Abstract
This article explores the ways in which the newly founded and highly contested Christian confession of the Greek Catholics or Uniates employed strategies of mass mobilization to establish and maintain their position within a contested confessional terrain. The Greek Catholic clerics, above all monks of the Basilian order fostered an active policy of acquiring, founding and promoting Marian places of grace in order to create and invigorate a sense of belonging among their flock. The article argues that folk ideological notions concerning the spatial and physical conditions for the working of miracles were seized upon by the Greek Catholic faithful to establish a mental map of grace of their own. Especially, the Basilian order took particular care to organize mass events (annual pilgrimages, coronation celebrations for miraculous images) and promote Marian devotion through miracle reports and icon songs in an attempt to define what it means to be a Greek Catholic in terms of sacred territoriality.
Highlights
The veneration of images1 of the Mother of God and the belief in their miraculous powers have been key components of Christian spiritual practice since time immemorial, but they came to experience a particular boost in the age of the Counter-Reformation, when all kinds of devotional activities were fostered and reinvigorated in what looks like an effort of making a counteroffer of a more material religion to look at, touch and interact with as opposed to the bookish immateriality of the Reformation
It was meant to be an offer to the broad masses, as Counter-Reformation relied on mass mobilization to win back lost terrain
What is true of Poland is no less true for the more narrow setting that we have chosen to have a closer look at, i.e., the Eastern, formerly a predominantly Orthodox part of the Polish Crown, that was claimed by the Greek Catholic Uniate church
Summary
The veneration of images of the Mother of God and the belief in their miraculous powers have been key components of Christian spiritual practice since time immemorial, but they came to experience a particular boost in the age of the Counter-Reformation, when all kinds of devotional activities were fostered and reinvigorated in what looks like an effort of making a counteroffer of a more material religion to look at, touch and interact with as opposed to the bookish immateriality of the Reformation. Miraculous images were suited to inspire a spatial sense of what it means to be a Greek or Roman Catholic by marking out specific places of grace, which through a complex array of ordered activities, supported by diverse kinds of hierotopic events (annual processions and pilgrimages, coronations), provided devotional objects (votive tablets, print reproductions of icons, commemorative medals) and minor texts distributed in print or handwritten copies (prayers, songs, litanies) for a lived experience of sacred space This rematerialization of religious experience of folk baroque Catholicism could in the area in question capitalize on the deeply rooted traditional. We will build up our basic argument drawing primarily on these small text genres
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