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Romania The Uniate Church
Under Habsburg rule, Roman Catholics dominated
Transylvania's
more numerous Protestants, and Vienna mounted a campaign
to convert
the region to Catholicism. The imperial army delivered
many
Protestant churches to Catholic hands, and anyone who
broke from
the Catholic church was liable to receive a public
flogging. The
Habsburgs also attempted to persuade Orthodox clergymen to
join the
Uniate Church, which retained Orthodox rituals and customs
but
accepted four key points of Catholic doctrine and
acknowledged
papal authority. Jesuits dispatched to Transylvania
promised
Orthodox clergymen heightened social status, exemption
from
serfdom, and material benefits. In 1699 and 1701, Emperor
Leopold
I decreed Transylvania's Orthodox Church to be one with
the Roman
Catholic Church; the Habsburgs, however, never intended to
make the
Uniate Church a "received" religion and did not enforce
portions of
Leopold's decrees that gave Uniate clergymen the same
rights as
Catholic priests. Despite an Orthodox synod's acceptance
of union,
many Orthodox clergy and faithful rejected it.
In 1711, having suppressed an eight-year rebellion of
Hungarian
nobles and serfs, the empire consolidated its hold on
Transylvania,
and within several decades the Uniate Church proved a
seminal force
in the rise of Romanian nationalism. Uniate clergymen had
influence
in Vienna; and Uniate priests schooled in Rome and Vienna
acquainted the Romanians with Western ideas, wrote
histories
tracing their Daco-Roman origins, adapted the Latin
alphabet to the
Romanian language, and published Romanian grammars and
prayer
books. The Uniate Church's seat at Blaj, in southern
Transylvania,
became a center of Romanian culture.
The Romanians' struggle for equality in Transylvania
found its
first formidable advocate in a Uniate bishop, Inocentiu
Micu Klein,
who, with imperial backing, became a baron and a member of
the
Transylvanian Diet. From 1729 to 1744 Klein submitted
petitions to
Vienna on the Romanians' behalf and stubbornly took the
floor of
Transylvania's Diet to declare that Romanians were the
inferiors of
no other Transylvanian people, that they contributed more
taxes and
soldiers to the state than any of Transylvania's
"nations," and
that only enmity and outdated privileges caused their
political
exclusion and economic exploitation. Klein fought to gain
Uniate
clergymen the same rights as Catholic priests, reduce
feudal
obligations, restore expropriated land to Romanian
peasants, and
bar feudal lords from depriving Romanian children of an
education.
The bishop's words fell on deaf ears in Vienna; and
Hungarian,
German, and Szekler deputies, jealously clinging to their
noble
privileges, openly mocked the bishop and snarled that the
Romanians
were to the Transylvanian body politic what "moths are to
clothing." Klein eventually fled to Rome where his appeals
to the
pope proved fruitless. He died in a Roman monastery in
1768.
Klein's struggle, however, stirred both Uniate and
Orthodox
Romanians to demand equal standing. In 1762 an imperial
decree
established an organization for Transylvania's Orthodox
community,
but the empire still denied Orthodoxy equality even with
the Uniate
Church.
Data as of July 1989
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