REVERSIBLE TOLERATION? CHANCELLOR GÁBOR BETHLEN’S OPINION ON ENDING THE ORTHODOX VERSUS GREEK CATHOLIC DISPUTES IN TRANSYLVANIA
REVERSIBLE TOLERATION? CHANCELLOR GÁBOR BETHLEN’S OPINION ON ENDING THE ORTHODOX VERSUS GREEK CATHOLIC DISPUTES IN TRANSYLVANIA

Summary/Abstract: The decades during the mid-eighteenth century were a time of crisis for the Habsburg government in Transylvania. It was faced with the dilemma of finding a suitable solution to the religious controversies within the Romanian community, split between the acceptance or rejection of church union with Rome. Established at the end of the seventeenth century as the Habsburgs attempted to deal with the political consequences of the religious diversity that plagued the newly acquired lands in East Central Europe, the Greek Catholic or Uniate Church allowed them to claim that Catholics held a majority in Transylvania and therefore assert control over the entire administration. Since fiction worked to their advantage and no real competitor subsisted in the political arena after the peace of Sătmar in 1711, Vienna made no further effort to consolidate the diocese until the late 1730s . In the confessional landscape of the Monarchy this was to prove a mistake, as the Serbian Orthodox patriarch took the opportunity to widen his influence by predicating through select emissaries that a union with the pope would lead to eternal damnation. A monk of Bosnian origin, Visarion Sarai, opened the conflict in spring of 1744, when his speeches delivered through large parts of southern Transylvania caused mass abandonment of the Greek Catholic Church and an outburst of anger against its clergy.

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