Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)

The Parish Church of Magna Dominica Hungarorum, Regnum Marianum, 1931

church ... of the new Christian Hungary" was won in 1924 by Iván Kotsis (1889— 1980), a professor at the University of Technology. A memorandum issued in 1925 by those commissioning the work clearly delineated the ideological objectives of having a parish church built for the parish community established during the Commune of 1919. "Let us raise a church to proclaim and serve, under the prevailing conditions of truncation and material decay, the ideal of an integrated Greater Hungary, the historical Regnum Marianum." (Lacking a male heir, King Stephen 1 had offered his country and crown to the Holy Virgin.)

The foundation stone was blessed by Cardinal János Csernoch in the presence of Regent Miklós Horthy on 15 October 1925. The first sod was cut on the occasion of the silver jubilee mass of Lajos Shvoy on 11 July 1926.

The architect designed a reinforced-concrete building to be raised on a podium with a Greek-cross layout. The structure, which was meant to accommodate 2400 people, featured a dome on pendentives with a tall tower on the western front. The barrel-vaulted transept and the apse had an arched closing. Iván Kotsis's choice of style was inspired by the age of St. Stephen (the layout echoed a French prototype in Périgueux Saint Étienne, whereas the decorative details followed Italian models), and yet the church as a whole was closer to the neo- Romanesque world of his master Frigyes Schulek (as seen on the Fishermen's Bastion) or the forms of the Sacré Coeur in Paris.

The centralised arrangement, the "centred” semi-spherical dome emphasised the monument-like nature of the building. Its preponderance was not even diminished by the frontal tower, as the latter was left uncompleted.

The church was consecrated by Prince Primate Jusztinján Serédi on 14 June 1931.

The building sustained slight damage during World War 11. It was restored in 1946, but it could not escape its destiny given the spread of Stalinism in the country and the appearance of the one-party system. At first it was only the carved-stone replica of the Holy Crown, supposedly an anti-people symbol emblematic of a gentry order, that was removed from the top of the dome, but this was followed by demolition of the whole church.

The destruction of the church in 1951 was the most severe case in Hungary of damning something to be forgotten (damnatio memoriae), familiar from the pages of architectural history. The memory of the church is today kept alive by a cross standing on the edge of the City Park, where a monument of the Council Republic used to stand. (The new church of Regnum Marianum now stands in Zoborhegy tér, District XIV.)

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