Studia Pastoralne
Rocznik Wydziału Teologicznego UŚ

CHRISTIAN CULTURE OF CELEBRATION AND A CULTURAL IDENTITY OF EUROPE – CONTINUATION AND A BREAK-UP
Summary
The author’s reflection focuses on two major assumptions. First of all religious rituals and liturgies, which is a Christian culture of a feast and celebration, include a recollective, performative and identity-creating power. Second of all religious rituals have an impact on culture and therefore on a cultural identity. If today in Europe a new religious awakening is expected, then similarly to the past a special role in this process belongs to rituals. Christian culture of celebrating affects a universal culture by celebrating feasts as a “religious counterpoint”, which is opening our everyday life to a “different” and Divine time and a transcendent dimension, by emphasizing a human dignity of every person in the sacrament of baptism regardless sex or a social background and by a practice of humanism shown to the dying and the deceased. The author emphasizes that if at the beginning of the twenty first century religion is described as a cultural source of Europe, it is a Christian culture of celebrating that may become its communicator.