CONFRUNTĂRI CONFESIONALE ÎN SUD-VESTUL TRANSILVANIEI LA MIJLOCUL SECOLULUI AL XVIII-LEA
The middle of the 18th century corresponded, in Transylvania, to the outbreak of extensive confessional tensions, unfolding against the background of an uninterrupted mobility of intra-Carpathian Romanian villages (in part, directed by external factors) from Orthodoxy to union with the Church of Rome and vice versa. The spark for the escalation of these conflicts was the uncompromising speech against the union of the Aromanian hermit Visarion Sarai, who arrived in southern Transylvania in 1744, with the agreement of the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci. In his wake was a world of the Romanian village thrown into a veritable fratricidal civil war, caused by the non-acceptance, on one side and the other, of the confessional alterity of one’s fellow man. The conflicts – violent and diversified – stretched over several decades, the immediate effects of the issuance of the well-known Josephine tolerance edict from 1781 and its subsequent rescripts demonstrating as such, once more, both the complexity and the intractability of the problem.
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