Egyháztörténeti Szemle 15. (2014)
2014 / 1. szám - SUMMARIES IN ENGLISH - Jobbágy András: Nation and/or Religion: The Liturgy and Identity of the Greek Catholics in Hungary - Nemes István: Documents of the 1841 Intermarriage-Protestation Movement of Transylvanian Counties
156 Egyháztörténeti Szemle XV/1 (2014) Nation and/or Religion: The Liturgy and Identity of the Greek Catholics in Hungary Jobbágy, András Current article aims to analyze the changes of the Greek Catholic identity in Hungary with special emphasis on the process of “hungarizing” liturgy until 1912. The author’s main thesis is that in the course of the long nineteen century the primary religiously-based identity of the Greek Catholics transformed into diverging national identities. The article argues that the two, seemingly contradicting processes of nationalization, i.e. the segregation along national lines, and “latinization”, that is to say the deep cultural influence of the universalist Roman Catholic Church, reinforced each other in this particular case. Among the Greek Catholics in the north-eastern part of Hungary, the percentage of Hungarian speaking believers was constantly increasing. In parallel with the demographical upheaval between 1880 and 1910, the increasingly organized political and ecclesiastical endeavors to found a new, predominantly Hungarian diocese and to replace the traditional Old-Slavonic liturgical language with the national language marked a major shift in the Greek Catholic identity. Beside the religious and canonical aspects, the issue came to the fore in the discourse of the national policy as well. In this discourse, the Hungarian liturgical language appeared as a powerful assimilative mean, which can enforce the Hungarian national identity among Greek Catholics. Documents of the 1841 Intermarriage-Protestation Movement of Transylvanian Counties Nemes, István The paper presents for the first time the documents issued in 1841 by several Hungarian counties of Transylvania in order to protest against the pastoral letter on religious intermarriages of catholic bishop Miklós Kovács. The circular edited after a long delay compared to its Hungarian pairs, prescribed verbal commitment of spouses to baptize and educate their children in Catholicism. However, this strange modality to solve the intermarriage problem, that was so controversial in the Europe of the time, was conceived to avoid the Transylvanian prohibition of so called reversal letters, but it still was illegal. Transylvanian counties started a movement of protestation, which included a wide range of measures. They forwarded their complaints to the Government (Gubernium) and even to the Viennese Court. They wrote letters to the archdeacons of Transylvanian catholic districts and they addressed to the catholic bishop, of course, making use of the Government’s authority, to stop reversals and passive assistance. At the same time following the Hungarian example they started to communicate with each other by circular letters and tried to elaborate a common way to defeat the church in putting reversals and passive assistance in practice. The result of this movement was a quite uniform desire from the part of counties to discuss about the question during the upcoming Parliament of the province, but the opinions on particular issues of intermarriage and other religious questions were still too far from being consenta
