Original scientific paper
“We Think that It Is So, We Know, We Believe It” – a Preliminary Study of Catholic Devoutness among Croats in the Hungarian Part of Baranja
Jasna Čapo
; Institute for Folklore Studies, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Adhering to recent notions on the inadequacies of statistical (quantitative) analysis of religious practice, the author opts for a qualitative ethnographic study. A second shift in approach, likewise accepted in the text, consists in abandoning the study of archaic pre-Christian forms and synchretic manifestations of religious expression and turning instead to the study of catholic devoutness: its collective and individual expressions and receptions of church dogma in society, i.e. in the populace (among theologians this phenomenon is called the evangelization of church communities). Such an approach is suitable for researching devoutness among Croats in the Hungarian part of Baranja, among whom catholic faith is an actual and living reality, especially in the private sphere. The author does not particularly examine the reasons for this emphasized devoutness, especially on the individual level. There are several explanations: the impossibility of collective devoutness due to the relationship of the government to minorities which is as relationship only the extension of yesterday's ruling ideology, efforts to preserve and transmit language, traditions and ethnic consciousness, changes brought about after the Vatican council... Therefore, not entering into the outer traits of popular catholic devoutness, the author describes devoutness from within, in itself. In an attempt to give a typology of collective and individual devoutness, using these forms of religious behavior and popular explanations of religious themes, the author presents some preliminary suggestions on the devoutness of the Croatian populace in Baranja and on types of believers. Despite the generally high, although layered, level of evangelization in practice (as such popular devoutness is usually defined as “living”), we can differentiate several types of believers: those that “'know and believe”, those that “think and believe” (with an active critical relationship to religion), and those that “believe”, yet disregard the intermediation of the church.
Keywords
devoutness; religious behaviour; Croats; Hungary; Baranja
Hrčak ID:
127675
URI
Publication date:
30.11.1990.
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