Bethlen Almanac 1998 (Ligonier)

Halottaink - In memoriam

REVEREND ALADÁR KOMJÁTHY (1931-1998)

Chronicler of the Hungarian Reformed Church in America

Reverend Dr. Aladár Komjáthy, pastor of the First Hungarian Reformed Church of Pittsburgh and Adjunct Professor of History at Duquesne University, died barely eighteen days before his sixty-seventh birthday. He was the author of the best synthetic history of the American Hungarian Reformed Church, which — although originally written in English as a Th.D. dissertation at Princeton Theological Seminary — appeared only in Hungarian under the title A kitántorgott egyház [The Uprooted Church], Budapest, 1984.

Aladár Komjáthy was a stiff-necked Calvinist, who described himself in an article a few years ago as follows: “I am not a Hungarian, but an American Hungarian Reformed.” His “American-Hungarianness,” however, was so intimately interlinked with his Reformed faith that his national identity and religiosity merged into a synthetic whole. He was never able to phantom his Hungarianness without his Calvinist identity.

During his sixty-six years, Aladár Komjáthy walked a long and rocky path. He started from the city of Miskolc, where his father had been a Reformed clergyman. Given the political conditions in Hungary, he decided to leave his native land and to find his fortunes elsewhere. His path took him across several countries, among them Austria (1949-1950), the United States (1955-1968), Canada (1968-1989), and then the United States (1989-1998) again. He began his theological studies at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and then continued it in the Netherlands at Kämpen (1950-1955), with brief excursions to Switzerland, more specifically to Geneva (1952) and Basel (1954). He finished up his studies at the Princeton Theological Seminary (1955-1962), where he received his Th.D. (later changed to a Ph.D.) in church history in 1962.

Aladár Komjáthy’s original intention was to become a scholar and a university professor, but his mentor, the influential Bishop Zoltán Béky (1903-1978), persuaded him to give up this idea and to choose pastoral service. In line with this decision, Reverend Komjáthy served as the pastor of the Hungarian Reformed congregations of Roebling, New Jersey (1955-1963), Passaic, New Jersey (1963-1967), Warrenville, Connecticut (1967-1968), Montreal, Canada (1968-1989), and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1993-1998). During the same period, Dr. Komjáthy also served as the personal secretary of Bishop Béky (1958-1967), and as Adjunct Professor of History and/or Hungarian Studies at Bishop’s University of

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