Marc Roscoe Loustau. <i>Hungarian Catholic Intellectuals in Contemporary Romania: Reforming Apostles</i>

Marc Loustau’s Hungarian Catholic Intellectuals in Contemporary Romania constitutes an ethnographic study of generations of Hungarian-speaking theologians in Transylvania and their educational reform initiatives. The book’s array of interconnected stories and observations are grounded in the author’s decade of anthropological fieldwork and the biographies and activities of Hungarian-speaking Catholic theologians and educators from the region’s culturally and politically transformative interwar period. Premised on the idea that “theologians ought to be understood and studied as intellectuals” (2), Loustau pursues the idea that contemporary theologians are not just influential educators but also shapers of national public culture. The book’s episodic investigation takes place primarily in eastern Transylvania, in an area known as the Szeklerland, specifically in the Ciuc Valley (in this respect, the book’s title can be a bit misleading). Inhabited primarily by Hungarian-speaking Roman Catholics, it is a region that has long been at the confluence of identitarian and religious polemics, which took on acute if also overlapping nationalist dimensions after Transylvania was joined to Romania in 1919 as a result of the Treaty of Trianon.Lustau’s fieldwork, undertaken during multiple stints between 2009 and 2018, includes participant-observation in parish choirs, prayer groups, orphanages, dormitories, and shrines across eastern Transylvania, to list but a handful of locales and social settings. Throughout the book, the echoes of history reverberate back and forth through the socialist, postsocialist, and contemporary consumerist eras. The fieldwork and research are impressive, and the writing is truly engaging; often, the reader feels as if they are on a journey with Loustau: from an untested graduate student, having just landed in the region and toiling over Hungarian-language learning, to the moral and life lessons learned along the way, ending with a sophisticated and carefully considered critique of his discipline.The book unfolds across eight chapters, which in many respects can be read as stand-alone pieces. The introduction is weighty but lays out a clear path for the tasks and ideas that follow; the epilogue that comprises chapter 8, “Witnessing the Rosary’s Voice,” contemplates the Catholic tradition of praying the rosary and its impact on the author’s approach to conducting research in a community where petitionary prayer and evangelism intertwine as forms of meditation. Focusing on various groups of Catholic theologians and educators, Loustau concentrates on the substance of ideas held by Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals. Notably, the author interrogates their conceptions of “ethnic minority selfhood” (and self-creation) as well as “collaborative presence,” both through human and divine activities, and within the power dynamics of defined social and group boundaries (3). Whether through contemporary figures such as Brother Csaba Böjte, a peripatetic priest and pedagogue who rescues homeless orphans and leads the Saint Francis Foundation, or interwar-era activists such as priest Áron Márton, sociologist József Venczel, or educator Pál Péter Domokos, Loustau charts how these Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals wielded and wield their communal work under the watchful gaze of what he terms “Hungarians from Hungary.” Elsewhere, Loustau explores the impact of a resurgent, right-wing Hungarian populism and nationalism on today’s religious and educational activities of Transylvanian intellectuals.Hungarian Catholic Intellectuals in Contemporary Romania is, foremost, a work of anthropology, replete with heavy doses of theory, conceptual frameworks, and scholarly engagement. For nonexperts interested in the broader strokes of the history and contemporary society of Hungarian Catholics in Transylvania, this might distract from an otherwise compelling narrative. Nevertheless, the book will be of interest to scholars and advanced graduate students in adjacent disciplines, including the history of religion as well as nationalism and area studies, as the research and storylines are at the intersection of these and other fields. The book has a very nice selection of images yet no maps, which might have been useful to readers unfamiliar with the geography and history of the region under investigation.Within this ethnographical foray into the last century of Hungarian-minority religious life in eastern Transylvania, Loustau ultimately takes to task the anthropology of Christianity, which he argues has too often defaulted to the frameworks of nationalism studies and other disciplines in the social sciences that attempt to analyze Christian populist nationalism. As such, he argues, scholars in the latter fields have dictated the research parameters in debates over the definitions of Christianity, populism, and nationalism. This book, in many ways, seeks to redress the field’s major disciplinary shortcomings, albeit in this nook of Eastern Europe, charting a new path toward understanding theology and Christianity in practice.