State Power and Religious Influence in Dualist Hungary (1890-1914)

Ioan Marius Eppel, Babes-Bolyai University, Romanian Academy
Ana Victoria Sima, Babes-Bolyai University, Romanian Academy
Ioan Bolovan, Romanian Academy and Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

After the mid-1890s, when the Hungarian Government had initiated a series of ecclesiastical politics reforms considered controversial by some fractions of the clergy and of the civil society, in 1898, the executive in Budapest presented to the prelates in the House of Magnates a bill of law which attempted to reconcile the State and the Church through a coordination of forces “in our common interest”. According to the governmental intentions, the state offered a salary enhancement to the clergy of Hungary, with the exception of the Catholic clergy whose situation was to be regulated further on. Most interested in this project of law were the Churches of the national minorities which had a precarious financial situation and could use the additional income in order to consolidate their internal situation. However, the state maintained the right to condition the receipt of this enhancement. The present paper will delve into the stances taken by the stakeholders in this debate, which continued into the early 20th century (Law number XXXVIII/1913), as a means of highlighting the ways in which the Hungarian state understood the national component of the minority Churches’ responsibilities. That the government granted conditional financial support to the clergy meant that it recognized the clergy’s potential to secure the allegiances of their often ethnically-mixed communities, and saw fit to make use of this potential for furthering its own goals. Moreover, it will examine to what extent the clergy, as an historical actor deeply involved in the political life of modern states in East-Central and South-East Europe, perceived the significance of its brokerage role in the relation between state and community, in the context of the process of modernisation.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 214. How States Make Society