Facing Death

This study is based on my fieldwork on lived religion and beliefs among Roman Catholic native Hungarian-speakers in Harghita County, Transylvania, Romania between 1966 and 2016. In the Roman Catholic communities of my fieldsite, phenomena of modernisation and globalisation, as well as the preservation, recollection and transformation of remnants of beliefs and rituals of traditional religious communities were equally present. By exploring the complex questions of death, dying, the path to the afterlife and the afterlife itself, I was able to record personal experience narratives. In the religious communities under study, the motives for the varied forms of communicating with the dead are diverse and complex: there are dualities of knowledge and faith, reason and emotion; even for an individual, conflicting variations are possible; ready-made frameworks and individual, impulsive, emotional attitudes are simultaneously present and have an effect. The strongest motives are the fear of damnation and of prolonged suffering in purgatory, and the social motives that go with it: the ideas of the cohesion of small communities, families, generations, and the idea of the reciprocal relationship of the living and the dead in the same family. A similar role is played by the teaching of the good death, which everyone tries to ensure for themselves and their family members, even if they often practice “empty” rites. This is a testimony to the Church’s role as a constant norm-setter to this day.