the minds of the people:
were they equivalents of today’s saints?
Were they “gods”?
And if “gods,” did they have a status analogous to our One God — such that treating monotheism as a competitor or alternative to poly‑ or henotheism would even make sense?

Others claim that Christianity destroyed the native religion and culture of the Slavs.
But if we follow that reasoning consistently, we would also have to reject the reconstructed beliefs of today’s “native‑faith” revivalists — for they too may have displaced even earlier beliefs…

…assuming, of course, that those earlier beliefs were as they are now imagined.
That different belief systems fought, suppressed, or modified one another is obvious — otherwise they would not be different belief systems, as I noted earlier in the text on “universal” values.
They may have been fighting all the time:
one village suppressing another, one clan stamping out what it considered heresy in another;
they may have adopted many artifacts or sacred spaces — as Christianity did — but then inserted them into an entirely new system of meaning.
We do not know.
And all the more so, we cannot know what the “native faith” truly was, what formed its core identity, which time, which place, which interpretation…
It is one great guessing game.

Objects dug from the earth and letters written on parchment do not speak.
Only the people who used them speak — and they are no longer among the living.
We are.
Across the centuries, the meaning of the same words and objects may have changed many times.
The same artifacts, even the same words recorded in documents, may have meant something entirely different in their own time than what we imagine today.

This is why the most “native” element in Slavic culture is Christianity — the only tradition that has survived in continuity as the heritage of previous centuries down to our own time.
Christianity, transmitted by living persons, not reconstructed from guesswork.

The search for the “original” Mass of the first Christians is the same kind of guesswork.
Some seek the “original Slavs,” others the “original Christians,” still others an “original tradition” different from the teaching of its living representatives.
They think they have found it.
They have not.
They have merely projected their own imaginings onto the few scattered “words” cut out from ancient accounts.
What kind of building those bricks once formed — we do not know.

What Belongs to Us, and What Does Not

The second level of faith (described in the first chapter) includes matters such as morality, forms of behavior, and customs — things that must exist because the world is material.
In theory, one could attempt to deduce all of them from scratch, but:

the time required for such deduction would prevent us from doing what actually belongs to us: living — earning our bread, securing shelter, raising children, and doing all of this honestly;
attempting to establish everything independently would end in endless quarrels.

This is why we need to receive traditions, and within institutions we need arbitration, preferably hierarchical.
In the Church, this arbitration is a whole system culminating in one pope, whose singularity allows him to give the one binding interpretation in essential matters.
For Catholics, this disciplinary trust in the hierarchical Church is an obligation of faith.
It frees them from the exhausting and ultimately irresolvable conflict over, for example, the form of the Holy Mass — a conflict in which each argument can be met with another five hundred pages of counter‑arguments, and so on without end.
The faithful will not be judged on how they personally determined which form was correct.
They will be judged on the commandments and the catechetical precepts.
And one of these is the entrusting of judgment in such matters to the Church.

This humility of obedience — and of focusing on one’s own task — is the most reasonable defender of the Church’s unity.
It also means that even liturgical experts and bishops should not draw the faithful into positions that undermine the acts of the Church and the pope, because doing so forces the faithful to choose between trusting the Church and trusting those who undermine it.
This contradicts the very meaning of the Church and makes declarations of unity inconsistent.
We will return to this later.
[2022]

What Belongs to Us: Norm, Judgment, and the Terror of Innovation

In complex matters — those known to most people only through media and second‑hand accounts — society often demands that people join the accusations, that they abandon the tested norm handed down in tradition in favor of a “terror of innovation.”
But in such matters people have no way to verify who is right.
If they are required to join the accusations, they are being required to exercise sectarian faith.
Without verification, one can believe only in the norm:
– moral,
– linguistic,
– customary,
– sanitary,
– peaceful,
– and above all: in the presumption of innocence of persons and groups.

This presumption must be imposed, otherwise social life becomes paralyzed by those who thrive on suspicion.

Why the Argument “Without Suspicion We Become Defenseless” Is False

Some claim that refraining from judging others’ unexpressed motives leaves us defenseless against malicious people.
This reasoning is false — for two reasons.

The Balance of Harms
Even if we occasionally fail to detect an individual threat, we gain protection from a far greater danger:
the systemic paralysis of a society that begins to live in a state of suspicion.
Once the gate of suspicion is opened, the crowd of accusers will eventually break it down.
Suspicion becomes the norm.
Fear becomes the atmosphere.
A Society With a Damaged Intuition
In a world where reality is mediated through the media — through “bouillon cubes” of narrative, compressed, idealized, engineered to be more believable than facts — society’s natural intuition becomes crippled.
In such a world, people will trust not the one who is right, but the one who:
– markets better,
– triggers stronger emotional stimuli,
– performs more effective black PR against the person they wish to accuse.

Opening the gate of suspicion does not make us more vigilant — it makes us more manipulable.

Therefore, Principles Are More Rational Than Suspicion

Principles such as:
– presumption of innocence,
– in dubio pro reo,
– status quo,
are more rational than opening the door to suspicion.
They protect us from the most dangerous threat:
that dishonest people will shape our intuitions, lead us down false trails, and distract us from real dangers.
This is why the norm is wiser than the “innovation of suspicion.”
This is why trust is wiser than sectarian vigilance.
And this is why humility before tradition is wiser than believing that we — in an age of mediated illusions — can judge everything better on our own.

The Logic of Hierarchy and Primacy

Everyone believes they are right. And yet we disagree.
This problem is only partially resolved by trust in our ancestors, in Tradition — in what is given from above.
How is it resolved? Language itself shows us.

We do not invent language for ourselves.
We receive it from above, from previous generations.
In a sense, it is imposed on us, because before we learn it… we have very little to say.
And even if we did invent our own language, we would only be able to communicate with ourselves.
What would be the point of such a language?

The same is true of the worldview and way of life we call culture, which are given to us from above through upbringing and tradition.
Life and history teach us, however, that even these do not eliminate conflict.

What minimizes conflict in the most conceivable way is the recognition of a Hierarchical Institution, culminating in a single person.
Each level of hierarchy resolves disputes on the level below:
the father resolves the conflicts of the family,
the king — of his subjects,
the parish priest — of the parishioners,
the bishop — of the priests,
the president — of his subordinates,
the coach — of the players,
the master — of the apprentices,
the cardinals — of the bishops,
and the pope — of the cardinals and dioceses.
(Each within the scope of authority proper to their relationship.)

Life contains far too many situations in which there is no time for democratic voting and endless discussion.
Someone must decide — despite differing opinions.

In the Church, this model is strengthened by the shared belief that the Holy Spirit watches over it, and therefore the decrees of the hierarchy must be obeyed, and the pope is — albeit in a narrow range of matters concerning faith and morals, and under specific formal conditions — infallible.
And even when he is not infallible, we are still to obey his judgments and directives.
This is an extraordinarily rational solution. (2016)

Some say: These are the Facts, this is what God says, what the Holy Spirit says, what Scripture and even Tradition say.
Others — second, third, thousandth — say: No, the Facts are different, God says something else (God, or Reason, or the Nation, or the People, or Desire, or Elvis, Mao, Lenin, Lennon, Maradona, FC Barcelona, Wisła or Cracovia — depending on what they believe in).

Faced with such contradictions, one can experience, recall, and understand another fragment of the wisdom contained in Christ’s act of naming Simon the Rock and commanding him to strengthen his brothers. (2017)

Yet this is not all.
Treating the statements of a person who holds an office as inherently binding and unquestionable would make sense only if that person were God.
They are not.
They represent God in a certain sense, but they are not God.

What is binding is not what a particular person said, but a kind of sacred resultant — what has been said in unity, in continuity, in non‑contradiction with predecessors and successors, within the rules that precede the office and that the office‑holder accepts and hands on. (2020)

What Belongs to Us, and What Does Not (2)

As I explained not long ago.
But now I must acknowledge the point made by those who say that the meaning of earlier rules and texts can only be conveyed to us by someone living today.
And people living today — including Hierarchs — may disagree about the correct interpretation.

This is precisely why the hierarchy exists, with the pope at its head:
so that in the end, when disputes arise about the interpretation of Tradition among his subordinates, the decision ratified by the pope can be peacefully accepted by the faithful as binding, correct, and not harmful to their faith.

This is what belongs to the faithful — and in this they are to remain at peace, even if one day it turns out that the Church authorities were mistaken.
For these matters are empirically unverifiable, drawn from ancient texts concerning abstract realities, doctrines of faith and morals.

Most of the faithful simply cannot verify whether the authorities are right or wrong.
Thus, by following those who undermine the Acts of the Church — even in the name of truth, Tradition, etc. — they are in fact placing their trust in distrust of the Church.

Given the nature of these matters, they have no tools to verify whether those who challenge the Acts of the Church are right or not.
They trust them on their word, imagining that they possess facts and evidence.

The very existence of disputes among scholars — and even more so among the faithful — about what Tradition, Fact, and Truth actually are, reveals the perversity of such suspicious attitudes toward the Acts of one’s own Institution.
The Institution exists precisely so that, where various authorities disagree, one may adhere without hesitation to its interpretation.

The interpretation of ancient texts must be given by a concrete authority — one that is living, one, and has a single arbiter at the summit of the hierarchy.
Without this, the faithful would be left at the mercy of their own fallible interpretations, deciding for themselves whether to trust this or that bishop.
The Church and its Tradition would dissolve, replaced by clusters of religious leaders (as in various forms of Protestantism), and by the individual choice of the faithful based on what seems to them the correct interpretation of Tradition.
And each person may think differently.

A democratized, inherently revolutionary Tower of Babel of self‑appointed “churches” would arise.
It matters little that such critics denounce reliance on private opinion, for their denunciation is internally contradictory — they simply forget to call their own interpretation of ancient (e.g., pre‑conciliar) texts an opinion.

If things worked this way, the Church would never have survived.
The gates of hell would have prevailed.

The sacred resultant is a clue concerning those areas not explicitly defined by the contemporary pope and hierarchy.

One may criticize the pope when he violates the very principles he teaches — for example, when he himself engages in unjust judgments, though he has handed down the Eighth Commandment.
Words, too, are a kind of action, and thus papal words are subject to such verification.
This is how one must read Quo Primum Tempore.

Of course, we know the meaning of the words of predecessors only because living people have transmitted to us the meaning of language and its translations, enabling us to read both their words and the meaning of those words.

Someone may object that I am relativizing the meaning of words and thereby avoiding the question of what is true and what is not.
Quite the opposite: objectivity and truth do not belong to words, but to reality.
The objective, real feature of words is their changeability and subjectivity.

If we treat words as though they were objectively attached to meanings — as though objective states of reality had only one proper, equally objective set of terms naming them, and as though anyone who uses different words thereby loses the truth — then we fall into subjectivism and miss the truth, even while declining it in every grammatical case.

Neither Scripture nor the writings of ancient councils and popes speak to us by themselves.
This is why we have a living hierarchy, with the Papal Office at its head, so that in disputes over interpretation, its judgments in such matters are binding.

Thus, attacking the Acts of the Church as allegedly contrary to Tradition — based on one’s own inherently fallible interpretations — is not only a descent into private judgment, democratic presentism, and archaeological whimsy, but also a form of sola scriptura applied to the texts of Tradition.

On what basis do those who claim that ancient councils contradict modern ones (e.g., Vatican II) assume that they correctly understand

the earlier teaching, and
the current teaching?

On the basis of their own interpretation of both — an interpretation subject to error due to the limitations of our minds and of language.

Debate usually focuses on point 2.
Meanwhile, point 1 — and the very problem of trusting one’s own highly fallible understanding of distant texts — is rarely addressed. (2022)

The continuity of the principles Christ gave us to believe is known through the power of the Holy Spirit, mediated by the Church founded on the non‑relative Office of the Rock.
Its singularity allows it to encompass (though not eliminate) disputes and contradictions. (2012)

How to Read These Principles

Look backward.
Look beyond “I‑want,” “I‑feel,” and beyond the present moment.
What is proper is what is non‑contradictory with the teaching, ritual (e.g., the Holy Mass), and custom of previous generations of the Institutional Authority we recognize.

In this light, the copying of ancient Scriptures — together with the transmission of their meaning — gains coherence.

A living Institution of Persons, handing down not only dead letters but their meanings, through tradition — not only verbal but above all through non‑verbal ways of being and ritual, reaching all the senses — and verifying the infinite multiplicity of interpretations through a hierarchy culminating in one person, is the most rational solution known to history.
To this we add the belief that the Holy Spirit watches over this Institution.

If one is to believe, one should seek a worldview‑religious system in which believing is most rational.
And this, as I have shown, is held by the Roman Catholic Church.

This is the miracle of the Church: that it has survived, even though throughout its history its principles were lived fully by only a few.
This is shown by the constant feature of most saints — misunderstanding by their contemporaries, including superiors and fellow believers.
Persecution.
The misuse of Catholicism by rulers and societies, while living contrary to its principles.
This has been the case throughout the entire history of the Church — not only today.

“You are Peter, and on this Rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
“Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven.”
“He who listens to you listens to Me; he who rejects you rejects the One who sent Me.”
(2017)

edophile — meaning “priest”?

On institutions, responsibility, and a dangerous reversal of logic

Lead

After the widely discussed film about priest-pedophiles, a conviction long accumulating in Poland erupted once again: that the Institution of the Church — and institutions in general — are evil, while people are good.

This conviction is not only false.
It reverses reality.

It is not institutions that sin.
It is people who hold offices.
It is people who commit crimes — not the offices themselves, not the institutions.

1. What an Institution Is — and Is Not

The identity of an Institution is defined by its principles.

Do you blame the game of football because players constantly foul?
Of course not. A foul is a foul precisely because it violates the rules of football.

You may blame particular players or officials who tolerate such behavior — but not the rules themselves.

The same applies to the Church.

The foundation of the Church’s identity — just as in football — lies in its principles.
(The principal Principle is the Person of Christ.)

You cannot accuse principles of being broken.

2. Shifting Guilt onto “Dead” Structures

The true absurdity lies in the perversity of those who try to shift responsibility away from themselves and other concrete individuals onto some “dead” Institution.

Out of this absurdity grows a further danger:
the attempt to cure oneself with a poison falsely labeled as medicine — a poison that in those who took it actually produced the very illness it claimed to heal.

3. False Remedies and Self-Inflicted Illness

This mechanism appears far beyond the Church.

People praise social handouts as “help” in the face of rising prices, failing to see that these very “helps” drive prices upward, while taxes — hidden and visible — multiply.

We observe a similar pattern in contemporary medicine, the food industry, and the pharmaceutical sector, which often generate entire new categories of illness.

Like a firefighter who sets a forest ablaze in order to have something to extinguish.
Like a thief who shouts the loudest: “Catch the thief!”

The year 2020 marked the apex of this hypocrisy: a global frenzy of lockdowns in which fearmongering about a pandemic produced a real pandemic — of fear, paralysis, and victims smashed against the closed doors of hospitals.

A self-fulfilling prophecy — as they themselves called it. And rightly so.
(2020)

4. Norms, Obedience, and Moral Blackmail

Although the Pope may forbid something even without explanation, it is unjust to accuse those who treat the Mass as God commanded of enabling others to undermine the Faith or the unity of the Church.

You cannot accuse those who act according to the long-standing norm — for example, by keeping their faces uncovered or by obeying the Pope in matters of ordination.

They act according to what they received.

In a doubtful and complex situation, the proper stance is to remain with the established norm.

It is they who act correctly — not those who abandon the norm.

To accuse them of “endangering grandma’s life” or of betrayal is deeply unjust.
In truth, it is those who broke the norms who betrayed their Church.
(2021, 2022)

5. “The Church Was Silent”?

This problem is not imaginary. It appears in many areas of life.

But how does it manifest in the issue of pedophilia in the Church?

Voices from within the Church were ignored and mocked by the very people who now accuse the Church of institutional silence.

Such warnings came even from Pope Benedict XVI himself.

The outraged journalistic moralists either remained silent or responded with contempt and ridicule.

They themselves ignored the cries from within the Church — and now accuse the Church of silence.

6. Presumption of Guilt Instead of Presumption of Innocence

Are pedophiles not punished by the Church?

In other contexts, the Church’s critics insist on the principle of presumption of innocence.
Here, however, mere accusation becomes proof.

In many cases it is extremely difficult to determine whether we are dealing with rumor, slander, or real guilt.
Restraint in punishment often stemmed from honest caution.

There were numerous cases of priests being blackmailed — extorted under threat of being publicly branded as womanizers or pedophiles.

One such case became widely known:

Fr. José Antonio Molina, a priest from San Salvador, was urgently suspended by the Pope for alleged pedophilia and removed from all positions. He could not appeal. It later turned out that the accusation was entirely false. A civil court in El Salvador declared him innocent and cleared him of all charges. (ekai.pl)

The world shouted “pedophile!” — and the man was innocent.

We are dealing with a media-fueled anti-Church climate.

7. When “Defenders of Tradition” Undermine the Church

Unfortunately, the same emotional mechanism is exploited by those who claim to defend tradition but in fact strike at the Church itself — at the Acts approved by the Church.

Some, seeing the sins of people who invoke the Church, blame the Church as such.
Others, seeing abuses after a Council or the Novus Ordo, blame the Council or the liturgy itself.

As if this connection were self-evident.

In reality, those who reject the most recent Acts of the living Church logically reject the Church and the Faith altogether.

If Vatican II is discredited by post-conciliar abuses, then earlier Councils must be discredited by later heresies — and ultimately the Church itself must be rejected.

8. By This Logic, Christ Himself Fails

More still:
if the Apostles chosen by Christ were traitors, deniers, cowards —
if those who invoked Christ later fell into heresies and schisms —
then by this same logic Christ Himself should be rejected.

Someone might have said: “By their fruits you shall know them,”
judged those fruits as bad,
and rejected Christ altogether.

This logic destroys everything it touches.

9. Ideology, Silence, and the Smoke in the Church

Why, then, did certain voices remain silent?

Because voices from within the Church revealed the problem in its entirety — pointing to its ideological source.

Left-wing ideologies, promoted by circles close to the Church’s critics, were pushed into the Church from the outside — and succeeded.

The tragic acknowledgment of this can be heard in Pope Paul VI’s words about the smoke that entered the Church through some crack.

The supposedly progressive and open-minded “medicine” turned out to be poison.

10. The Final Reversal

Those who once attacked defenders of chastity as outdated and rigid later accused the Church of the consequences of abandoning that very discipline.

The discipline that was mocked as obsolete was precisely what protected against abuse.

Like those who hand firefighters gasoline and later blame them for spreading the fire.
Like doctors who poison a patient with a bottle labeled “medicine” and then blame the patient for the illness.

A perfidious reversal.

Conclusion: Against Fashionable Slogans

It is against this reversal that this book warns.

The issue is not isolated.
It is worldview-related, logical, moral, political, and symbolic.

The task is simple to name — and difficult to carry out:
to turn upright what has been overturned,
and to begin restoring things to their proper place.

Let us be cautious.
Let us not follow emotional, fashionable slogans.

Christ Yes, the Church No?

(Tradition Yes, the Post-Conciliar Church No?)

How do you know who the One God of our culture is?
How do you know who Christ is?
How do you know how to understand the mysterious signs we call Scripture?
How do you know that what is written there is even worth believing?
How do you know how to interpret the Syllabus of Errors or the bull Quo Primum tempore?

From the Church.

It is the Church that preserved those ancient marks — and preserved, above all, the conviction that there is something valuable in them.
It is the Church that, through direct relationships between living persons, handed down their Meaning. And it is meaning that matters — not the exact shapes of graphic signs, nor the precise sounds assigned to them.

Some fall into the temptation of believing in Scripture alone, clinging tightly to the letter.
They do so whether they praise these writings or attack them — whether the writings in question are the Gospels, the Council of Trent, or Vatican II.

Yet in the case of the Bible, we have access only to translations.
And even when we look at original manuscripts, we understand them solely through scholarly hypotheses and modern reconstructions — which are, in fact, educated guesses.

Scripture alone is not enough.
Nothing alone is enough.

Even when we appeal to Tradition, we can go astray if we allow ourselves to decide independently whether to trust one hierarch rather than another — one interpreter of Tradition over another — deciding for ourselves what Tradition is and what it is not.

All the more so when that hierarch, or any other interpreter, undermines the Acts of the Church given to us directly by living representatives of the Church, with the Pope at their head.

These Acts, and this living will, exist precisely for this reason:
so that in cases of dispute and divergent interpretations of Tradition, they may show us — the faithful — what is right, what we are to choose.
They protect us from the consequences of our own limitations, through which we may easily overlook errors in translations or in the arguments of authorities we happen to like.

If we choose not the Acts of the Church, but instead the complicated explanations of someone who undermines those Acts, then we simply betray the Church.
We transfer our hope from the Church to someone else.

Someone will object:
“But truth and reason allow us to evaluate that person’s arguments.”

No.
That is pride.

For if these matters are important, interpretative, and complex — and they are — then it is very easy to make a mistake, to miss an error.
In practice, we end up believing on someone’s word those who undermine the Acts of the Church, instead of believing the Acts themselves.

This amounts to the same thing as if the hierarchy did not exist at all.

We decide whom to trust according to our own preferences — preferences that are fallible and limited, like our “little heads that fit into a hat or a cap.”

That is why it makes sense to trust a network of verifiers — a structure in which authorities correct and limit one another.
It makes sense to trust persons and signs that reach beyond themselves and beyond temporality.

From these “transcendings,” from these relationships — not from isolated elements — emerges Meaning:
the proper Logos of Scripture, not necessarily its exact wording.

This transmission we call Tradition.
The network of persons and verifiers we call the Institution.

People, as we know, can interpret the same marks — even the same words — in different ways.
This applies to Scripture, to later Fathers and Popes, and to any writings whatsoever.

That is why the Church, with its hierarchical and living Institution, ensures that we do not lose ourselves in the thicket of possible interpretations.

You may, of course, choose not to believe the Church.

But then it makes no sense to believe in Jesus.

Without the Church, you would know nothing about Him.
And even if you knew of Him from other sources, you would still have to accept their version.

Why should we favor those sources over the Church?
Because the Church “has a bad reputation”?

The Cross of Christ once had a bad reputation too.

The Church is one source — but, to be honest, most other “sources” are secondary to it.
And even if something older were discovered, we could attempt to interpret it only on the basis of what has been handed down to us directly by the living Church.

It was Church monks who copied the books.
Church scholars who preserved the knowledge of ancient languages — Latin in the West, Greek in the East.
And preachers who handed down the content of the Gospel.

As someone once said — I forget who:

“Luther cried ‘Scripture alone,’ but he stole that Scripture from a Catholic monastery.”

Most translators agree that even between contemporary languages there is no exact translation.
How much less between languages separated by two thousand years.

We do not know what is an idiom.
We are not even certain whether we correctly decipher simple natural terms — for example, whether John the Baptist ate the insect called locust, or the carob pod known as locust bean.

Not only words, but entire phrases carry meaning.
So do non-verbal situations: patterns of images and actions that make up a culture.

And we do not know — and never will know — whether Jesus’ act of writing in the sand carried a meaning completely inaccessible to us today.

A Japanese smile may mean something entirely different from a European one.
We do not know whether climbing a tree, resting one’s chest on someone’s head, riding a donkey, or other seemingly incidental actions carried symbolic meanings that gave biblical messages a sense inaccessible to literal reading.

We learn only tiny fragments — and even about these we cannot be certain.

That is why all attempts to understand Christ on the basis of Scripture alone — or rather, its translation — prove disastrous.

They are, in essence, mixtures of presentism and archaeologism.
And these have little to do with pure truth.

They end in the massacres of revolutions:
first those carried out “according to Scripture” — as in the sixteenth-century Lutheran explosion of dialectic against reason and the Church, in the name of God, though in truth against God —
and later openly according to one’s own whims.

See the Enlightenment.
The French Revolution.
The Bolshevik Revolution.
The Nazi Revolution.
The sexual revolution.

Here, the place of God was taken by Reason, the People, the Nation, or simply: I-Want-It.

The more deeply someone knows their field of study, the more certain they become —
of the uncertainty of scientific results, and of the necessity of accepting certain “certainties” on faith.

Scientific research, given the uncertainty of its foundations, is largely guesswork — which does not diminish its value.
It reveals only a portion of the complex processes of nature, and even less of linguistic and cultural processes.

We do not know what it does not reveal.
Nor whether what remains hidden would overturn the entire scientific picture.

Here the wisdom of the Church becomes clear.

For centuries, it was wary of attempts to read Scripture independently, urging the faithful to trust the Living Tradition of the Church — expressed also through local traditions, where what was transmitted was not exact wording, but Meaning.

Today, the situation is reversed.

We lose meaning.
And to the dogmatically defended wording of modern translations of the Gospel — which we treat as the actual Logos — we attach whatever meaning happens to suit the world at the moment.

That is why I was always puzzled that the very first voices I heard — both from within the Church and from outside it — spoke with regret that popes once forbade the reading of Holy Scripture.
When I later encountered the following words, which were themselves the object of similar lamentations, I realized that they are simply true:

“It pleased God that Holy Scripture should remain mysterious in certain parts; otherwise, if it were completely understandable to everyone, it would be held in too little esteem and would lose the reverence due to it. It could also be falsely understood by those insufficiently educated and lead them into error.”
— Pope Gregory VII

CATHOLOGI(C) — OR REASONABLE HUMILITY

The most rational certainty turns out to be the certainty that we are mistaken.
This follows from a simple fact: we are finite, while the possible descriptions of the world are infinite.

In such a situation, the most reasonable attitude is humility.
A humility that inclines us to test our own perspective against the perspectives of others, and from other angles.
To submit to what transcends us.
To remain with what belongs to us — and not to interfere in what lies within the competence of others.

To faith.

This is difficult.
And precisely for that reason — credible.

That is why, if Sister Faustina or Padre Pio had placed the words of Jesus received in private revelations above the commands of their superiors, I would not have believed them.

The “Secretary of Divine Mercy,” however, told Jesus that she would not carry out privately given instructions because her superiors did not permit it.
And Jesus — according to her account — praised her for this.

This is precisely what speaks in favor of the authenticity of those revelations.
It does not yet definitively resolve the matter, but it speaks in their favor.

Any other behavior would have been irrational.
After all, God Himself gave us reason.

Perhaps you are surprised that I am uttering such “heresies” against Progressive Dogmas.
In their light, the attitude described above is treated as a textbook example of blind faith in the Church, submission to the shackles of Tradition and hierarchy, and the abandonment of one’s own reason.

I will try to show that the opposite is true.

BLIND FAITH…

…in the Church?

I must believe in everything else as well.
In science.
In the principles of my own thinking.
In the fact that the world is as I see it, hear it, and feel it.

All the more so in matters unverifiable by nature: in ancient texts, testimonies, revelations.

Since it is impossible not to believe, it is worth seeking such a religious and worldview system in which belief is most rational.
(2017)

…in the post-conciliar Church? In the Pope?

This accusation is raised by those who have concluded that, in the name of defending Tradition, one must oppose the pope — for example, by consecrating bishops without his consent “in order to preserve Tradition.”

But within this conviction, they themselves have blindly trusted their own suspicions and the authorities who fueled those suspicions.

The Church exists precisely so that, in such disputed situations — when different intelligent people hold different views — one may trust the Church, rather than those who undermine its Acts.

Whoever does not wish to trust the Church blindly simply does not have to belong to it.

If someone, in the name of supposed obedience to God or to older texts of Tradition, rejects the Acts of the Living, contemporary Church — approved by the pope and the Councils (canonizations, forms of the Mass, official interpretations of faith, morality, and custom, which constitute the nearest rule of faith) —
if they declare these Acts to be contrary to ancient Tradition, while ignoring arguments showing that no such contradiction exists,
then in fact they place themselves above the Church.

They make themselves arbiters: deciding which pope or bishop is right, and which is not.

Yet it is precisely the Acts of the contemporary Church that exist to serve as arbiters — to establish criteria, provide interpretation, and decide in changing matters who may do what, when, and under what conditions.

By analogy: not every priest has the faculty to hear confessions.
Only an extraordinary situation — such as imminent danger of death — permits confession even to a priest who is suspended or excommunicated.

The same applies in another respect:
those who claim that religion “should not interfere” in this or that area themselves place their own preference in the position of religion, ignoring the fact that the function of religion is precisely to assign everything its proper place.

If something assigns religion its “niche,” it itself becomes a religion.
(2022)

ENSLAVEMENT?

Those who say that the Church enslaves them resemble people who come to play football and then resent the referee for penalizing them for throwing the ball into the goal by hand.

If you do not accept the rules — do not enter the field.
Go play something else, or invent your own game.

In any case, something is always imposed upon us.

The world imposes worldviews indirectly.
It smuggles them in through cultural forms which, by virtue of their omnipresence, ease, and multisensory impact, shape us so that we do not even notice when our preferences change — and with them the worldviews that justify those preferences.

By the method of “boiling the frog.”

We imagine that something was “invented by ourselves,” that it flows from the depths of our heart.
But that depth, too, is being shaped.

Therefore, the most enslaved are those convinced of their own creativity, liberation, and boundlessness.
They do not see the convention they have named “nonconformity.”

The Church presents its assumptions clearly.
It hides nothing.

That is why — from a superficial perspective — they appear today less attractive and more demanding.
And that is why they can be accepted or rejected.

Voluntarily.

And this is honesty.
And this is freedom.

IRRATIONALITY?

The paradox of “enslavement through liberation” is part of the Great Folly of the Enlightenment, visible in numerous inconsistencies.

Those who proclaim a theory of a Catholic historical conspiracy mock conspiracy theorists.
Those who claim that the Church’s version of the Gospel is unreliable “because there is no evidence” seek truth in other writings — equally unevidenced.

The same applies to visionaries:
one says there is no hell, another that there is;
one says Jesus is not God, another that He is but without the Trinity;
one says there are many gods, another that there is no God at all.

All claim to possess a “truth hidden by the Church.”
Yet their versions mutually contradict one another.

Whom, then, should one believe?

Without hierarchy, a Tower of Babel arises.
Everyone establishes a “Church of Personal Preference” — with their own Jesus and their own “god,” who always approves their desires.

That is why I propose believing not in ourselves, but in a structure in which different elements mutually correct one another.

This is what Tradition is.
A going beyond oneself.
Transcendence.
Mystery.

And this turns out to be rational.

Cathologic.

An institution is not a dead building, but something composed of living persons and of the entire set of verifiers mentioned above — verifiers that transcend the present moment and transcend language.

The Church is one such Institution.
It consists not of a single factor, but of many factors together, acting in communion, never in isolation.
Not faith alone, not Grace alone, not Scripture alone!
Not women alone, not men alone, not priests alone, not laity alone, not couples alone, not children alone, not freedom alone, not coercion alone, not relativity alone, not objectivity alone, not lexicons alone, not rules alone…
Nothing “alone” means anything!

The Church binds together into a coherent whole the apparent opposites:
reason with faith, practice with symbolism, word and text with non‑verbal signs, individuality with community, body with soul, form with content, the “pagan” soil of symbols with the Christic Seed that fulfills them — the Meaning — the LOGOS!

Proper interpretation is the convergence of the Holy Mass, Scripture, commentaries, customs, ways of life, interpersonal bonds, hierarchy and succession — and the belief that the Holy Spirit watches over all of this together, never separately.

Humanly speaking, this Institution could also lead us astray — even despite so many “verifiers.”
But any individual person can mislead, deceive, or simply be mistaken.
You, I, bishops, the pope, a pastor, an imam, a plumber, a prime minister, a gravedigger, a bridge player, a monk.
Everyone.
For everyone is limited — humanly speaking.

Yet I believe that here something more‑than‑human enters in.
I believe that the Holy Spirit watches over the Hierarchical Institution of living persons who hand on not only letters, but above all the proper Meaning of the Gospel, through multisensory means.
This transmission converges in the Catholic Tradition.

The word “I BELIEVE” is the key here.
For such belief turns out to be the most rational of all.

Distinguishing Principles from… Their Violation

That the Holy Spirit watches over the Church does not mean that bishops do not sin, or that errors never occur.
We have free will.

And yet — despite sins and errors (which hierarchy and tradition contain, though they do not abolish them) — one can still discern what might be called a “Holy Resultant.”

To do so, we must distinguish ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES from mere practice.

It is principles that determine the identity of the Church — and of any institution.
Practice must be measured against principles, not against actions that violate them.

This is not about Szymek, Józek, Jurek, Marcel, Staś, or Karol.
It is about the office they hold.

And behind that Office stands a Personal God.

Even the most sinful priest — a libertine, a criminal, a thief — if he has valid ordination, possesses a power no holier layperson possesses: the Sacraments.

You may say this assumption is unjustified — mere faith.
Indeed. Unjustified by anything else, yet justifying everything.

Without it, all justification becomes — or rather collapses into — boundlessness, aimlessness, and therefore groundlessness.

Despite the sins of popes, bishops, and lesser clergy, the Church has endured.
God suffers through their sins and sacrileges, yet He does not cease to give Himself to us through their unworthy MEDIATION.

After all, priests are human.
They are not worse than we are.
They are simply like us.

One may disagree with the actions of individuals — bishops or popes.
One may admonish them.
At times, opposition is even a duty — when they break the very rules they themselves transmitted.

But to undermine the principle and practice of obedience to Offices
(not to the persons who temporarily occupy them)
is folly.

As foolish as fighting against monarchy as such.
As foolish as trying to train a sports team democratically, with every player voting on tactics.
As foolish as claiming that a company does not need a boss-employee structure.

And yet — as practice shows — hierarchy exists in every enterprise that has more people than fingers on one hand.

Because it works.
Because behind it stand two Greek ladies: pragmatics and… logic.

Is Every Widespread Practice in the Church a “Custom”?

(In response to doubts concerning the interpretation of the Council of Trent, discussed in Chapter II of this book.)

The mere fact that something is commonly done during Mass does not make it binding.

Otherwise, sin itself — since we all sin — would have to be considered a “custom” and a foundation of the Church’s identity.

This leads to impossible questions:
What quantity?
What duration?
What frequency of a given practice makes it a rite?

The Council of Trent does not specify this.
If we stop at the letter of the text, the matter remains unclear and open to multiple interpretations.

The foundation of Catholic custom is not practice alone
(just as Scripture alone cannot tell us its own Meaning),
but practice in harmony with PRINCIPLES, presented by authorities as a model.

In truth, these principles were always lived consistently — not only in ritual, but also in morality — by a minority.
Yet they were lived.
By the saints, for example.

The Church proceeds from the conviction that written texts alone are insufficient.
We need ritual and moral practice to show us what the texts mean.

This is the essence of tradition —
the place where the greater Tradition, with a capital “T,” expresses itself.

(2022)

BAD CATHOLICS = A BAD CHURCH?

(A Bad Council? A Bad Novus Ordo?)**

It is unreasonable to reject the Church because of the failings of her members.
After all, it is the Church herself who told us that beneath the Cross only John remained. The rest — including the first pope, St. Peter — fled, denied Christ, or even betrayed Him, as Judas did.
The same pattern repeats throughout the Church’s history. Christ knew this perfectly well. And what did He do? Did He revoke the apostles’ authority?
Quite the opposite.
Knowing all things, He made them priests and the foundation of His Church. In doing so, He showed that the Church’s identity rests not on flawless individuals, but on principles and on the Office behind which God Himself stands.

To conclude, therefore, that Catholicism is evil because many Catholics are sinful is irrational. It is a logical fallacy: one does not follow from the other.
If it did follow, then we would have to admit that since some doctors poison patients to profit from pharmaceutical contracts, the essence of medicine must be poisoning; that the essence of priesthood — or rather, teaching — is abuse and its concealment; that all people are wicked because many people are wicked.
Nonsense.

This same ancient rule of faith is attacked both by those who reject Christ and the Church because of the sins of Christians, and by those who reject Tradition, the Council, or the Novus Ordo because some commit wrongs in their name or within their structures — whether against God and neighbor, or in doctrine and worship.

Should we then reject Jesus Himself, since the immediate “fruit” of His ministry included a traitor, a suicide, a denier, a future pope who fled, and a whole company of frightened deserters?
Should we reject earlier Councils because the heresies and schisms that followed them — Jansenism, Gallicanism, Bajanism, Old Catholicism, and others — appeared after their decrees?
Should we reject the so‑called “Tridentine Mass” because liturgical abuses and experiments occurred during the centuries when it was the only form priests knew?
Should we reject Jesus, Truth, Reason, and the Church because crimes were committed in Their name?

Only when I myself was wounded by the internal conflicts of traditionalist circles — those closest to my heart — did I begin to understand the wisdom hidden in the fact that Our Lord did not prevent Judas from betraying and hanging himself, nor the apostles from erring and fleeing, nor the crowds from misunderstanding His words and accusing Him of speaking obscurely.
Through this, I see more clearly the falseness of the same accusations now directed at the New Mass and the Council.

Christ left us a legacy far more ambiguous than any council text — whether the last one or those before it.
During His earthly life, and again after His Ascension and Pentecost, disputes arose among those who invoked His name.
Each group believed it possessed the one true, objective interpretation — and yet they disagreed.
The many heresies and schisms bear witness to this. All of them invoked Jesus.

A similar dynamic appears today in the tensions between, for example, the Society of St. Pius X and the “indult” communities, or other groups within the Church.
All appeal to Jesus, the Church, and Tradition.
All look at the same Act of the Church — and some see a rupture, while others see fulfillment, continuity, and expression.

If the alleged ambiguity of the Council were proof against it, then it would be even stronger proof against Christ Himself.
For it is His Church that allowed a diversity of disputes about the Mass and about doctrine.
The very existence of these disputes shows that the texts and directives were not perfectly clear — and could not be, by their very nature.
(I will demonstrate this later using the supposedly “clear” bull Quo Primum tempore of St. Pius V.)

By what mysterious logic do those who reject the Council because of its ambiguity claim at the same time to be defending the Church and her Tradition — of which that Council is a central expression?

Let us be honest:
If an official Act of the Church — such as the Second Vatican Council — must be rejected, then by the same reasoning the Church herself must be rejected, and Christ with her.

For it was the same Jesus — let us repeat — who chose a traitor and a coward.
The same Jesus who established rules that later required interpretation, since they became the source of disputes — and thus, in the language of the Council’s critics, were “ambiguous,” “opened a door to error,” and therefore, supposedly, “must be rejected.”

This is precisely the same mistake made by those who reject the Church altogether — only transposed to another level.
We will return to this error in Chapter Three.
What follows here is its prelude.

Fidelity to Living Norms — a Humble and Simple Defense Against Error

(rewritten in English with the requested stylistic blend)

Luther, in the name of defending that fragment of Tradition which he alone deemed authentic, rejected obedience to the living norms and to the superiors who embodied them. He branded them apostates from the True (Orthodox) Teaching of Christ. After the First Vatican Council proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility, a portion of Catholics rebelled and rejected that teaching—again in the name of Tradition, which, according to them, the Council had violated. Others before and after them did the same: heretics and schismatics of every age, convinced that fidelity to a chosen shard of the past justified disobedience to the living whole.

In various groups—some Neocatechumenal communities, certain charismatic circles, and the occasional liturgical experimenter—one saw a similar pattern. Under the banner of a supposed “return” to the Church of the first Christians, or, conversely, under the pretext of modernization, they dismissed the norms then in force. They treated them as a kind of illness: a pagan or medieval accretion that obscured the pristine ideal of the Early Church. And so priests, then the faithful, and eventually bishops introduced, against the rules, the table-altar (allegedly primitive), Communion in the hand, female altar servers, unauthorized translations, spontaneous commentaries, and a whole catalogue of innovations.

They ignored the norms consistently, until—by the method of faits accomplis—their innovations became common practice. Even when some of these rebellious practices were later approved post factum (perhaps out of pastoral prudence, so as not to scandalize the faithful), they continued to break even the new norms, turning disobedience into habit, and habit into principle.

They had, and still have, very persuasive arguments: quotations from the Fathers, descriptions of ancient gestures, reconstructions of how hands were once folded upon the Cross. And in the same breath they associated, for example, Communion on the tongue with moral decline, doctrinal corruption, or that mythical specter of “ritualization.”

In doing so—almost casually, as if it were self-evident—they assumed that the Church had been wrong for centuries, as though the Holy Spirit had been asleep, and that they would now finally understand the Fathers better than the generations who lived closer to them. But this assumption undermines the very meaning of the Church’s existence. It is, at its core, an act of pride—a quiet but devastating rejection of the foundations of our faith.

Of course, the shape of rites is not doctrine. It is something that can change. But precisely because it can change, the Church alone has the authority to make those changes within the framework of her norms. These innovators ignored that authority and introduced changes without the Church’s consent. And often the Church, faced with a pastoral dilemma, later ratified those changes—Communion in the hand being a prime example. It was first introduced illicitly; only after it had spread widely did the popes approve it.

And that approval was wise, if one considers the chaos that would have erupted had the Church suddenly declared that what bishops had assured the faithful was good—citing the Fathers, no less—was in fact unlawful. If it had been a matter of doctrine, resistance would have been necessary despite the confusion. But since it concerned the form of a rite—an area entrusted to the Church’s authority—the Church was free to modify it. And even if the change were imperfect or pastorally unhelpful, it must still be accepted. What must not be repeated are the insinuations that Communion on the tongue was some kind of ecclesial error.

A striking example of such overinterpretation can be found in the statement of Fr. Marcin Lisak OP (26 February 2005) on the official website of the Polish Catholic press agency. His narrative—though widespread—is in fact at odds with the Church’s Tradition.

A similar fidelity to suspicion—only now directed not at the “late medieval Church” but at the “postconciliar Church”—lies at the root of the opposing error. These critics claim to be faithful to what they received: the “Mass of All Time,” the “doctrine,” the “unchanging Tradition.” And indeed, they deserve praise for not inventing new rites, for clinging to what was handed down.

But their error, and their resemblance to the revolutionaries, lies elsewhere: in ignoring and devaluing, in the name of one part of Tradition, the living norms of the Church. They cling to what Tradition produced, while ignoring the very principle of Tradition—the living authority without which those older forms would never have existed.

They call this fidelity to Tradition, to God, to orthodoxy. But so did every heretic and schismatic in the history of the Church. And like them, they ignore the contemporary norms of the Church: the calendar, the new saints, disciplinary decrees, the new Order of Mass, the Second Vatican Council.

The error of both camps is the same: ignoring one part of the Church’s teaching in the name of another. Inevitably, this leads to choosing—according to one’s own preference—which fragment of Tradition is “truer,” guided by some new authority: Hus, Luther, a charismatic priest, a religious order, or a bishop.

Both sides will be offended by this comparison. They should not be. I have already noted the differences between them. But those differences do not erase the structural similarity.

They will also protest the claim that they rely on their own private judgment. They will insist that the texts are clear, that the evidence is undeniable, and they will point to long, intricate treatises by learned authors. But if the ordinary faithful were expected to decide which of these interpretations is correct, the Church would be unnecessary. And the Church is necessary precisely because even great scholars disagree—and because texts, by their nature, are conventional and multivalent, especially when ancient.

The Church alone can provide the authoritative interpretation and the ritual forms that illuminate those texts.

The Church may change the rites of the Mass. Even if such changes contain imperfections, we cannot reject or ignore them. It is not our place. The Church has the competence to determine the form of worship, because that form is not a matter of empirical proof. If it were, it would become the subject of endless disputes, each side armed with volumes of arguments—until the Church collapsed into a Babel of competing liturgical theories.

Someone must decide what the form is. That someone is the Church.

It is not for us to choose which liturgical decisions of the Church are correct and which are not. How would we know what “correct” even means? How would we know whether we understand older texts and customs properly—whether post-Tridentine or “early Christian”? We would know only from our own heads. And then the Church would cease to have meaning. We would become judges of the Church, placing ourselves in her place.

The Church exists precisely to keep us from losing ourselves in the labyrinth of possible interpretations.

The essence of the Church is that she shows us what is right and what is wrong, and on that basis we are to judge and transform ourselves and the world. If we were to decide for ourselves whether the Church’s changes were legitimate or illegitimate, we would always risk error—and thus deny the very function of the Church’s hierarchy, placing ourselves above it.

Tradition tells us that these matters are changeable, and that the Church—through councils and popes—has the exclusive right to make legitimate changes. If someone breaks these norms, appealing to practices long ago altered by the Church, he breaks the law and strikes at the Church. But if the Church approves a change, then we are obliged to accept it humbly. At that moment it becomes legitimate—even if previously it was not. And even if it has flaws, those flaws cannot objectively endanger our faith, because we know what is legitimate and orthodox from the Church’s approval itself.

That approval is our primary criterion of orthodoxy.

Those who ignore the Church’s post–Vatican II norms commit the same error as the revolutionaries: they choose a stage of Tradition according to their own preference, while ignoring the living authority of the Church—the first guarantor of Tradition and orthodoxy.

Let Each Person Do What Belongs to Them — Without Reaching for What Belongs to Others

“Whoever carries the weight of his own sins does not look back at the sins of others.”
— Abba Moses, Sayings of the Desert Fathers

…All the more so, then, he does not rummage through the supposed sins of the Church or the failings of his superiors.

A coach may impose a strategy that seems worse to the player than the one used by the previous coach. But tactics do not belong to the players. The coach is responsible for them. A player who cannot accept the strategy may leave the team or change the sport altogether.

Likewise, no one forces us to be Catholic. But if one chooses to be, one ought to respect the rules of the Church one has freely embraced. As long as the “tactics” do not directly violate the rules of the game or the moral law, they are to be followed. For it is still better than the chaos that would ensue if every player followed the strategy of his favorite coach.

Even if some players truly had better tactical insight, the very act of rebellion would destroy the team. The revolt itself becomes the strategic error — a self‑inflicted wound that nullifies even the best ideas by denying the very principle that makes ideas workable.

Consider the finest engine in the world. What good is it if we insist on installing it in a car whose chief engineer does not want it? And what happens when other mechanics, inspired by our defiance, begin forcing in their own “best” parts? The car collapses. The components no longer fit.

This is precisely what happens when people undermine the Acts of the lawful Church and the authority of the pope. They dismantle the very compatibility that makes Tradition a living whole.

Better a weaker engine, weaker parts, even a weaker system — but one assembled according to the design given by the chief engineer. Then at least the machine holds together. And each mechanic, even if the design proves flawed, is judged only on his fidelity to the task entrusted to him. He has done what belongs to him.

So it is with us. We will be judged above all by our fidelity to the commandments and the precepts of the Church — the greatest of which is love of God and neighbor — not by our ability to determine which liturgical form is superior.

Even if we participate in a form that is imperfect, revolutionary, or flawed, if it is approved by the Church, the error is not ours. We will not be judged for what does not belong to us.
For deciding which form is proper, or when disobedience in matters of ordination becomes necessary, are questions so complex that pursuing them would consume the time needed for simpler, clearer, and far more demanding tasks — living according to the commandments.

These matters belong to the Church’s representatives, above all the pope. They will answer for them, just as the coach answers for the tactics.

But if we take these matters into our own hands — if we belittle the Church’s directives and permissions — then we violate the very principle that does belong to us, and for which we will be judged.

We become like players who, perhaps rightly, see flaws in the coach’s strategy, but who, by implementing their own tactics on the field and inciting others to rebellion, commit a far greater error — one for which they will be held accountable.

Soon enough, those they persuaded to rebel will develop their own “only true” strategy. The rebels rebel against the earlier rebels. Everyone plays his own game. The team dissolves.

Those, therefore, who participate in a less perfect, even flawed form, yet remain faithful to the living Church, do not err in what belongs to them.

These are the ordinary parishioners:
those who simply go to Mass,
who quietly finger their rosaries,
who fight for Communion on the tongue and on the knees,
who beg for years for the Mass of All Time,
and even those who, unaware of abuses in various “new movements,” accept them in good faith, believing the Church permits them.

If they err, they err in matters that do not belong to them — matters for which the Church bears responsibility.
And in what does belong to them — daily prayer, honesty, fidelity to the Eighth Commandment — they are often more faithful to Tradition than those who declaim “Tradition” in every grammatical case.

These are the ones to imitate.

One thing is clear: in this revolutionary confusion we will not achieve agreement about liturgical forms. We will not convince one another. There are too many stimuli, too much information, too many shards of shattered crystal caked in mud.

Almost every group is right in some respect and wrong in another. And in most cases, there is no simple proof that what others do is objectively wrong. Our arguments often arise from the emotion of indignation or sorrow — emotions that make the supposed wrongdoing of others seem self‑evident, while the other side sees no sufficient reason to accept our “obviousness.” And we cannot provide it.

Therefore, what belongs to us is this principle:
Do not accuse others of what does not belong to them.
Do not pressure them to abandon imperfect customs (unless they are intrinsically immoral), if — despite our example and explanation — they see no sufficient reason to do so.

Which errors must be pointed out, and how?
Above all, those that arise from accusations — accusations against the forms and Acts of the Church’s Tradition, and against the Catholics attached to them, as though these were empty, superstitious, or medieval relics.

Such accusations are precisely what we must avoid: they lack sufficient reason.

Where we differ in positive practices, let us act separately without accusing one another.
Where we can act together, let us fight for the Church by doing what belongs to us:
faithfully fulfilling the commands of the living Church,
and joyfully honoring and practicing both her ancient and her present teaching.
(2022)

What Belongs to the Faithful, and What Belongs to the Church?

It has never belonged to the faithful to decide which form of the Mass is worthy and which is not.
What has belonged to them is simpler, and far more demanding:

To choose which Institution they trust—and thus to choose the Catholic Church.
To remain faithful to the laws, forms, and teachings that this Church gives them.

If someone refuses that fidelity, the only consistent path would be to found their own church—or to believe solely in themselves.
Trying to “obey the Church” while simultaneously overruling her is an attempt to walk in two opposite directions at once.

When we begin to occupy ourselves with responsibilities that are not ours—imagining that we are obliged to do so—we lose the strength and clarity needed to fulfill what is ours.
This is why so many “super‑traditionalists,” fierce in judging liturgical forms, see nothing wrong in dances, fashions, and entertainments that the Church, through saints and documents, has long considered morally dangerous.

Where they will be judged, they surrender to the spirit of the age.
Where they will not be judged, they wage war—yet the war itself becomes a revolution.
This contradiction is one of the devil’s favorite strategies.

An Example

A milder version of this confusion appeared in a priest who urged the faithful to reject the Novus Ordo and the Council—while at the same time organizing a concert of young women standing with their backs to the Tabernacle.

I remember participating in such concerts years ago.
Later I recognized it as a mistake—just as many ordinary Catholics attending the New Mass eventually did.

The unease was not about dresses alone, nor merely about wearing them in church.
It was about performing with one’s back to the altar, while the conductor stood in the very center of the sanctuary, turned directly away from the Cross and the Tabernacle.
The saints and the popes had warned precisely about such things.

Yet this priest, in a video titled “Catholic, Why Are You Not Normal?”—a title already insulting to other Catholics—responded with a long lecture on the “Catholic sense,” concluding that those who object lack it.
Fr. Dariusz Olewiński has analyzed this case in detail elsewhere.

And so it happens:
The very people who loudly judge the form of the Mass, who criticize the pope, fail to notice what is wrong in the area that is their responsibility.
Here they no longer quote Pius XII, Bellarmine, or traditional practice.
Here they behave exactly like the rest of the “post‑conciliar Church.”

Yet the saints and catechisms have always taught that those whose conscience recoils from such performances are the ones who show the true sensum catholicum.
More on this in chapter three.

Where the Faithful May Resist

The faithful may resist clear violations of God’s commandments or the Church’s moral law.
If a pope accuses someone rashly, he contradicts his own teaching—for speech is also an act.

But if the same pope, even in the same document, establishes new rites or restricts older ones, he acts within his rightful authority.
And that binds us, regardless of how he explains it.
He may, in those explanations, speak unwisely or even unjustly—but the decree itself is not the explanation.
And the decree obliges.

A Parallel in Social Movements

Not every error must be immediately condemned.
Often the deeper faults lie in hidden structures and habits, not in the surface words.
We should show patience toward those who fall into such errors unknowingly, especially when they act out of fear or woundedness—so long as they do not accuse or trample others.

But we cannot show patience toward the lack of patience.
Nor toward blaming victims for defending themselves against aggression disguised as smiles and polite phrases.

This is why I disagree with those who scold journalists for “clickbait titles” like “shocking” or “urgent.”
Such titles harm no one directly.
To fixate on them—especially when they arise in response to far greater injustices—is to strain out a gnat while swallowing a cow.
It is like accusing the man who cries out in pain, while ignoring the one who stabbed him with a pin and now sits behind him with a gentle smile.

It is blaming those who are pushed toward the cliff, rather than those who drive them there with whips.

The Fog of Ideology

In the heat of ideological battles, when emotions run high, logical arguments lose to the fashionable impulse to criticize the Church—whether “Catholic” or “post‑conciliar.”
This fashion passes for intelligence and independence.
It passes… but it is not.

Many who reject the Church use publicized scandals—past or present—not to seek justice, but to escape the difficult demands of the Gospel:
chastity, fidelity, celibacy, the defense of unborn life, the refusal to exploit, steal, or indulge every desire.

Is free will not precisely the capacity to do what is difficult, for the sake of reason and love?
We can do it—but we do not have to.
And so the commandments are broken.

But the breaking of a law does not disprove the law.
If anything, the fact that many break it—and yet the Church refuses to change it, preferring humility and repentance—speaks in favor of the law’s truth.

TEARING THE ORGANISM APART (2021)

(English rendering with stylistic fidelity and clarity)

The principle of the holy resultant is the principle of bond—and of the ordered system of reality that grows out of that bond.
To ignore it is to fall into the disease of autonomism.

This disease manifests in many forms, all of them variations of the same rupture:

restricting, forbidding, replacing, or rebuilding—according to the taste of one era—what earlier holders of the Office declared sacred and binding for all time (for example, the forms of the Holy Mass). It is the tearing of a limb from the body, depriving the whole of life.
inventing one’s own gender identity or any other identity in isolation from inherited tradition, language, and norms.
inventing private languages according to the whims of the individual.
forbidding long‑standing norms (such as the uncovered face, or the Mass that a predecessor explicitly forbade anyone to forbid), and treating them as crimes simply because a contemporary committee or government decrees it.
inventing new purposes for things whose purpose tradition has already established—such as the church building.
every form of “Solely”: Sole Scripture, Sole Faith, Sole Interpretation.

Such treatment of authority is not Catholic. It resembles the Byzantine or Turanian model—cezaropapism—where the ruler’s will becomes the law.
In the Roman‑Catholic (or, in Koneczny’s terms, Latin) approach, authority is never total. It is conditional, bound by rules that transcend it, and it may not sever those bonds.
Every successor inherits the obligations of his predecessors.

The same rupture appears in the redefinition of the beginning of human life to justify the killing of the unborn, or in the personification of animals—both of which tear us away from the shared linguistic and cultural frameworks that make social life possible and prevent mutual destruction.

The Organism

If we have used the metaphor of disease, it is fitting to use the metaphor of the organism as well.

Why an organism?
Because we cannot simply construct one—human, animal, or even plant—at will.
And if we cut it into pieces, sever its head, pluck out its eyes, and then glue it back together, it will not live.
Even if it survives the cutting, the idea of placing a leg where an arm should be will not yield good results.
Even if the transplant does not kill it, it will wound it.
A hand in place of a foot is not a “new configuration.”
It is a violation of the organism’s inner bond.

Nor can we resurrect long‑buried remains, or trim an adult body (the Holy Mass) into the shape of an infant (the “primitive” liturgy of the early Church).
It will not survive.

The philosophical recognition that we are limited—that we do not know what we do not know—translates into the recognition of proper methods of thinking and acting.
It allows us to distinguish between a healthy organism of reality and society, and one that is being mutilated.

In the case of a living body, we never know all the consequences of the changes we introduce.
We cannot construct it from scratch.
We can discover some of its laws, but never all of them.

And yet: the fact that a child conceived in a laboratory exists, or that a limb has been transplanted to an unusual place, or that the body bears defects—none of this removes the person’s dignity.

Christ came to save human beings marked from birth by a far deeper defect: original sin.
He left the apostles in office even after they fled.
He placed at the head of the Church the very one who denied Him—the one to whom He once said, “Get behind Me, Satan.”
And even then, St. Paul had to rebuke Peter for yielding to human respect.

My conscience compels me to treat the New Mass in the same way as that “laboratory child”:
as dignified in itself, and entirely safe for the faith.
Diminishments and omissions are not enough to justify treating it as a threat to Tradition.

THE SCIENTISTIC ERROR

Tradition often produced substitute, mythic explanations—narratives that also served as mnemonic devices.
When someone later discovered that the mechanism “doesn’t actually work that way,” he would often begin to mock those mythic explanations and, by extension, reject the very fact of the phenomenon itself, simply because the traditional explanation was not factually accurate.

That is an error.

Such “explanations” were never meant to function as scientific or factual accounts.
Rejecting the underlying reality because the traditional metaphor is not a laboratory description is a logical fallacy—a straw‑man attack that assigns to traditional explanations goals they never claimed for themselves.
(2021)

In What Sense Is Tradition Better Than Science?

From our human limitation—illustrated earlier with the metaphor of the organism—arises a fundamental difference between scientific and traditional modes of thinking.

In the scientific mode (for example, in academic medicine), we ask:
“How does it work?”

In the traditional mode, we ask instead:
“Does it work—and when?”
More precisely: What are the effects?

In the scientific approach, we already know that any answer to “how” will be partial.
In the traditional approach, we do not chase the intricate mechanisms—because we know we cannot finish that chase.
We simply observe whether something works.
And we observe it across generations.

If a certain plant killed one man, then another, and this pattern repeated over generations, then it is evidently poisonous.
That is all we need to know.

If another plant—growing by the river on the eastern bank—relieved headaches, while the same plant growing elsewhere did not, and this pattern repeated across many cases and several generations, then tradition records that correlation:
this plant, by the river, on the eastern side, cures this ailment.
And so on.
(Tradition correlates effects with macro‑scale circumstances.)

I trust tradition more.
I treat academic medicine as auxiliary and subordinate to traditional medicine.

Why?
Because science relies on experiments and mechanisms.
It declares something “proven” only when it can describe how it works.

But what then?
Before the mechanism was known—did it not work?
Of course it worked.
Science simply did not yet know how.
And many people, in the meantime, treated unproven phenomena as if they did not exist.

Traditional medicine did not worry about its inability to dissect mechanisms.
It focused on the fact that it works—and, if it works, it used it.
Simpler? Yes.
And more rational—because it respects the limits of the human mind.

More rational also because the function of medicine is effective healing.
What matters is knowing what produces results, without needing to know the hidden machinery behind those results.
Part of that knowledge includes awareness of negative effects—likewise accumulated across generations.
This is crucial in medicine, and good academic physicians know it well.
There is no time to analyze everything.
If we have methods tested across generations and they prove effective, we use them—even if we do not yet know why they are effective.

The fact that we do not know why is often mistaken for proof that the method is “superstition.”
In reality, treating such methods as superstition is itself the first and strongest superstition.

The very existence of scientific discoveries proves that many things already work long before we understand them.
Perhaps one day we will understand them.
Wonderful—when that day comes.
(2021)

The Four Factors That Shape the Power of Persuasion

The creation of a coherent system out of many disparate elements.
Reaching all the senses through a wide range of non‑verbal signs and the familiar textures of everyday life.
Providing the foundation for human communication.
Being imposed by forces that transcend us—those that precede us and remain independent of our will: Transcendence (Eternity), Tradition, and the laws of nature.

These factors generate an impression of truth, objectivity, obviousness, and naturalness.
They determine the persuasive force of any given claim and of an entire worldview.

A striking example of their effectiveness is the great wave of conversions sparked by the spread of the Guadalupe apparition. Its power lay in the way it spoke through the indigenous, “pagan” systems of non‑verbal signs—rooted in nature and the cosmos, in plant symbolism, clothing codes, cosmic imagery, and bodily postures that expressed hierarchy.

Evangelization among the Celts in the British Isles succeeded for the same reason: it appealed to multisensory, deeply rooted symbols woven into ordinary life. The same was true among the Slavs. Purely verbal instruction, or action limited to elites and rulers, without this multisensory, symbolically dense folk substrate, is like seed cast on soil that cannot sustain growth.

The people followed Our Lady of Guadalupe also because Juan Diego was not merely a humble peasant, as the popular imagination suggests, but a kind of local nobleman—kin to the great Montezuma—whose example carried cultural authority.

The Cistercians and other monastic orders rebuilt Europe by teaching improved agricultural, craft, and technological methods together with Catholic mysticism and learning. Not separately—together.
Missionaries such as St. Patrick, St. Columba, St. Cyril and Methodius, St. Francis Xavier listened attentively to the voice, language, and customs of the people, while simultaneously seeking the support of local rulers. This “closure from above and below” was essential for the success of their mission.

Today, people follow the fashions, gestures, and lifestyles of their media, sports, and music idols.

Therefore, these four factors must be activated simultaneously—from the people and from authority, from below and from above.

The condition for activating them is ownership and freedom, local rootedness and self‑sufficiency.
The surest way to deprive people of control over their worldview is to deprive them of control over form, and ultimately, to deprive them of property.

It so happens that these four factors correspond precisely to the features of traditional and religious societies, the very soil in which religion originally grew:

Multifunctionality of elements and their mutual interpenetration—harmonizing different spheres of reality, binding practice with symbolism.
2–3. Expression through non‑verbal, ritual forms, not merely linguistic ones;
the weight of the word and its sacred status.
The search for meaning and the proper order of reality in the Beginning, in Eternity, in Ancientness, through Tradition.

Cathologic - II. THE MYTH THAT BECAME TRUE Jan Moniak