Finding Mary’s Country: Catholic Archives of Communist Hungary

This paper examines three understudied archives of lay Catholic devotional life in 20th-century Hungary that challenge narratives of religious “privatization” under communism and raise theoretical questions about how archives capture religious life and the extent to which archiving practices can make visible or shield certain kinds of religious life from view. These archives, collections of prayer books, petitionary prayers, and ex votos, are often seen as irrelevant to larger questions of community and politics, but this paper shows how, taken together, a greater story emerges from them, one of lay Catholics living, praying, and moving together in order to enact a religio-political vision that takes Hungary to be, rightfully, Mary’s country. Ultimately, these archives reveal a complex vision of Hungarian futures that emerges not in state archives or institutional repositories but in the very cracks between church and state.