Father Jacek Woroniecki (1878–1949) – Master and Mentor of Catholic and Christian Pedagogical Thought

Abstract

Fr. Jacek Woroniecki contributed to building not only Christian and Catholic pedagogy, but also pedagogical theory in general in Poland, having achieving unquestioned primacy in this regard. He appeared on the grounds of Catholic and Christian pedagogy as master and teacher, contributing to the development of their disciplinary status throughout his entire life, which we read as an illustration of shaping his mature faith and his scientific reflection arising from it.

In warning against the hasty classification of educators as Catholic educators, he embraced the pedagogical issues from a position which could be described as a position of Christian wisdom, and in this wisdom, particularly in the Catholic Church, he discovered what he understood as paedagogia perennis, including in his thematic blocks such fundamental groups of issues as 1) the subject of education as the reflection over the person to be educated, 2) the object of education, i.e. what we want to produce in education by means of educational activity, and 3) the tutor, i.e. the one who individually or socially is to direct the process of education in the pupil. Noting the domination of individualistic attitudes in teaching and education, Fr. Jacek Woroniecki exhibits “the social side of the educational action itself,” while not depreciating “the tutor’s individual values” at all.

Speaking on the matter of the specificity of pedagogy, Fr. Woroniecki contributed to the consolidation of this specificity, and simultaneously introduced pedagogical reflection, in the contexts of universality, and developed its status as a discipline with its own identity, but simultaneously open to reality, to other disciplines, and the manifold aspects and dimensions of human existence. In making a practical contribution to the development of pedagogy, he indicated the methods for the formation of the character and personality of a pupil, postulating a return to the pedagogical principles of Christianity called the pedagogical universalism, in which attention was paid to the formal object of the education – the person – e.g. how the person should be when reaching the fullness of personal existence as a result of the proper, i.e. harmonious, development of all the natural and supernatural virtues.