Radio Maria Transylvania: National Representation, Prayer, and Intersubjectivity in a Growing Catholic Media Network

This article examines the public discourse of a Radio Maria Transylvania, a growing Catholic media network for members of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Romania. I look at two primary narratives: first, accounts about how the network was founded in the mid-2000s. And second, listeners’ prayers to the Virgin Mary published on the media network’s web site. Acts of petitioning powerful others for assistance on behalf of a family are central features of Radio Maria Transylvania’s storytelling–on behalf of a national family in the case of the network’s origin narratives and a natal family in the case of prayers to the Virgin Mary. The trope of representing the family and the existential experience of objectification–becoming an object acted upon rather than an author of one’s own story–therefore stands behind both these distinctive forms of narrative practice. This symbolic device and process of becoming a narrative subject unite the two storytelling styles and lends them a single orientation and existential direction