Religious Identity of Bulgarian Catholics’ Communities

Abstract

This article analyses the issue of religious identity of Bulgarian Catholics during the start of the 2000s. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork materials gathered by the author in Bulgaria in 2015–2017. It presents the results of a research, carried out on a comparative basis among the communities of Bulgarian Catholics from Sofia, Plovdiv and its regions (in the villages of General Nikolaevo, Sekirovo (today forming the quarters of the town of Rakovski), Kaloyanovo, Belozem, Zhitnitsa).

The research performed by this author reveals that religious identity of Bulgarian Catholics is not a unified one. There are some different characteristics and peculiarities among the local and regional religious identity of this confessional community. The presented observations confirm the thesis that the local and regional religious identity of Roman Catholics are interconnected and mutually dependent. Further, the cultural and religious forms of Bulgarian Catholics’ religiosity are transformed through acculturation and they are put in a new context with a distinctive cultural and religious identity.