Devotions of Desire: Changing Gods, Changing People at a Transylvanian Pilgrimage Site The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Loustau, Marc Roscoe. 2015. Devotions of Desire: Changing Gods, Changing People at a Transylvanian Pilgrimage Site. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Divinity School. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:15821961 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Devotions of Desire: Changing Gods, Changing People at a Transylvanian Pilgrimage Site A dissertation presented By Marc Roscoe Loustau To The Faculty of Harvard Divinity School In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Theology In the subject of Religion and Society Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts October 2014 © 2014 Marc Roscoe Loustau All rights reserved. Michael D. Jackson Marc Roscoe Loustau Devotions of Desire: Changing Gods, Changing People at a Transylvanian Pilgrimage Site Abstract This dissertation describes how desiring subjects make devotional worlds in times of radical change. I argue that what is centrally at stake for people who pass through the Şumuleu Ciuc (Hungarian: Csíksomlyó) pilgrimage site in Transylvania, Romania is the question of what makes a good Catholic in relation to the Virgin Mary. Disputes about this question revolve around notions of the desiring subject: What role should forms of sexual, material, and affective self-interest – or lack thereof – play in the life of Mary’s devotees and the life of the Mother of God herself? This formulation of desire and change as intersubjective and relational processes involving divine and human beings breaks new ground among dominantly sociological and symbolic studies of religious change in contemporary Eastern Europe. Chapter One broadly outlines 20th and 21st century social transformations in the Ciuc valley. Chapter Two explores the annual Pentecost pilgrimage event as a ritual intricately caught up in everyday processes of emerging post-socialist masculine subject formation. Chapter Three tells the story of a young woman’s vision of the Virgin Mary that resulted in the installation of a new statue and shrine at the pilgrimage site. Where other scholars have treated similar events in terms of abstract political processes of resacralizing and nationalizing post-socialist space and time, I seek to re-site the “politics” of the shrine in the tension between religious experience and semiotic form. Chapter Four blends phenomenological and pragmatist theories of materiality to address recent infrastructural transformations to the pilgrimage site as efforts to “remodel Mary’s iii home.” One set of new structures outside at the shrine materialize and enact the ambivalent search for a post-socialist lay Catholic leading class that I introduced in Chapter One. Chapter Five takes up my previous concern with gender in order to examine women’s Marian healing practices in secular post-socialist hospitals. Chapter Six beings with a consideration of the intersubjective politics of storytelling and the new role played at Csíksomlyó by the global Catholic radio network, The World Family of Radio Maria. iv Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………..….v Acknowledgments and Dedication……………………………………...……………………vi Note on Orthography……………………………………………………..…………………viii Devotions of Desire: Changing Gods, Changing People at a Transylvanian Pilgrimage Site a. Introduction: Devotions of Desire…………………………….…………………..1 b. Chapter One: Csíksomlyó and Post-Socialism: Desiring Gods, Desiring People………………………………………………………………………….…32 c. Chapter Two: ‘At Grips with the World:’ Pilgrimage, Ritualization, and the Intimate Formation of Masculine Subjectivities…................................................98 d. Chapter Three: The Statue Affair: Catholic Visions on the Ground, in the Mind, and on the World Wide Web…...………………………………………………149 e. Chapter Three: Remodeling Mary’s Post-Socialist Home……………………..195 f. Chapter Five: “I Chatted With Her When I Was Alone:” Devotees Take Mary into the Secular Post-Socialist Hospital……………………………………………..227 g. Chapter Six: “I Ask the Virgin Mother…:” Transylvanian Radio Maria and Devotional Storytelling among Transnational Labor Migrants………………………………………………...………………………269 v Acknowledgements Experience flees in the face of words like gratitude that we would use to capture it. Still, I am moved to express my deep gratitude to so many who helped me with this project. Michael D. Jackson gracefully took over my supervision under extraordinary circumstances and he helped me develop a sustaining and authentic intellectual vision. His guidance has been a testament to his gentle conviction that students should discover for themselves what really matters in human encounters. Ronald Thiemann, my first adviser, passed away soon after I returned from fieldwork. This project could not have gotten off the ground without his dedication to his students’ success. Robert A. Orsi helped me understand how we build worlds through friendship, and our early conversations about doing research in people’s lives guided me in the field. Krisztina Fehérváry took a leap of faith to sign onto this project when we had never met before. Her stories about her parents’ remarkable lives and her own experiences continue to serve as a touchstone for my reflections on Hungarian history and culture. Michael Herzfeld is as savvy and resourceful a professional mentor as one could wish for. My thanks go out to my friends near and far, mentors present and absent, and colleagues who shared in the give-and-take of research, writing, thinking, and living: Rev. Forrest Church, Jerry and Denny Davidoff, István Cziegler and Mia Shandell, Kate Y. DeConinck, Betsy Draper, Robert Ferencz, Prof. Shaye J. D. Cohen, Dávid Gyerő, Prof. Keith Hitchins, Mary-Ella Holst, Julia Hamilton and Adam Shive, Charlene Higbe, Prof. Steven Jungkeit, Frank Karioris, László Koncz, the Kristály family, Kathryn Kunkel, Prof. Smita Lahiri, Zsuzsa Magdó and Éva Sándor, Samira and Linda Mehta, Prof. Anne Monius, Lehel Molnár, Prof. Daniel McKanan, Elizabeth Monson, Ezgican Özdemir, Kinga Székely, Károly Varga, Sabine Wagner, Regina and Chris Walton, and all those I met at Csíksomlyó. vi I received support from several institutions over the course of this project: This dissertation would have been much diminished without the generosity of Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School for ethnographic research funding, the American Council of Learned Societies for language training support, and the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Panel on Theological Education for a dissertation finishing grant. The Central European University Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology provided residency and intellectual community for a semester’s worth of writing. My special thanks go to Vlad Naumescu for providing guidance and encouragement during this time. My brother, sister-in-law, Aunt Anne, Nilaya, and extended family helped me find steady ground to stand on when events left me off-kilter at several key moments during my doctoral studies. My parents both know what it is like to accomplish something like this; they have intimate knowledge of what it took to finish this project in particular. I dedicate my dissertation to them. August 15, 2014 Cambridge, MA vii Note on Orthography All translations are by the author. I follow standard conventions for Hungarian and Romanian orthography, omitting regional dialects. viii I. Introduction: Devotions of Desire The world a miracle makes is both past and present, neither gone nor coming. I sensed this seeming paradox the first time I heard my friends Szilveszter and Ibolya talk about their miracle – an intervention performed by the Virgin Mary, the Roman Catholic holy figure and frequent intercessor. Szilveszter and Ibolya are a middle-aged married couple living in the Ciuc valley in eastern Transylvania. They already had two children when Ibolya made a pilgrimage to the nearby Marian shrine at Csíksomlyó in 1991. The annual Pentecost procession to Csíksomlyó had recently become a public event again after the fall of socialism, although Ibolya’s decision to attend was personal: Ibolya carried anxieties about her faltering marriage as she entered the Csíksomlyó church and approached the st atue of Mary to which many devotees pray when they ask for a miracle. She knelt down, began reciting a memorized prayer, and then offered a spontaneous request that, in her words, “bubbled up from the soul” (lélekből fakadó ima). She asked Mary, “for love. I asked to have more love in my life.” Soon after the pilgrimage, Mary granted Ibolya’s request: Szilveszter explained that Mary led him to renew his faith and recommit himself to the family. Several months after hearing this story, early in the summer of 2012, Ibolya and Szilveszter invited me to come over for a Rosary prayer session at their house. In attendance were several of their elderly widowed neighbors, women wearing the signature floral-printed headscarves of the rural “auntie” (néni). Two other couples cast a very different impression, arriving in their own cars dressed in middle-class attire of slacks and button-down shirts. And three of