Published: 2018-11-26

Crisis of the faith? Religious truths of the Catholicism in the minds of high school studentsand university students. From acceptance to contestation

Józef Baniak

Abstract

The research analyzed in this article, was realized in 2011 among 456 high school students in Kalisz and426 students in Poznan as a part of a comprehensive project considering attitudes of Polish youth towardsthe Catholic religion and the Roman Catholic Church. These studies have shown that the gradual erosionof religious orthodoxy in an academic high school students is now taking on a greater pace than it wasnoticeable at the end of the twentieth century. This rate is also higher than in the environment of juniorhigh school students (Baniak, 2006: 183–212), as erosion of religious orthodoxy in an environment of highschool students and university students is more dynamic and covers not only the basic thesis of the Christianfaith, but also relates to connections of faith and religion with the Catholic morality. These connections areclearly weakening or disappearing entirely. High school students and academic students, depart in greaternumbers and more frequently from a dogmatic religion to a selective one that is focused on the basiccontents of a religious doctrine. Increasingly, among this group of youth appear attitudes and actions contest-ing the principles of the Catholic faith, questioning their meaning and authenticity, and even a clearlysecular attitudes that often lead directly to the abandonment of faith and religion. Selective and contestingattitudes toward the dogmas of the Catholic faith are revealed for more than one-third of high schoolstudents and almost half of the university students participating in the study. Some respondents treat the weakening of their faith or its disappearance as a simple "turn of fate," thus showing that the dogmas of thefaith are indifferent to them and that these have lost their value in the hierarchy of meaning in life.

Keywords:

dogmas of the Catholic faith, theological, Christological, eschatological, ecclesial, mariological, awareness, injunction, choice, high school students, university students

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Baniak, J. (2018). Crisis of the faith? Religious truths of the Catholicism in the minds of high school studentsand university students. From acceptance to contestation. Academic Journal of Sociology, 17(4). Retrieved from https://czasopisma.uksw.edu.pl/index.php/ucs/article/view/2903

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