Ecclesia culturata ‒ Ecclesia culturans. Tożsamość kulturowa Kościoła

Abstract

In the article the problem is tackled, whether the Church as a creator of culture can also be created by it. It is shown that the Church cannot function beside or outside culture, it should enter a creative dialog with it; hence it is justified to talk about the Church’s cultural identity. In order to outline the problem of the Church’s cultural identity an analysis is made of the cultural “present time”, in which the Church lives and acts, and directives concerning the cultural future of the Church are given. This problem must be tackled constantly, for researchers talk about identity crisis and about disintegration of identity because of the schizophrenic character of contemporary culture. Every epoch brings new problems connected with the Church’s co-existence with particular cultures, as the Church is not a museum that one can admire or look at its past with the feeling of nostalgia in order to remember what good and useful things it did, but it is a living Divine-human institution stimulating the struggle of definite people in their striving to achieve their heavenly homeland. Hence, the Church cannot be afraid of contacts with even most tangled contemporary pluralist and pluriform culture specified by geopolitics, great religions, different systems and forms of syncretism, or by the level to which various peoples and nations are advanced.