Levéltári Közlemények, 93. (2022)

Angol nyelvű összefoglalók

Abstracts

Zoltán Paksy

THE BIRTH OF CHURCH POLICY LAWS IN HUNGARY AT THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY

In Hungary, the so-called ecclesiastical laws - on civil marriage, the introduction of state registration of births and the legal status of churches and religion - were passed by Parliament in the mid-1890s, amidst serious domestic political battles. This study, which summarizes the political struggles surrounding these laws from 1867 until their ratification, can be divided into three parts. The first chapter describes the attempts to regulate ecclesial policy between 1867 and 1890. Several bills were proposed during this period, but none of them became law. The reason for this is that nor the Catholic Church and nor the ruler did not support these reforms, and the Hungarian governments avoided the confrontation until 1890. The following chapters describe the emergence of a new force, the political Catholicism, organized against the adoption of the ecclesiastical laws, and its Christian national ideology, which appeared after 1867 and gained increasing influence in Catholic society. This group institutionalized during the 1890s, with the creation of its political party, the People’s Party, and many other organizations, all of which sought to strengthen the political and public representation of Catholic society. Finally, the third part of the paper summarizes the circumstances in which the laws were passed between 1890 and 1895, with a detailed legislative chronology of the time of passage of each law, the voting percentages and the positions of the various political tendencies. The laws were passed, and although the Christian Nationalist tendency - which was firmly opposed to modernity and liberalism and also had an increasingly anti-Semitic content - was defeated. However, its rise in Hungarian society continued and was the ideological precursor of the Christian Nationalist tendency of the 1920s.

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