# My American Lectures/Catholic Organisations and Propagands in S. E. Europe

CATHOLIC ORGANISATION AND PROPAGANDA IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE
South-Eastern Europe belongs to orthodoxy, with the sole exception of the Adriatic coast, which has remained true to its original Catholicism. It was not always so, however, and the Greek creed was not always proof against the strong, often fanatic and ever-exemplarily disciplined propaganda of the western Latin church, whether in the former Latin or in the Slavonic and Greek states.
The history of this struggle has often been written, true to the smallest detail, though separately for each national state. A short survey of this religious struggle in all territories under the impulse of the same orders and feelings may serve, therefore, to rectify some prejudices and to offer fresh and perhaps useful explanation.
Moldavian Fortified Church
The best proof of the Latin origins of the Christianity of Dacia lies there, the Greek having disappeared with the Cappadocians of the Trajanic colonization. In Dalmatia, for a long time in dispute between the eastern and western empires, the old Roman episcopacy remained, preserved alike against the pagan barbarians and the Imperial church of a different linguistic and hierarchical character. In Antivari, the city opposed to the Itahan Bari, in Ragusa also, bishops ruled who had to decide the question of supremacy. Each of the centres abandoned by the emperors, at least for a certain time, recognised the local religious chief to be a substitute for the -civil and military authorities. Before the arrival of the Slavs such prelates had the same position of popular authority and ecclesiastical prestige as St. Severin before the ​Germans in Pannonia; or Bupus and his colleagues in the Gallic cities attacked by Attila. Such autonomies which represented not only a religious organisation, but also a local form of government, were not to be subdued and directed by the remote Patriarch of Constantinople, whose own relation to the emperor had yet to be determined. So Catholicism remained firm, consolidated as it was in the popular feelings of respect and gratitude.
A new Latin centre was set up in the Byzantine capital itself: for under the Empire all races were grouped around their own churches. When Arabs were tolerated in Constantinople they had their officially recognised houses of prayer: the Jews also. The first Italian merchants established in Byzantium, about the nth century, first Amalfitans, then Pisans, Genoese and Venetians, had colonies of a similar character. Before the Comnenes who were, until the bloody persecutions of the perverse Andronicus, in favour of the Latins, the bells of the little catholic churches sounded as freely as those of the orthodox faith. The Venetians in particular made full use of this imperial tolerance.
Encouraged by the fact that the fourth crusade had been able to set up a « Latin Empire», the Pope was at first persuaded that it would also give him possession, as of right, of his See, as, theoretically, of Jerusalem. He hoped to see a forced dispersal of the Schism, but the feeble emperors and the prudent Venetians, who had gained the right of appointing Constantinople’s religious head from among themselves, did nothing to justify such exaggerated optimism. The Venetian prelate worked only for his enlarged community, and the Greeks, under their spiritual leaders, preserved their former religious life, of which unfortunately almost nothing is known. In the provinces retained by the Latin barons, something similar occurred. Ortho- doxy ​gave proof that a foreign conqueror was not sufficient to destroy the principles of its existence.
At the end of this adventurous empire, the Patriarch, whose nomination had evaded the Venetians, remained a titular bishop of Constantinople, residing in his own country in the West. But Orthodoxy restored was doomed to suffer unending humiliation at the hands of the great western church which alone could withstand the Turk and other enemies.
At Lyons, the ambassadors of Michael Palaeologue brought to the Pope all that was necessary to prepare for the union of the two churches. Notwithstanting the resistance of the Greek clergy, Latin propaganda was encouraged by such declarations and offers. In the quarrel of the Hesychastes, represented by a Greek monk who came from the Calabrian province of orthodoxy, Barlaam, there was undoubtedly an influence of western conceptions. To this end also the marriages of the emperors with the Latin princesses of Savoy and of Monteferrat certainly helped.
But not only in Byzantium, but also in each of the Balkanic and Danubian States and territories, the Holy See worked for the expansion of its authority. In the 9th century, as the apostolic function of gaining souls for the western church was confided to the Carolingians, direct negotiations were commenced with the chief of the Slavs in the middle Danube, the Moravian « king », and with the pagan Khan of the Touranian Bulgarians established in the Balkan peninsula: the latter succumbed to the flattering overtures of the Byzantine emperor and became his orthodox « son », being baptised in the name of the imperial Michael.
At the outset, the Hungarian duchy, a barbarian extension of the Moravian state, whose chiefs were unlawfully ​called kings, was snatched from the ever-growing influence of Byzantium and won over to the Latin Church. The former voevode who, in accordance with the Slavonic custom, bore the name of Vajk or Vlk (the wolf), was now an apostolic monarch, was baptised Stephen and was destined to become a saint of the Catholic church. His crown had one meaning only, viz: that of accrediting him with the mission previously confided to the Carolingians — now in decay — of bringing all pagans and schismatics under the sway of St. Peter's sceptre.
But on the shores of the Adriatic the same Holy See of Rome created a kingdom of catholic Slavs. A catholic kingdom of Croats, a mere fragment of the larger Moravian congregation, also enjoyed the protection of the Pope. Both crowns were sacrificed however to the crafty barbarian who appeared willing — sword in hand — to win a saintly halo. Croatia was reunited, thanks to family relationships, with Hungary, and in the white city of the Adria, Beograd, the Dalmatian crown was set on the head of King Coloman. Serbs, Bulgarians and Roumanians now stood alone before this vast congregation of provinces under the holy right of domination.
But Byzantium was there to defend these peoples, whom it considered as living within its own territories and therefore belonging to it. When Manuel Comnene was master of Adriatic Serbia, and he went so far as to set up in Hungary the kings who pleased him and appeared willing to serve him, the progress of the Hungarians was bound to be arrested, while the catholic state of St. Stephen seemed to be in danger of degenerating into a mere fief of the Eastern Empire. To these vassals of the Holy See therefore was sent a Greek « crown » which has been preserved down to the present day. Only after the crimes of Andronicus had brought ruin upon this ​magnificent foundation was Hungary able to resume the offensive.
But at his moment the papacy, ready to abandon the Arpadians of Hungary as it had formerly the Carolingians of France in the day of their decay, now bethought itself of the possibility of direct action. This took the form of negotiations with the Wallachian chief, Joannice, ruler of certain Bulgarian lands, who considered himself, in contrast to the Latin intruders of Constantinople, as the true emperor of the Romans (that is to say the Greeks) as well as of his own Bulgars and Wallachians. He, and not the Arpadian, Andrew the Second, who headed a crusade into Egypt, was to be the armed hand of the Pope against the heretic. No flatteries were spared the proud barbarian, whose simple genealogy was connected by the skill of pontifical secretaries with the masters of ancient Rome. But Joannice deemed that his imperial mission in the East could be accomplished only by the preservation of his own orthodoxy.
The crown given to the Serbian voevode at almost the same time that pontifical crowns made kings of the rulers of Cyprus and Armenia, had the same significance.
Such direct intervention was the more necessary after the invasion of the Tartars, who seemed to have destroyed Hungarian power for ever.
As the realm partially recovered from this immeasurable catastrophe, against which the proud Pope Innocent III had found no means of fighting as in the days of his greatest triumphs at Lyons, the role of the apostolic kings was seen to lack support. At the beginning of the 12th century, however, King Bela called a band of the Teutonic knights who built wooden strongholds, assembled colonists in Southern Transylvania, then frequently infested by pagans from the opposite slopes of the mountains, ​and penetrated the free Roumanian valleys, then under the rule of Cuman, Touranian chiefs from the Steppe. These latter however failed in their expected allegiance to the Crown, and the Teutons were accordingly forced to abandon their quest, to continue it half a century later in Prussia. A remnant of this conquest was the bishopric of Milcov in Southern Moldavia, which was later destroyed by the Tartars. Another episcopal seat was founded by the Hungarian Crown at Severin, where the ruins of the old Trajanic bridge were still visible. It was the most convenient point for gaining not only the districts of western Wallachia, but also the neighbouring districts of Bulgaria across the water. Watching here, the Hungarian soldiers of Rome could check any attempts at crossing by the Bulgarian Assenides on the left bank of the Danube.
The Holy See prepared, after the invasion of the Tartars, for the foundation of a new catholic province on the river as a bulwark against pagans and heterodoxy alike. The Joannites, a Latin order of chivalry, and who could understand in some degree the Roumanian language, were to receive by royal decree not only the castle of Severin, of glorious memory, but all the Roumanian lands around with their fields, mills, fisheries and sufficient tilled land, which the King considered (perhaps without sufficient reason), as far as the River Olt, to be his fief: he even went so far as to include in the gift such countries beyond the river as had never been within his realm. The desired province of pontifical creation, which would have preserved the more ancient rights of the king, was an impossibility however. As the Teutons had established themselves in Prussia, the Joannites found a home in the beautiful but desert island of Rhodes and thence betook themselves. ​
Both attempts to enlist the aid of the knights had failed. But the Pope had yet another instrument to his hand for the extension of his power over the heretical, schismatical South-Eastern Europe, in the newly-created orders of the Dominican and Franciscan friars, whose only weapon was that of an untiring propaganda.
In the second half of the 13th century both were sent to the Danubian territories to work under the leadership of the Hungarian sovereigns. Thus the See of Severin, that of Milcov, or that of the Cumans, could be preserved from retrogression. The Bosniac heresy of the Patarenes or Bogomiles, an Asiatic doctrine transmitted by Anatolian colonists in Thrace to the Bulgars, had in these new and fervent apostles its fiercest enemy.
But to renew the offensive energetically there had to be two new factors besides the conquering spirit of the Popes of Avignon. First the creation of enduring States on the Roumanian slopes of the Carpathians: Wallachia, towards the year 1300, and, half a century later, Moldavia. Secondly, the substitution of the degenerate Ar-padians in Hungary, suspected of having connived at the heathen usages of the Cumans, by the new and fierce dynasty of the Neapolitan Angevins, in whose veins ran the blood of St. Louis.
Now a catholic bishopric was founded in the very capital of the Wallachian state, Argeș, where the Dominicans were mainly connected with the great work of latinization. The Franciscans on the other hand confined their activities to Severin and to the neighbouring Bulgarian town of Vidin, which the second of the Angevin line, Louis the Great, caused to be made the capital of a new Banate in addition to that of Severin, transferred by his father, Charles-Robert, to Timișoara (Temesvar). To the German Franciscans of Silesia was confided ​the new Moldavian bishopric of Sereth, the second capital of the Principality. The Princes Alexander and Vladislav-Payko of Wallachia, and Latcu of Moldavia were considered to be good and steadfast catholics; the second wife of Alexander was a Hungarian, Clara, while of the daughters of this prince one was married in Hungary to a Piast, a Silesian prince and a high dignitary of the realm, and the two others, one of whom was Empress of Serbia while the other lived in Bulgaria, at Vidin, were charged by the Pope himself with the mission of winning over both their husbands to Catholicism. This enterprise, which seemed to prosper and to be under the best of auguries, was compromised and almost ruined altogether by the greatest crisis in the Papacy — the occidental schism.
Hungary obeyed the French pope, but the latter could not obtain the victory over his rival. The Hungarian king had enough strength to uphold the catholic foundation of Severin, Argeș, too and Sereth, and the older one of Milcov, which was transferred to Bacău, in the midst of the Hungarian colonies in Moldavia, near the Franciscan centre of Csik. Louis died almost at the same moment that the Catholic Church was split into two inimical factions and, as the heirdom of Gregory XI, his own was long disputed, viz between the husbands of his two daughters and sole heiresses, Sigismund of Luxemburg and the Lithuanian Duke Jagello, baptized Wla-dislaw. Louis had ruled Poland also, as the successor of Casimir the Great, conqueror of Russian Galicia, where his mother, the sister of Casimir, Elizabeth, had exercised sovereign rights. The reunion of the two great catholic realms in the East of Europe, now wholly freed from the Tartar yoke, could have had far-reaching results in the south-east of Europe. Now Hungary remained on one side, and Poland on the other.
Monastery of Sucevița ( ​Old Moldavia! ​
Each of the two separate realms had a mission of its own, and with great difficulty Poland was forced to ascertain the price of political community with the only half-christianised Lithuania and Hungary to find the means of providing for her own military and political true needs, in the time of Sigismund, an emperor, a restorer of the catholic unity, a peace-maker between France and England, without feeling the lacks of him as a sovereign at home. Both stood unprepared, in the welter of the decay of the Middle Ages, before the Ottoman Turks, who united the strenght of Mongolian rule with the Byzantine ideals of domination.
Notwithstanding the energetic attitude of the King-Emperor against the Hussites, forced, before the onslaught of the friars of Jacob della Marchia, to seek a refuge in Moldavia where their gospel was translated into the popular tongue; notwithstanding his plans for introducing the Teutons in Licostomo-Chilia, on the Danube, and Severin, the work of catholic propaganda was left to the free-lance Franciscans. Their tireless little army made Transylvania its headquarters, when an extraordinary personality had now arisen to lead the « poor of Christ» not only against these heretics, but against the formidable armies of Mahomet the Second. As the Sultan endeavoured at Belgrade to gain the door to Hungary and the Christian Occident, so he encountered the Calabrian saint with his band of adventurers and beggars, of mystics and mendicants who fought in the holy name of Christ, neither giving nor asking quarter and winning the most unexpected victories. The new St. John, leader of both Hungarians and Roumanians, had as principal helper the Roumanian of Transylvania, John Hunyadi. For more than ten years this knight of eastern Christianity, later, in the service of a child of foreign origin, the ruler of the Hungarian realm of which he was the ​true if uncrowned sovereign, successfully filled the mission of crusader at Varna (where Wladislaw, sovereign of both Ludovician realms, and the legate of the Pope had died).
But with the new Hungary of Matthias, John’s son, the fight against the Turk could no longer be maintained. Matthias, a ruler in the sense of the Renaissance, dreamed of the crown of the Caesars, and died at Vienna. His contemporary, the Moldavian Prince Stephen, was the heir of the old Roumanian crusader in Hungary and Pope Sixtus IV was quick to recognise, praise and occasionally to reward this champion of Christendom. Stephen was naturally obliged to admit and to sustain, as the ally of the western catholic powers against the Sultan, Catholicism within his own territories, notably at Cetatea-Albă which was, for Italians, an important colony and the principal harbour at the mouth of the Dniester, and at Baia, the cradle of Moldavia, where a Polish bishop had been sent for the spiritual needs of the Lithuanian princess Ryngalla, who was the wife of the Moldavian Prince Alexander the Good, Stephen’s grandfather.
The dream of Innocent II haunted the Popes long after the Holy See was restored, by Eugene the Fourth and Nicholas the Fifth, in its old unity. But they were, at the birth of the modern era, also Italian princes eager to form a state of the Church and ready to fight all who challenged their territorial ambitions. In the 16th century their newly-extended arm was broken by the Protestant revolt.
The Hussites, the first to move against Rome, had gained credence in some parts of Poland, Upper Hungary and the neighbouring Roumanian districts: they afforded Roumanian literature the first translations of the Gospel. But this was not a danger to the Orthodoxy; the Protestantism of the Transylvanian Saxons, who had printed ​a catechism for the Roumanians in that language, was a movement of the cities which could not interest or influence the villages of the old creed. Literature also gained by the imposition of a new church on the same Roumanians by the Calvinist princes of Transylvania, but, despite the superintendents appointed and the lay councils which were held, this forced gift of a foreign tyranny had only an artificial and sporadic life. Nor did the attempt made in Moldavia by the Greek adventurer Jacob Basilikos, who, won over to the cause of German and Polish Protestantism (the branch of Socinius), gained the throne of the principality and founded a bishopric with a Pole as its spiritual head and a protestant school under a Silesian German, meet with any better fate. The efforts of a contemporary German printer to publish reformed Slavonic books also bore no fruit.
As a reaction against the work of the Reform, the propaganda of Catholicism was increasingly successful. The Jesuits intervened at the end of the 16th century. Their centres of activity were Transylvania, Poland and, later, Constantinople too: the provinces of the Balkans remaining the appanage of the Franciscan and Dominican friars.
Transylvania the free, not the Turkish nor the German fragment of the old Hungarian group of provinces, had returned to the Catholic faith at the very moment when its prince, Stephen Báthory, was elected King of Poland, to be the greatest of all its sovereigns. It was impossible for the overlord of Poland to be other than an obedient son of the Roman Church. If Christopher, the brother to whom Stephen confided the conduct of the principality, shunned a formal declaration of the faith, his son Sigismund was educated by the Catholic Fathers in their own fashion and nourished upon the ideal of great military deeds in the service of God and His Church. ​
The celebrated Jesuit who was the apostle to the Muscovites, Possevino, came to this country and later gave a most interesting description of its inhabitants. But the greater part of the nobility remained true to Calvinism, and the Saxons were never to be tempted to abandon the Tutheran creed, while the so-called catholic bishop had no adherents through whom to mould the new generation in his own form.
In Poland the scope of the Jesuits was much greater. Under the guidance of the Papal Nuncio a large school was established at Lemberg and the superior sent his emissaries forth in all directions, also employing such of the Uniate Ruthenes who could usefully act as links with the Roumanians.
Certain of such missionaries, aided by a Venetian of Albanian origin, Bartolomeo Bruti, who was counsellor to that infirm prince, Peter the Tame, won over Moldavia, seeking to drive out the Lutheran faith from the scattered German villages of that province. Peter himself averred that he was a true son of the Roman church, and at the same time his brother in Bucharest, Alexander, husband of a Perote, whose mother and sister were also Catholics, was considered a complete and steadfast convert to the Latin faith.
But to attain even greater successes means were found to benefit by the relations of the Holy See with the German emperor Rudolph the Second, then on the point of assailing the Turks. The new crusade was well looked upon by Pope Clement VIII, whose flatterers assured him that Constantinople reconquered would soon be a Clementine.
A host of followers of the Holy War came to the Danube to initiate, encourage and conduct operations, including a Spaniard, one Alonso Carrillo, confessor to the young Transylvanian; the Nuncio Malaspina was accredited ​to the same prince Sigismund. The imperial secretaries and agents burnt with the same Catholic aims and fervours. The principal representative of the Danubian crusade, the Wallachian prince Michael the Brave sent a mission to Italy to testify his goodwill towards the Holy See.
A consolidation of the Catholic work in the Principalities was the result of this joint crusade against the Turk. The old organisation was refashioned under the active influence of the Jesuits and a Franciscan revival. One Arsengo of Crete, succeeded by a Venetian, Querino, was appointed, after a lengthy interval, Bishop of Argeș and Moldavia. As the then ruling Moldavian prince, the deadly enemy of Michael, who had momentarily routed him and had set over the church of that principality a Greek chief of good family (Dionysius Ralis, Archbishop of Tirnovo), had been reinstated by the Poles, his attitude towards Rome was subservient in the extreme: this same Jeremias Movilă visited the Latin church in the old capital of his territory, Suceava, and assisted the Italian bishop from his own treasury. All the members of this dynasty preserved the same attitude towards the Western Church, the insincerity of their belief being proved by the fact that Peter, the son of Jeremia’s brother Simeon, was responsible for the restoration of the Russian church in the states of the Polish king, the celebrated Metropolitan of Kiew Peter Mogila.
At the commencement of the 17th century, the position of the Jesuits in Constantinople, whither they had come to combat the efforts of the Calvinist ambassador of the Bow Countries to win over to Protestantism the leader of the Eastern Church, and the projects of the gifted Patriarch Cyrill Bukaris (a true chief of the Greek nation in its struggles for liberty), was an exceedingly strong ​one. Had it not been for the misfortunes of this ill-starred prelate and the repressive measures of the Turks against the Catholic propagandists, the work of the Fathers, supported by the French ambassador even before the advent of the Richelieu ministry, a pact could have been concluded between certain of the Patriarchs and the Church of Rome. The Roumanian princes in the first half of this century were on many occasions asked to assist in the propaganda, and the letters of the French ambassador already mentioned, de Cesy, who was himself a fervent believer, were too pressing to remain completely neglected. No practical results were gained however and, without leaders, Catholicism in the Principalities degenerated. The few Franciscans in the Wallachian town of Targoviște, and their brethren at Bacău in Moldavia, were in themselves inadequate to maintain a movement begun under such favourable auspices.
The very Papacy itself seemed to have lost its old zeal. Not until 1650 were more serious efforts made to regain lost ground. An intelligent missionary, Marco Bandini, was then sent to Moldavia, in the reign of the rich and influential prince Basile Lupu, and his long report is luckily preserved to us. He was also entrusted with a mission to the Wallachian Court of a traditionalist prince, the good and aged Matei Bassarab.
In the second half of the century, the wars of certain Christian States against the Turks inspired the idea of a new crusade: first the conflict between the German Empire and the Sultan, with the participation of the nobles sent by Eouis XIV, then the struggle of the Porte against Poland in the days of the Christian knight John Sobieski, and, thirdly, the revenge of the Christians for the Turkish siege of Vienna and the reconquest of the Hungarian provinces. ​
Not only visitors of higher rank, such as Peter Parcevich, titular bishop of Marcianopolis, on the shores of the Black Sea, were sent to the principalities, but the repeated raids of the German imperialists in Wallachia, under the conduct of one Heissler, a Veterani, the occupation of a large part of Moldavia by the Poles, all gave support to a Catholicism which seemed to organise here through the Roumanians, as well as south of the Danube. Notwithstanding the presence of a bishop in Nicopolis for both banks of the river, Catholic missionaries like de Stefani and Antide Dunod conducted the negotiations with the German subjects of that hardy Wallachian prince of Byzantine descent, Șerban Cantacuzino, who dreamed vainly of regaining the crown of his ancestors. But it was in this same reign that the most important Catholic colony of Câmpulung, formed of Saxons and Hungarians by the Teutonic Knights, was forcibly won over to Orthodoxy. The reaction against the Christian policy of Șerban under his nephew Constantin Brâncoveanu could not be favourable to Catholicism, notwithstanding that the young and brilliant prince was surrounded by Catholic doctors (such as Bartolomeo Ferrati) and secretaries (such as Del Chiaro, author of the «Rivoluzioni della Vallachia »).
This epoch is at least characterised by the fruitful activities of the Patriarch Dositheus in Bucharest and Jassy: this leader of the Hierosolymitan church chose the defence of the Eastern creed against the Jesuits as the principal purpose of his life. The Greek works he published in the Roumanian capitals were disseminated throughout all the provinces of the Orthodoxy and formed the basis of all counter-propaganda. The Roumanian bishops obeyed all his directions, almost considering themselves his subordinates. ​
One of the principal reasons for his efforts was the victory gained by the same Jesuits in Roumanian Transylvania. Introduced by the Imperialists after the province had submitted to the rule of the emperor, they sought to gain allies against the Calvinists in their castles and the Lutherans in their cities. The neglected and affronted Roumanians, forming as they did the greater part of the population, were disposed to follow their counsels; latterly the Hungarian superintendents of the Calvinist church had gone so far as to condemn the bishops they had examined and recommended to the prince and to arrest them and to mete out corporal punishment to them, all because of their disinclination to obey slavishly the commands of their spiritual leaders. Thus, under the Bishop Theophilus, a hastily assembled Roumanian council admitted the four points of separation between East and West, expecting such material advantages for the impoverished clergy of this humiliated nation as should have known could never be realised. Theophilus’s successor, Athanasius, in spite of his visit to Bucharest for the customary examination and confirmation in his See by the Wallachian metropolitan and notwithstanding all threats, including that of excommunication pronounced by his superior, accomplished the formal act of reunion with the church of Rome and was rewarded with gifts and high honours, being made a counsellor of the emperor.
But the few Roumanian Calvinists protested and the population of the districts of southern Transylvania, peasants and rich merchants alike, maintained their adherence to the old creed, and were supported in this by. Brâncoveanu and his clergy. The emperor, after the conclusion of the peace of Carlowitz with the Turks in 1699, had brought in his domains the Serbian patriarch and the other chiefs of the nation. Serbs were called upod in this part ​of Transylvania to maintain the resistance against the act of union, hater Athanasius was degraded to be a simple bishop, transported to the rural district, of Făgăraș from the capital, and there subjected to the authority of a foreign Jesuit. His successors were wholly neglected, and the most important of all Uniate bishops, Innocent Micu-Klein, having asked for the promised rights of his nation, was insulted in the Transylvanian assembly by the representatives of the leading nations. Being in danger of arrest in Vienna, he sought satisfaction in Rome, only to die in poverty, while the revolt of the orthodox peasantry broke forth under the leadership of a courageous village priest, whose inspiration led them far beyond the goal of religious grievances into the domains of ideals of social freedom for the nation.
The Court of Vienna eventually consented to send a religious chief to these numerous and indomitable malcontents — a Serb who was at the same time bishop of the Serbs in Buda and in the lower Austrian provinces, hiving under the thatched roof of a humble cottage near Hermannstadt (Sibiiu) he had, in the same lowly condition, two Serb successors, until in the year 1810 the Roumanian Basil Moga assumed their office. After him a greater personality, Andrew Șaguna, was to add much lustre to this church of the furthest ranges, and to gain for her the dignities of archbishop and Metropolitan from the Emperor Franz Joseph.
Cut off from the great masses of the nation, regarded as mere tools of the Court, the successors of Klein, Peter Paul Aaron the mystic, the great organiser Bobb, brought no gains of consequence to the fight for Catholic expansion in Transylvania. Secluded in their modest stronghold of Blaj, practically the prisoners of the Government, playing, with their excellent national schools, merely a cultural role, ​they represented neither more nor less, as far as the creation of a metropolitan church for Alexandru Șuluțiu was concerned, an abortive creation of the Jesuits. As this sect was proscribed by the Emperor Joseph the Second and the order was temporarily destroyed by decree of the Pope, the principal support of the Uniates crumbled beneath them. The Viennese Court was more disposed to favour the Roman Catholic rather than this bastard form of religion for a nation which was considered inferior.
The decay of Catholicism in the Principalities was, to all intents and purposes, identical. The Latin church remained alien, while their leaders committed the gross error of separating Moldavia, with its Italian friars, and the Jesuits in Jassy with their much-prized school, from Wallachia, subject to the bishop of Nicopolis in Bulgaria (the occupants of this See, Ercolani and Ferrer, were Italians too) who did not support the aspirations of Roumanian nationalism. Thus the Church at one time, in Moldavia, was the representative of a mere handful of Hungarians in the Carpathian districts of Roman and Bacău and in the tiny city of Huși. The Holy See, rejecting the appeal of the Hungarian Primate, had decided in favour of the Italian friars. The new episcopal church of Jassy and the archepiscopal one of Bucharest were more Roumanian in character, their present leaders being Roumanians. For this church and the Uniates of Transilvania a concordat was recently concluded with the Vatican.
The Serb, Bulgarian and Greek States moulded themselves on an Orthodox pattern. Only Austrian Dalmatia remained aloof, true to the old Catholic tradition, and recognised as such by the Yugoslav Government. In Bulgaria the few Catholics concentrated round the bishopric of Philipopolis are only the descendants of the Bogomiles, won over by Franciscan propaganda. In Bosnia and ​
Herzegovina the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy tried, as in Albania, whose Catholics never failed in obedience to the Pope, to exploit and support Catholicism for political ends. No religion can evergain either proselytes or ascendancy by such devices. Moreover, universal as is the Church of Rome, its sole basis for development is to identify itself with the worldly ideals of the very society it endeavours to lead in its relations to the Divinity.