Fraternity-Testvériség, 1959 (37. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1959-02-01 / 2. szám
10 FRATERNITY The Rise of the Counter-Reformation The Catholic Church reached its lowest ebb towards the end of the 16th century. In the seventies it might be said that it hardly existed in Hungary at all. The bravest stand taken by any of its followers was that of the Franciscans. They had owned some 70 monasteries, with about 1,500 lay and clerical brethren attached to them. Now, at the close of the century, they had only five monasteries left, with 30 monks in all living- in them. At the same time the total number of adherents left to the Old Church in the whole of Hungary was only about 30,000 persons, and that number included Croatian and Slovene priests. That is to say, there was now only about one Catholic to a thousand Protestants. “The great majority of the Hungarian people had become Protestant in religion in the course of two generations”, is what a Roman Catholic historian writes. Throughout the century most of the bishops’ seats remained unoccupied. Transylvania had no bishop at all after 1542; indeed, in 1556, all Roman Catholic property was taken over by the State. Yet those priests who remained in their parishes had considerable numbers of followers. As far as the Kingdom in the north was concerned, King Ferdinand I remained completely loyal to Rome along with his court, and he it was who was the first to attack the new faith in any decisive manner. In 1548 he brought in measures into the parliament to “restore the old religion and church worship and to root out heresy everywhere.” But we have already seen with what success he tried to do this. The hierarchy itself sought to stem the tide from time to time, but without much success, before the end of the century. The difficulty was that the Archbishop could not collect a national Synod of prelates. After the death of, first, Nicholas Olah, and then of Antal Verancsics, the archiepiscopal chair itself actually remained vacant, so that no more priests could be trained. (To be continued)
