Paper short abstract:

Absolution prayers and the anointing of the sick are weekly held in the monastery of Nicula. The rituals are frequently misinterpreted even by the Orthodox participants. Oil and flour are brought to be blessed. Not only people, but clothes of sick relatives are anointed.

Paper long abstract:

The monastery of Nicula is known for its weeping icon with miraculous healing power and is visited by tens of thousands of pilgrims every August at the feast of Assumption. It used to be Greek Catholic for 250 years (1699-1948) until the Romanian Greek Catholic Church was banned by the communist regime. The re-established Romanian Greek Catholic Church reclaimed the monastery without success after 1989. The population of the region is mixed, Orthodox and Greek Catholic Romanians (a minority today), Calvinist Hungarians and Orthodox Roma live together. The shrine has been visited for hundreds of years by people of different ethnic and religious affiliations.

The absolution prayers and the anointing of the sick are celebrated consecutively every Friday night at the monastery and are attended by hundreds of believers from the region. Members of the clergy (monastics and parish priests alike) agree that these rituals for the healing of the body and the soul became communal (mass-) rituals as a result of a need coming from below, following the massive changes caused by the collapse of the socialist regime. People are attending the rituals with different aims (based on the requests written on "pomelnice", small pieces of paper), and many of them misunderstand its meaning. Confession is mostly omitted and people bring oil, flour and clothes of their sick relatives to get them blessed or even anointed. The paper is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in the region.