https://doi.org/10.31261/WSN.2005.05.10
The pre-war parish papers that appeared in the Katowice diocese are a precious and still relatively neglected historical source. The purpose of the present article is to characterize one of them, the „Parish News” issued in Wielkie Hajduki (now Chorzów Batory, part of the city of Chorzów), in the years 1929-1939, as a historical source. The parish of Wielkie Hajduki, which at that time was still a separate district in the county of Świętochłowice, has become a rewarding area of research because of its well preserved archives, and because of its being a very representative, standard, and characteristic example of industrial and proletarian areas in the Upper Silesia as it was in the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. The Hajduki „Parish News”, as a historical source, is no doubt highly valuable for all kinds of research, concerning, among other things, demography, sociology, national problems, but also mentality, social mores, and the ways of spending leisure. Above all, it gives us access to the religious practices, the activity of societies and fraternities, and, broadly speaking, to the forms of the religious life of the local community, centred on the parish, at that time. The „Parish News” provides us with a deep insight into the everyday life of the parishioners, and also into the strivings of the clergy to develop desirable attitudes towards religion. The life of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish in Wielkie Hajduki, as it appears in the parish paper, can be described as intensive and colorful. Above all, the image of it seems credible, authentic, lively, and many-sided. We clearly see the efforts of the local priests to turn their numerous flock of parishioners into a genuine parish community, with a heightened religious and civic awareness. We can also clearly observe the local community with its various problems. We are also given a chance to notice here the characteristic features of the mentality of those times, to carry out demographic, or sociological research, and, finally, to complete the historian’s detailed knowledge on the past of particular cities and districts. Bearing in mind that similar papers were published in many parishes, we may regard then as offering an exciting possibility to deepen substantially our knowledge of the local history. A historian may find in the Wielkie Hajduki „Parish News” a lot of precious information. Important matters are interwoven with trivial ones, exceptional events with everyday ones, people’s successes with failures. In a word, we get here an excellent guide to the everyday life of Upper Silesia in the inter-war period, a source then that makes it possible for the historian to understand the past better.
Download files
Citation rules
Cited by / Share
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
Vol. 4 (2005)
Published: 2025-08-13
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English
Język Polski