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News ReleaseFor Immediate Release
The year 2005 marks the 400th anniversary of the Racovian Catechism, perhaps the most influential Unitarian document in history. The catechism, which caused consternation in conventional religious circles for many decades after it first appeared, was produced in the little town of Raków (Racovia) - today an unremarkable place in the depths of the Polish countryside, but at that time famous as "the Unitarian capital of Europe." Its printing press issued hundreds of titles, most of them in Latin, which meant that they could and did find a place in the libraries of leading thinkers of the time. It also boasted an academy whose high standards drew students and faculty from all over Europe. Poland, known during that period as the "asylum of heretics," provided a remarkably tolerant environment for radicals who in many other countries would have been burned at the stake or suffered in the wars of religion. Consequently, it drew many refugees, a large number of whom were well-educated Italians. The most prominent of these was Faustus Socinus, after whom the whole Unitarian movement was for more than two centuries popularly called "Socinian." The Racovian Catechism embodied Socinus' thinking, though he died a year before its publication. Raków was originally founded as a Utopian community, democratically organized, with material possessions owned in common. This proved a failure among the individualistic Poles, but it gave place to a center not only for the theological debates that made it famous, but also for progressive thinking on such subjects as capital punishment and participation in war. Its broad humane spirit has been widely recognized as one of the sources of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, although by the time of that flowering of the human spirit, Raków itself had succumbed to the forces of religious repression. Phillip Hewett, whose personal acquaintance with Raków extends back to 1969, has compressed into a brief and readable narrative the seven tumultuous decades from the founding of Raków in 1569 to the dispersal of the Unitarian inhabitants in 1638. In this short space he manages to situate the story in the history of Unitarianism, Anabaptism, liberal thought, Poland, the Reformation and the Renaissance. Noting that the problems with which the Racovians struggled - war and peace, individualism and community, the distribution of resources, the impact of cultural change, and the limits of tolerance - remain very much with us today, he begins and ends the book with reflections on the present significance of the Racovian story. The book concludes with the hope that we may bring to our situation the qualities which the Racovians brought to theirs: "authenticity in thinking, a firm grasp of our values, and courageous action."
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