The aim of the project was to come up with an anthropological account and analysis of the embodied religious imageries embraced by modern-day Catholic pilgrims who come to worship in the shrines of south-eastern Poland. The research team comprised Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, Iuliia Buyskykh, Magdalena Lubanska (Principal Investigator), and Konrad Siekierski.
We strove towards completing the project goals motivated by the conviction that the current state of research on Catholic religiosity in Poland is hardly comprehensible and covers only a fraction of its sensual and material aspects. Therefore, the bulk of our insight concentrates on the directness of religious experience, as well as ways of managing it and the role of forms which serve as intermediaries for experiencing the sacrum. Thus, we reference the current discourse concerning pilgrimages and the special power this type of religious practice exudes the role of the clergy and sacred spaces in the creation of religious imaginaries (T. Csordas), and the performativity of religious phenomena. Through concentrating on the forms which mediate between and govern religious experience, we show how the material sphere and the landscape influence religious experiences. Our focus was on showing the multidimensionality of Catholicism and its many faces, especially on the fact that this denomination is not sufficiently researched by anthropologists. At the same time we reference studies on identity, memory and stereotypes. Drawing upon anthropological works discussing the multi-denominational history of the region we show the changes caused by the current social and political situation in Poland.
The source material for theoretical analysis was provided by field research conducted in Marian Sanctuaries in Kalwaria Pacławska and Leżajsk, in the Basilica of the Holy Spirit in Przeworsk with the Sanctuary of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of Saint Barbara in Przeworsk (aspiring to the status of a sanctuary), the town church of Saints Stanisław and Wojciech in Rzeszów, as well as in smaller towns, villages and parishes (e.g. Sokołów Małopolski, Gniewczyna, Grzęska, Mazury, Jodłówka). As we joined our respondents on pilgrimages, held conversations and engaged in social interactions, we got a chance to know them better, and to provide a counterweight to the scholarly and journalistic analyses that may lack the human element of face-to-face contact.
The phenomenon of pilgrimages and the related religious imageries were regarded in a very broad context; our research encompassed such phenomena as the cult of items, the role of the senses in a religious experience (e.g. mass in the intention of healing, pilgrimage practices, revelations), the interrelation between religious and national imageries (Messianism), or between religious imagery and the perception/construction of nature (nature as a sensational form). It also analysed new forms of religious expression such as Extreme Way of the Cross, the influence of charismatic movements on contemporary Catholic imagery, inter-denominational relations in important pilgrimage centres (Kalwaria Pacławska), the introduction of a new religious cults inspired by a pilgrimage to a given parish (the case of the cult of the Infant Jesus in the town church in Rzeszów).
The results of our research have been published in Polish, Russian and English in periodicals such as “Religion, State & Society”, “Etnografia Polska”, “Ethnologia Polona”, “Studia Religiologica”, “ГОСУДАРСТВО РЕЛИГИЯ ЦЕРКОВЬ в Рoсcии и зарyбежом” and “Journal of Global Catholicism”.
The project also included the completion of an ethnographic documentary entitled “Nie sądzić” (‘Not to Judge’, 35’, 2017, directed by Magdalena Lubańska, Pawlina Carlucci-Sforza), awarded in 2017 as the Best Documentary at the Grand Off Independent Cinema Festival, which belongs to the most important initiatives of its kind in the world. The movie is shown in ca. 90 independent cinemas across Poland; trailer is available at
The project contributes to the development of a relatively new sub-discipline in anthropology, namely the anthropology of Catholicism. It is also conducive to a more thorough understanding of the social role of Catholicism in the Polish context.
A more detailed information about the project is available under the following link.
Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
Fot. K. Baraniecka-Olszewska
The main tasked realized by me within the project was research on formation of religious experiences of pilgrims coming to Marian, Roman Catholic, sanctuary in Kalwaria Pacławska administered by the Franciscan order. Focusing on Franciscans’ strategies to direct experiences of the faithful pilgrimaging to this religious site and simultaneously on pilgrims’ own tactics of participation in religious celebrations in Kalwaria Pacławska, I described processes of managing religious experiences within a performative interaction between local, dynamic religious imageries and current, grassroots faithful’s practices. Applying the category of ‘sensational forms’ coined by Birgit Meyer I demonstrated also what role the sanctuary itself plays in the whole process. Thanks to its material presence which mediates faithful’s relations with the sacred, but also to emotions, interpretations and meanings evoked by this material presence, it becomes one of the main elements of religious experiences.
Such a research approach enabled me to demonstrate religious experience as performative at least in two ways. On the one hand, it is an outcome of a particular situation: of the interaction of pilgrims’ practices with religious imageries and materiality of the site. On the other hand, it is an impulse to participation in other religious practices, a source of interpretation of the experiences, a way of confirming higher aim of participation in religious celebrations and also a trigger for transformations of believers’ religious identity. Risking a simplification: anthropologists oscillate between a conviction that religious experiences are taught socially and formed culturally and the faithful live experiences formed within particular habituses and a conviction about deeply individual character of religious experiences and their mysticism. My research proved that religious experience as a research subject requires combining these approaches, since it strongly depends on faithful’s creativity within top-down religious imageries [aktywne hiperlinki
Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, Natura sanat: on ecological aspects of healing miracles in Kalwaria Pacławska, Poland
Камила Баранецка-Ольшевска, Управление чувственными формами: оптимизация, максимизация и эффективность. Торжество в Кальварии Пацлавской
Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, Great fair in Kalwaria Pacławska revisited. Some reflections on the anthropology of pilgrimages ; Etnografia Polska 60 Z. 1-2 (2016)
Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, Natura Sanat: On Ecological Aspects of Healing Miracles in Kalwaria Pacławska, Poland
Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, Magdalena Lubańska, Religious Imageries at Polish Catholic Shrines
Iuliia Buyskykh
Fot. I. Buyskykh
In the frames of common project I focused on an embodiment of religious imageries of Greek Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims who seek their ancestral and denominational legacies rooted in pre-war history, coming to worship the place connected with Greek Catholic pilgrimages before the WWII, and making their memories the part of their religious experience (including experience of physical and mental relief, healing effects, sense of belonging to a certain place). The adaptation of their own religious imageries and practices (including Greek Catholic liturgy during the Assumption of Mary Feast) to nowadays homogeneous Roman Catholic shrine of Kalwaria Pacławska somehow contradicts the official Roman Catholic Church's perception regarding the place of worship as exclusively Polish and Roman Catholic.
I tackled a research on inter-confessional relationships between Roman Catholic majority and Greek Catholic and Orthodox minorities in selected local communities mainly in Fredropol district of Subcarpathia voivodeship in 2015-2018 (villages Kłokowice, Młodowice, Nowe Sady, Huwniki, Nowosiółki Dydyńskie, Kalwaria Pacławska, Pacław, Leszczyny, Kopysno). I also conducted my research in Przemyśl (2017-2018), and in Lviv, Ukraine (2018). Generally, my fieldwork was conducted in two main directions.
First one was connected with the research focus on heterogeneous Lviv pilgrimage (organized by Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine), a patchy temporal community consisting of Ukrainian citizens of both Ukrainian and Polish origin, Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics and Orthodox believers (Kyiv Patriarchate). Following the research intention to study religious practices and imageries of pilgrims, in August 2016 and in August 2017 I personally took part in the pilgrimage walking with the other participants from Lvivska oblast’ of Ukraine to Kalwaria Pacławska sanctuary in Poland on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Without that engaged experience and fully participant observation, I doubt I could have understood and analyze the phenomena. The small group of Greek Catholics and Orthodox pilgrims became the object of my special interest. It turned out that the majority of Greek-Catholic and Orthodox actors of Lviv pilgrimage came from the Ukrainian families who were resettled to the USSR in 1944-1946. Their main intentions were to “come back” to “their Kalwaria”, where their grandparents and parents went on pilgrimage in interwar period. I consider this particular group of pilgrims to be a community of memory that expresses itself in ritualized commemorative practices at the place where Greek-Catholic church in a village of Pacław existed before the WWII. The purpose to continue my research in Lviv was grounded on the demand to continue my communication with Greek Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims in places of their constant residence. This intention was additionally strengthened by the necessity to communicate with the Franciscan clergy in Lviv Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Antony, who organize the annual pilgrimage to Kalwaria Pacławska.
Fot. I. Buyskykh
The other direction of my research in the area was focused on fieldwork in religiously and ethnically mixed communities, including micro level of mixed families (Polish-Ukrainian, or rather Roman Catholic-Greek-Catholic). I focused on the everyday perspective of ordinary people and their bottom-up strategies to reconcile plural pasts, and coexist with the neighbors of other Christian denomination and ethnic origin. In the terms of my research I faced challenges that effectively shifted the direction of my original research plan and changed my overall understanding of this region. People in the area (and especially Greek Catholic followers) felt quite vulnerable respondents, mostly declining to be recorded during interviews. This is why in quoting most of the narratives I rely on my field notes, the only means I could use where people categorically declined to be recorded, experiencing strong fear of the possibility to make their contested memories somehow public. During my research I had to face the necessity to consider how the current political discourse with (re)construction of “national heroes” both in Poland and Ukraine shapes religious practices, issues of memory rooted in the WWII period and aftermaths, and perceptions of history in local communities near Przemyśl.
The religious activity I observed in Polish Subcarpathia seems, to various extents to be animated by the legacies of the post WW II period. Greek Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims seek to engage with denominational, ancestral and territorial legacies which have become distanced from them given Soviet-era population shifts and moving administrative boundaries. At the same time, local Greek Catholics living in Przemyśl and neighboring villages seem to be deeply concerned about forging continuities with the past, connected with their families’ memories. I see it as a process of recovery of family memories and sacred places. Their religious energy and sense of purpose seems to emerge from the latent tensions of Greek Catholics (and to some extent Orthodox) believers engaging with dominant position of Roman Catholicism in Poland. The latter causes to some extent the processes of exotization and marginalization of Greek Catholics and Orthodox followers in mixed localities of Subcarpathia.
Fot. I. Buyskykh
All my findings in the field and preliminary conclusions point to the important role that religious practices and especially pilgrimages play in linking people with their ancestors and specific sacred places in which family memories become part of embodied religious experience. The ethnographic observations, as a result of my research, open up a number of more general questions related to the importance of post-memory, built on the traumas of parents / grandparents, in constructing an identity that needs experiencing the sacred place connected with the family. This, in turn, opens the possibility for a broader discussion of the relationship of family memory built on the trauma of the past with a sense of belonging and the reasons why certain places become sacred to the bearers of other religious rites and denominations living abroad (case of Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims).
Iuliia Buyskykh, Between memory and border: Ukrainian pilgrimage to Kalwaria Pacławska ; Etnografia Polska 60 Z. 1-2 (2016)
Iuliia Buyskykh, Forgive, Forget or Feign: Everyday Diplomacy in Local Communities Of Polish Subcarpathia
Magdalena Lubańska
Fot. M. Lubańska
In accordance with the project proposal I began my studies from researching the phenomenon of pilgrimage and its influences and implications on Catholics religious imageries. My first research destination was town Rzeszów, where I happen to meet the woman devoted to promoting devotion to the Infant Jesus in the city’s oldest parish church, the church of St. Wojciech and St. Stanisław in Rzeszów. According to the woman the direct impulse for that project came to her during a pilgrimage she had made to locations connected with St. Thérèse of Lisieux in 2008 as an animator of a local group of a Catholic organization known as the Family of the Scapular. I thought that this is an interesting opportunity to investigate how the new worship together with the brotherhood of Christ Child were introduced in the church. I also tried to answer the question of why the women belonging to the brotherhood of Child Jesus choose to worship God as a Child, and how their choice is connected with their spiritual path. What kind of figures do they embrace as spiritual role models, and why? What is it about the worship of the Child Jesus that they find attractive, and how do they maintain, and contribute to, that form of worship? I connected these aspects of the worship to women’s strong need for “giving/protecting life” as well as for sensual relationship with the sacred. I treat this need as a self-embraced development strategy combining a fulfilled feminine identity with a religious life as worshippers of Christ.
My interest was also piqued by the fact that devotion to the Infant Jesus remains an under-researched aspect of Catholic devotion in Poland, even though this particular form captures many aspects of Polish Catholicism among women in that it reveals “how forms of ‘divine’ kinship shape horizon of motherhood, gendered imagination, the messianism of the Polish nation-state, and the contested domain of distribution of life and death around the unborn foetus. The results of my field research on this topic are available in the article “Mothers, Grandmothers, Patriots. Religious Imageries of Female Members of the Confraternity of the Infant Jesus at the Church of St. Wojciech and St. Stanisław in Rzeszów, Poland”
However, as the target, the main location of my field research was the city of Przeworsk, which is situated between Rzeszów and Przemyśl. Staying there, I participated in a plenty of religious events: like passion plays in the church of St Barbara, pilgrimage from the basilica of Holy Spirit to Jodłówka sanctuary of Our Lady of Consolation, healing masses headed by the famous exorcist Józef Witko (in Palikówka, Gniewczyna), and commemorating masses for atrocities and predators of postwar period in the forest of Dębrzyna (Świętoniowa).
In addition to participant observation I also used the method of art-based research to evoke the important data for my analysis. I managed to involve members of the local community (‘functional elites’) in shooting a documentary ethnographic movie “Nie sądzić/Not to Judge” (35’, Pawlina Carlucci Sforza, Magdalena Lubanska). The movie reveals how religious imageries interact with the traumatic memories of murders committed during World War II and postwar period rightly named by Polish historian, Marcin Zaremba, the time of “great fear” . Two public debates organized in Przeworsk after the showing of the movie, provoked the audience to express the various opinions and standpoints related to the ethical problems presented in the movie. Thanks to them a lot of interesting data were revealed, that helped me to structuralize the latter ethnographic interviews. The article analysing them is at the moment in the peer-review and it is going to be published by the end 2018.
Another phenomenon that attracted my interest was the growing popularity of charismatic renewal movement in south-eastern Poland and its impact on catholic religious imageries. To study that phenomenon I attended masses involving healing services and charismatic prayer meetings and made interviews with its participants (this was also the topic researched by auxiliary employee involved in the project, my former student - Emilia Jaworska - a person deeply engaged in field research). This way I was able to observe the importance of sensory-based practices related to a belief in the "porous self" (Ch. Taylor). The devotees express that belief by, on the one hand, viewing themselves as being vulnerable to evil powers, and, on the other hand, by believing that they can remedy this danger by opening up to the influence of the Holy Spirit and by using water or exorcised oil blessed during a healing service. I demonstrate the various ways in which belief in the porous self becomes objectivised, and its importance within the religious imageries of that group of devotees. I also show interesting parallels in local religious imageries related to the porous self and nation seen as messianic community. The results of my research on this topic are available in the article .” The Porous Self in the Religious Imageries of Pilgrims from Przeworsk: Making Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation at Jodłówka”, Journal of Global Catholicism, 2/2, 87-123
Magdalena Lubańska, Religious Imageries of Pilgrims from Przeworsk: Making Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation at Jodłówka
Magdalena Lubańska, Mothers, Grandmothers, Patriots. Religious Imageries of Female Members of the Confraternity of the Infant Jesus at the Church of St Wojciech and St Stanisław in Rzeszów, Poland
Konrad Siekierski
Fot. K. Siekierski
In this project, I focused on two new, and so far little studied, phenomena in Polish Catholicism, namely the Extreme Way of the Cross (EDK) and the spread of charismatic religiosity in Poland. On the one hand, they are rooted in traditional devotion around apparition sites and pilgrimage centres. On the other hand, they provide an answer to the contemporary search for individualised and personal relationship with the sacred. To examine these phenomena, I drew both on works of Polish scholars (e.g. Jacek Olędzki) and the concepts by leading Western specialists in the anthropology of religion (e.g. Thomas Csordas and Robert Orsi). Furthermore, I presented them in the context of similar devotional practices in Catholic and Protestant countries.
The Extreme Way of the Cross is a new initiative of the Catholic Church in Poland that has quickly gained popularity. It combines elements of pilgrimage and devotion centred on the Passion of Christ. EDK is based on the idea that “it has to be difficult, uphill and in the night – only then a true prayer starts”. As such, it offers an insight to contemporary embodied religious imageries of Polish Catholics and to the central role of the suffering body in religious experience. My research on EDK took place in 2015–2016 in and around Sokołów Małopolski. Its key part was my participation in an Extreme Way of Cross from Sokołów to Leżajsk and back.
Fot. K. Siekierski
Fot. K. Siekierski
The second topic of my research was a proliferation of charismatic religiosity to Polish Catholicism, a development which reinvigorates but also reshapes traditional miracular sensitivity. I studied the dynamics and results of this proliferation on the example of an unofficial Marian apparition site in the village of Mazury. This site is currently renovated and promoted by believers engaged in the charismatic movement. During my fieldwork in 2016–2017, I talked to the guardians of the shrine as well as to the witnesses of the apparitions in 1949 and members of the clergy. I also studies the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance in Rzeszów.
Fot. K. Siekierski
Fot. K. Siekierski
Fot. K. Siekierski
Конрад Секерски. «Пора покончить с этой религией комфорта!» Текст и тело в Экстремальном крестном пути
Konrad Siekierski, Faith and fatigue in the Extreme Way of the Cross in Poland
Konrad Siekierski, Charismatic Renewal and Miracular Sensitivity at a Catholic Marian Apparition Site in Poland