The Secularized Cult of St Stephen in Modern Hungary

Abstract

St Stephen, the founder of the medieval Hungarian state and a powerful supporter of the Catholic Church, canonized as early as 1083, offers an interesting example of how a patron saint’s cult can be redefined and revitalized under changing socio-structural and political circumstances. Although fading at times, there is a continuous line of reference to him over the centuries. In this respect, certain interesting steps were undertaken during the economic, political and cultural modernization period of the Dualist era at the end of the nineteenth century, in a society still influenced by traditional religion, but also in the Communist state of the second half of the twentieth century, a state hostile to religion and a society already secularized in its structural and cultural aspects. The post-Communist period after 1989 brought additional perspectives to the reinterpretation and refunctionalization of the national patron saint. St Stephen’s case also offers the opportunity to investigate how these reinterpretations have been executed in a field of complementary cults, supplementing and specifying also the meaning of the former, turning it into a ‘lieu de mémoire’¹ or a ‘narrative abbreviation’² in modern society. In this respect, the patron saint was placed in a field of competing points of reference, marking different narratives of the national past, different interpretations of the composition of the political community, and different definitions of the mission of that community or the challenges faced by it.