At 6 PM on October 2nd, 2018, we host our first ever (thirty-seventh overall) debate of the VERITAS Debate Nights series at the VERITAS home office on Zsil Street. The title of the debate is 1918–19 and the Churches. Kálmán Árpád Kovács, VERITAS Research Fellow, and Pál Hatos, Associate Professor / Dean (University of Kaposvár), familiarize the audience with the topic, while Róbert Hermann, VERITAS Subject Team Leader, leads the discussion.
Location: VERITAS Research Institute for History, Zsil utca (Street) 2–4, Budapest
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The evening’s discussion examines the 18-month period that witnessed three distinct government system changeovers (in 1918–19) from the perspective of the churches. (These took place in the wake of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and proceeded in the following chronological order: from monarchy to the Republic of Councils (communism) to the Kingdom without a King (regency). The starting point is the heritage of Church policy in Dualist Hungary. La Belle Époque saw such positive developments as the resolution of pay for pastors and teachers, which in the case of the Protestant denominations was supplemented by the state social security system. Growing demand for state assistance, however, meant dependence on limited final assistance from local governments, while denied access to such funds generated discontent. Though the Roman Catholic Church was considered a national church, most of its congregation was made up of minorities (mainly Swabians and Slovaks). Most Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox believers practiced their religion within the walls of their own national churches. Though the so-called Church Policy laws of 1894–95 led to progress in the area of the separation of church and state, it was not entirely successful. Areas of responsibility continued to overlap, especially in education policy. Finances related to state and educational, as well as Church and religious instructional functions could not be successfully determined; state assets could not be separated from the churches’ in such a way as to placate the churches. Catholic autonomy and the final attempts at implementing the (seventy years) delayed elements of Article XX of 1848 were already doomed to failure because of the raging war. These developments led to the political strengthening of republican, bourgeois radical and social-democratic trends which ultimately treated religion as strictly a personal matter. It was at that time the churches first comprehended the real possibility of the development of a social order that diminished their role or worked against their interests. The communist era brought submission and bloody atrocities. In contrast to what female writer Cécile Tormay, who had lived through the atrocities, wrote, we must look at the period as a whole and objectively analyze it.
