Mapping Mary: Lay Cartographies of Communist Hungary

For consideration in the "Interpreting Cartographies" session:

Inspired by Michel de Certeau’s theoretical work in The Practice of Everyday Life, this paper comes out of a larger dissertation project that examines lay Catholicism in communist Hungary in search of a politics of presence beyond church and state. In this paper, I examine the everyday devotional activities and prayer practices of Hungarian Catholics in the 20th century to render visible what I call lay cartographies of communist Hungary. I use lay cartographies to refer to the “performance of a map” in which everyday Catholics engaged as they moved between Marian shrines and rural chapels to seek out the presence of the divine on behalf of their communities. Following Jennifer Scheper Hughes’s assertion that such movement itself becomes an “enactment and performance of the territorial jurisdiction,” I argue that in the spaces marked out in prayers, shrine cards, and devotional texts—the stuff of lay catholic devotion in 20th-century Hungary—a different map of communist Hungary emerges.[i]

As de Certeau argues in The Practice of Everyday Life, if we move beyond the presumption that consumptive practices of daily life are essentially passive modes of existence, “we may be able to discover creative activity where it has been denied that any exists.”[ii] Such is the case for studies of religion in communist Hungary and more broadly the Soviet sphere of eastern Europe. Much of the scholarship on religion in communist eastern Europe, and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, prioritizes questions of church and state that take as authoritative the perspectives of state actors, on the one hand, and clergy, on the other. Other work that does consider the lives and practices of everyday people living in communist eastern Europe follows the standard narrative that the communist period had the effect of “privatizing” religion, forcing religion into homes and out of the public sphere, thus rendering religious acts as either apolitical (because they were not public) or taking religious people to be passive perpetuators of cultural practices that had been around for centuries.

By contrast, my source material is drawn primarily from an archive of Roman Catholic prayerbooks housed in the Department of Folklore at the University of Szeged. In this collection, several hundred prayerbooks, almost all published in the 20th century including throughout the communist period, attest to a vibrant devotional life among lay Catholics. From these books and other ephemera, what emerges is a Catholic devotional life that was centered neither in churches nor in private homes but in the spaces of Marian shrines, rural chapels, and other sacred sites that dot the landscape. For example, when charting the movement of just one of these books through the prayers and shrine cards it holds, what emerges is a book—or community—that travelled nearly 1000 miles between places that stretched across the national borders of Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Italy between 1938 and 2001. One prayer card from a shrine located in present-day Romania includes the text of a “Hungarian Prayer” addressed to Our Lady of the Hungarians. Such movement resists easy mapping along geopolitical lines, especially because the area in which the shrine is located changed administrative hands six times over the course of the 20th century. Yet the shrine retained a remarkable stability as the locus of power and presence for Our Lady of the Hungarians.

Moreover, with the changing geopolitical borders in central and eastern Europe throughout the 20th century, I argue that these lay cartographies were actively participating in—though never fully subsumed by—the still unsettled border disputes of the time. With the 1920 Treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I, the borders of central and eastern Europe were significantly redrawn, reducing the size of the then Kingdom of Hungary by two-thirds and leaving vast numbers of Hungarian-speakers suddenly outside the borders of the reimagined Hungarian state, strewn among the newly defined Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, among others. But, as this paper shows, geopolitical borders are only part of the story, and “[w]hat the map cuts up,” as de Certeau writes, “the story cuts across.”[iii]

In this paper, I seek not only to tell this story of another Hungary but to show the map, to make visible the cartographies performed by everyday Catholics in the 20th century as they sought out Mary’s presence. I argue that in physically moving between these sacred sites, lay Catholics in the communist period were creating maps of Hungary that offered a competing territorial vision from the ones imagined both by the institutional Roman Catholic Church and the state. Drawing on sources typically seen as irrelevant to broader geopolitical debates of the time, in this paper I show how an examination of lay Catholic devotion in communist Hungary—especially the movement of Catholicism from the spaces of institution into rural shrines and chapels serviced by the laity—renders visible an “otherwise” politics of space and territory that took shape far from “the usual spaces of political struggle.”[iv] This otherwise vision of the space of Hungarian Catholicism unsettles the inevitably of the nation-state as the only frame for imagining space and history in the 20th century and beyond as lay Catholics grounded their maps in the notion that Hungary was, is, and would be into the future Mary’s country, that Mary is, in fact, what makes Hungary.

[i] Jennifer Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 120-121.

[ii] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 167.

[iii] Ibid., 129.

[iv] Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 192.