Horvat, Irina Liuba: Icoane din colecţia Muzeului Judeţean Satu Mare (Satu Mare, 2014)
Introduction
Introduction The second volume of the collection about the Mukachevo diocese appeared in 2012; this volume included 166 original documents from the period of 1731-1750. This year, the third volume can be published and comprise 118 documents. The publishing of this volume is possible thanks to the close collaboration with the State Archives of Transcarpathia and the more than generous financial support of the European Union by the European project HUSKROUA 1104/140 and the Satu Mare County Council. The volume contains the documents from the period of 1750-1761, these are years of profound changes and reforms initiated by Empress Maria Theresa and have the merit of being initiated the process of the Austrian entry into modernity94, guided by an amazing political clairvoyance. From the point of view of religious life, Maria Theresa manifested herself as a firm defender of Catholicism; herself being a firm Catholic, considered by historians a vivid illustration of the idea of pietas habsburgica. But how is this reflected in the church field? First, the Empress made considerable efforts to understand the real situation inside the Mukachevo Greek Catholic church, ordering the Catholic canonical visits of Barkóczy, the Catholic Bishop from Eger, in Satu Mare, Ugocea, Bereg, Szabolcs and Maramureş counties in 1748, ensuring conditions than the bishop Michael Olsavszky from Mukacevo to start in 1750 the inspection of parishes in his vast diocese95. The visit of Olsavszky Bishop, more over accustomed to such efforts because of his previous visits to the Romanian parishes from Transylvania between the years of 1747-1748, visiting until 1752. It is remarkable that during the months January to April, 1750 he visited Vienna where he had meetings with different officials of the empire, including the Empress Maria Theresa, attempting on this occasion to advocate for the canonization of Mukacevo, trying to escape the increasingly oppressive yoke of the Catholic Church of Eger. During this time he always addressed reports to the Locumtenential Council and even to the Empress on the situation found in the counties he visited96, sending on the June 25th, 1753 an imposing Locumtenential report to the Council (doc. 34)97 and in 1756 even to the Empress Maria Teresa (doc. 51). Even though the reports of bishop Olsavszky tried to improve the realities found in the field (eg reporting a smaller number of believers in each of the counties he visited, decreasing the number Greek-catholic priests sanctified in an Orthodox environment etc.), actual data recorded during the visits are extremely important, providing an almost complete radiography of the situation of the Greek Catholic religion in northern Hungary at the half of the eighteenth century. They also provide data on the economic situation of parishes, number of population, education and even health situationby recording the existence of midwives in villages he visited. We can also have a comprehensive view on the intellectual level of the clergy, wealth and state of churches. The overall picture that emerges from these visits is that the Greek Catholic Church of Mukachevo was far from the status of the other churches (Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran). Many parishes were extremely poor, without financial properties and some of them without the items and books necessary for ^Henri Bogdan, Histoire des Habsbourg des origines á nos jours, Paris, 2005, p.229. 95Hodinka Antal, A Munkácsi görög-katholikus püspökség története, Budapest, 1909, p. 600-603. Copy of diploma's nomination of Olsavszky to the right of making canonical visitationis published by Dulişkovici I, Istoriceskiia certi Ugro Russkih, III, Ungvár, 1877, p. 153-154. 960vidiu Ghitta, La visite pastorale de I évéque Manuel Olsavszky dans les comitats de Satu Mare et de Maramureş (1751), in Church and Society in central and Easten Europe, Cluj-Napoca, 1998, p. 238-253. 97Hodinka Antal, op.cit., p.604. 22
