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Claims about a shared Christian tradition animate European debates about religious otherness, but more remains to be known about how Catholics on Europe's near-margins understand ecumenical unity among churches. I analyze contemporary Hungarian Catholic intellectuals' publications about a controversy at the Hungarian national shrine, Our Lady of Csíksomlyó, in Transylvania. When a priest wrote that Csíksomlyó's annual pilgrimage commemorated sixteenth-century Catholics' victory over an invading Unitarian army, Transylvania's Unitarian bishop denounced the origin as an undocumented myth. Prominent Catholic ethnologists, historians, and theologians agreed that, in the name of ecumenism, intellectuals should not publicly mention the origin narrative. But they suggested it could endure were Catholics to renew a tradition of reading between the lines of public discourse. Debating how to make a public secret of intra-Christian antagonism, they reconstructed images of Hungarian Protestantism and Romanian Orthodoxy as other faiths, and also rearticulated Catholics' otherness to a national ecumenical tradition.
Marc Roscoe Loustau (Mon,) studied this question.