IDENTITATE SI DIVERSITATE. DESPRE BISERICA ROMÂNILOR ARDELENI (1744-1754)
IDENTITY AND DIVERSITY. ABOUT THE ROMANIAN CHURCH IN TRANSYLVANIA (1744-1754)

Summary/Abstract: Identity and diversity. About the Romanian Church in Transylvania (1744-1754). The present study covers the crisis of the Union in the decade following Visarion’s mission (1744-1754). The period is dominated by the contest between the Court and the Roman Catholic hierarchy and their supporters, on the one side, and the Orthodox (the „non-united,” „schismatics”), on the other. For its part, the Court was determined to defend and, wherever possible, expand the Union, while the Orthodox clung tenaciously to „our religion,” demanding the right to practice their faith as they wished and to be served by priests of their own choosing. In a broader sense, the confrontation between the Court and the Orthodox represented an extension of the Catholic Reformation into the eighteenth century, and, at another level, it became, in effect, an encounter between modernization and tradition, between West and East. In the course of these events the further delineation of an ethnic consciousness separate from a strictly religious identity became sharper.

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