István Udvari
The circulars of András Bacsinszky, bishop of Munkács (1732–1772–1809)
belonging to the period of Maria Therese
In the second half of the
18th century enlightened despotism (despotisme éclaire, просвещённый абсолутизм)[1]
was a
characteristic feature of Euorope’s peripheral countries. The aim of the
enlightened despotic rulers was to overcome the backwardness in their countries
and to catch up with the Central European countries well ahead in European
development.
The
modernisation of the Habsburg empire started during the reign of Maria Therese,
empress of Austria and queen of Hungary[2] (1717–1780): censuses were
taken of the population, public education improved considerably, the
relationship between landlord and serf was fixed by the state in the sockage
regulation etc. Serious changes also took place in the relationship between
Church and state as the rulers tried to involve the clergy more and more in
public affairs.
The
ideas of enlightenment spread in various ways to the Rusyn intelligensia the
majority of whom consisted of priests. The higher clergy of the Greek Catholic
Church became acquainted with the ideas of enlightenment in Vienna as they were
frequent visitors to the capital. The lower clergy had only indirect access to
these enlightened ideas. As the investigations show they could read about them
in the church circulars where the bishop explained to them the orders issued by
the Office of the Governor General. The greatest representative of the Rusyn
enlightenment is bishop András Bacsinszky, consecrated during the reign of
Maria Therese.
The ideas formulated by him and the reforms he introduced had a long
lasting influence the results of which could be felt even in the 20th
century.[3] The effect of these reforms was all the more intensive as at that time
the Church and its prescriptions influenced in many aspects the life of the
common people. As a bishop András Bacsinszky did much for the development
of education. He did his utmost to make
good use of the positive discriminatory policy the enlightened
Habsburg rulers applied to the Greek Catholics. The absolutist endeavours of
the Hapsburg govеrnment to raise the
level of school education, culture and welfare fitted well with the far
reaching aims of András Bacsinszky. His career started in 1768 when he was
elected a member of a collegiate committee consisting of four priests and the
task of which was to carry on the reorganisation of the Munkács bishopric after
the Roman Catholic pattern. In 1769 he headed a deputation sent to Maria
Therese with the request to give independence to the bishopric of Munkács. In
1772 he was consecrated bishop of the Munkács diocese.
In 1776, due to his personal
efforts, he succeded in obtaining from Maria Therese the Abbey of Tapolca and
its lands yielding yearly an income of 12.000 golden Fts. for the bishopric. He
also managed to arrange out that the seat of the bishopric be transferred from
Munkács to Ungvár, into the cloister of the suppressed order of the Jesuits.
They were also granted the Jesuits’ church in Ungvár and the castle of the
Drugeth family which accomodated the Greek Catholic seminary (1775–1780). He
organised a committee of 7 priests ensuring them enough to pursue literature
and scientific studies, reformed and reorganised the priests’ training (since
1777 already in Ungvár). He himself moved to Ungvár in 1780. From the royal court he
managed to get scholarships for sixty student–seminarists and salary for five
professors of theology.
Bishop András Bacsinszky took part in the conference of the Greek Catholic bishops held in Vienna in 1773, where importante decisions were taken about the liturgical books, the feast days of the calendar, the positions and conditions of the priests and believers. It is important to underline that they urged the Empress to make the authorities in the counties and the landlords build more schools for the Greek Catholics. It was also demanded that the greek Catholics were given freedom to assert themselves according to their abilities and that the Greek Catholic children had free school-education [4].
The
circulars of András Bacsinszky
The circulars were written in the
office of the bishop and were sent round the bishopric. It had be written in as
many copies as there were decanal districts in the bishoprics or parishes the
circular was destined for. The oldest document we have is from 1690. It is a
circular of bishop De Camelis in which the new bishop introduces himself to the
clergy and invites from each county or district two priests to take the oath of
allegience.[5] Bishop
Olsavszky in his diocesan charter of 1755 prescribed for the priests what to do
with the circulars. Among others he demanded that they were sent on in time and
whoever was late doing this was to be fined 1 Tallér. In addition to this he
also ordered that the circulars were to be copied into a special book
(protocolum) before being sent on. Bishop Bacsinszky confirms Olsavszky1s
orders related to the circulars and prescribed that the deans were to make sure
the circulars were copied according to prescriptions in all parishes and
outparishes.[6]
The deans, after reading the
circulars, sent them on, or, if needed, issued a new circular, explaining in it
the tasks the bishop set for his own parishes. The circulars had their own
definite form with stereotypical expressions made after the same pattern. They
were direct continuations of mediaeval charters and diplomas. As for their
structure, these circulars were divided into three main parts: introduction,
the text itself and finally the concluding part. All structural units had their
own formulae, place and destination. The practice of the Bacsinszky Chancellary
and his circulars are well known and on the basis of this we can establish that
he issued two circulars each year, one in spring and one in autumn before the
conference of the decanal districts held also twice a year. In these
conferences all deans and schoolmasters took part. Those absent without weighty
reasons were summoned to Ungvár by Bacsinszky for reprimand[7].
As in Subcarpathia all cultural and
educational measures were always connected with the development of the language
of the Rusyns, it is worth mentioning the influence Bacsinszky’s circulars
exerted on the formation of the literary Rusyn language. It is no wonder as
they had to read them, to copy them into the protocollum and to explain their
content to the believers (I have to call attention once more to the following
data: in Subcarpathia in the 18th century there were 729 parishes
with the same number of priests in 60 deconal districts).[8]
The influence of these circulars can be seen on the new ones formulated by the
deans where they repeat sometimes whole sentences without any linguistic change
in them[9].
The Rusyn intellectuals of the time considered the language Bacsinszky used in
his documents and letters as a literary norm, as a pattern to be followed and
kept. That is why the roots of the “jazichije” the literary language of
Subcarpathia in the 19th century can be traced back to the language
norm of the Bacsinszky – Chancellary. In this way it is clear that the
“jazichje” is not a haphazard language formation created for literary purposes
and unintelligable to the common people – as some critics think is the case. It
rather is the result of a long and natural development based mostly on the
language used in the circulars of Bacsinszky.
According to their content the
circulars can be divided into two major groups.
1.
To this group belong the circulars explaining
and summarising the orders and rescripts issued by the authorities of the
states, the Council of the Governor General
2.
The content of the circulars of this group is
free from the state affairs, as they are concerned mostly with matters
educational and ecclasiastical as well
From the circulars of the first group it turns out that the government,
in the spirit of the enlightened policy of the time, tried to involve the clergy in
the administration of the state vesting them with different public functions
and in this way they also took part in the general division of labour[10].
Joseph II considered the priests civil servants who, according to him, in
addition to church service had other civil duties to do such as the
proclamation and explanation of the imperial orders and the organisation of
local public education. In this spirit Bacsinszky’s circulars urge the priests
to carry out the census correctly (Conscriptio animarium) as it was done with
the help and active participation of the priests. The task of the priests was
also to carry out informative and explanatory campaigns during epidemics,
droughts or famines. They were expected to organise collections of money, crops
and textiles for bandages during the wars with Prussia and then with France. In
one of his circulars, for example, Bacsinszky prescribes a collection for the
deaf and dumb. Due to the long lasting wars, a lot of circulars give
instruction about deserters, discharged and re-enlisted soldiers. It is common
knowledge that at that time Catholicism was the state religion in Hungary.
Therefore the Catholic Church meticulously took care of the Catholic upbringing
of children born in families where one of the parents was not Catholic. As in
these families the non-Catholic parent had to give up his/her right to the
religious upbringing of the children. Any violation of this law was to be
punished by the state. So it is no wonder that a lot of circulars deal with the
registration of mixed marriages and of children growing up in such families.
Many circulars prescribe the registration of apostates, enlisted soldiers and
volunteers. Special masses had to be celebrated for the victory of the imperial
royal army[11]. The
circulars also prescribed the collection of money for the support of insurgents
(for levy in mass of the nobility) and he also demanded that the lands used by
the cantors were registered in field books. The circulars of the Council of the
Governor General, formulated in the enlightened spirit of the era were,
concretized for the Rusyn by a new circular written by the bishop. In
connection with orders of Maria Theresa, for example, it was declared that
neither the believers nor the priests were to take part in pilgrimages longer
than one day. The circular mentioned, as a negative example, the feast day of
the Glorification of the holy Crucifix held at Bukóc in 1779. On this day 65
priests gethered in Bukóc for the celebration leaving their believers in the
villages for days without church service and school teaching[12].
According to the order issued by the Council of the Governor General,
Bacsinszky, in one of his circulars, asked that the election of the provost be
carried out: in another one he prohibited people from Galicia, Russia, Bohemia,
Moravia, Silesia and Transilvania to marry without deaconal permission. On the
occasion of Maria Theresa’s death a special circular was issued by Bacsinszky.
In it he prescribed
not only the mourning and the celebration of Offices for the Dead but he also
evaluated the reforms of the empress and the advantages the Rusyns had from
them.
The circulars belonging to the
second group urged the development of public education in themother tongue
emphasising its importance for the strenghtening of national identity. He was
well aware of the spread of Latin education therefore he considered it his duty
to pay special care to education in mother tongue. These circulars are full of
emotion and are formulated in a solemn style. It is interesting, however, that
this kind of exhortation and topic comes up in the circulars only after 1795.
The reasons for this are to be found in the experiences he had after the 90s
which opened up new horizons in his thinking.
In 1789 he was elected a member of the Upper House and therefore he took
part in the sessions of the Parliament in 1790-1791, in 1792 and in 1796. As it
turns out from his letters, the affairs of the country discussed in the
Parliament had influenced his views. The session of the Parliament convoked in
1790 in Buda had a definitely Hungarian nationalistic character which was
organised by the Hungarian nobility as a counteract against the Germanising
efforts of Joseph II’s government. At the same time Bacsinszky could also see
the Serb and Rumanian nationalistic endeavours which led to conflicts with the
Hungarian interests. This is why his circulars written after 1795 echo the
ideas of the national movements and emphasize the most important tenets of this
ideology, demanding support of the common people, the taking up of their cause
which was possible, according to him, only if the nation and its intelligentsia
were united.
The bishop considered his own
circulars a kind of teaching material providing instructions for priests and
schoolmaster-cantors, helping them to carry out their jobs more effectively.
These instructions and prescriptions were grouped in paragraphs according to
their content. In them he, in a fatherly, but sometimes thunderous manner,
regulated not only the job and duties of the deans, parish priests and
schoolmaster cantors but also set rules for the relationship between parents
and children, priest and dean, demanding the observance of good morals.
He called the attention of the
clergy to the changed conditions they lived in. He was sure they had realised
the sound circumstances they had in the last third of the 18th
century, their increased authority and better educational facilities. He gives
to understand that these improvements were due not to the efforts and diligence
of the clergy. For Bacsinszky it was clear that the legal and economic
emancipation of the Rusyn clergy would have been impossible if not for the
open-handed policy of the empress. Although he gives no exact historical data
and comparison, he emphasized that in the last decades the leaders of the Rusyn
nation, the Rusyn clergy, formerly in such a miserable situation, had acquired
equal rights in every respect. In his circular issued by him on the occasion of
Maria Therese’s death he writes about this as follows:
The
death of our beloved empress inflicted great sorrow on the whole country but
especially on the believers of the diocese of Monkács. If we look at our
bishopric, the corporation of canons, the priests’ seminary and its professors,
the cathedral in Ungvár, the residence of the bishop in Munkács, the vicariates
in Máramaros and Szatmár, the Rusyn students in Vienna and Buda, the number of
the new or restored churches arranged and decorated splendidly, and all those
things we were given above all our expectation, we have to see and acknowledge
that Maria Therese’s work had blessed results for the Rusyns, and therefore, by
her death we have lost not only our beloved and honored empress but so to say
our mother who even in her last years was very generous and kind hearted unto
our miserable and poor Rusyn people.[13]
We can judge about the enrichment of the parishes and churches if we
take into account that during the time of Bacsinszky’s administration the
number of stone churches had tripled and he was obliged to issue a circular
asking the priests to have iron bars put on the windows of the churches to
prevent robbers from taking away the precious sacred silver vessels, caliches
and vestments of the priests made out of expensive material.
For Bacsinszky the cultural and
economic development of the nation, the preservation of national identity and
the avoidance of language assimilation were possible only by using the mother
tongue everywhere, in school–teaching, in studying the catechism. He gave the
same evaluation to religious ethics. His circulars offer a definite programme
for the realization of these objectives. The proposal use such operative words
as: priest, language, nation, Church, children, youth. It appears from the
circulars that Bacsinszky’s aim was to carry through the pragmatic ideas of the
enlightenment in his own Church, joining them with the efforts to preserve and
develop the mother tongue. It seems to us that he succeded in achieving these
aims and therefore we can rightfully consider him the most significant
representative of the enlightement in Subcarpathia.
Analysing the circulars of
Bacsinszkys’ it seems to be justified to think that dialectic enlightenment
sooner or later entails the development of nationalism. It would be interesting
to find out what works and books influenced the formation of Bacsinszky’s
thinking.
From the circulars the influence of Herder, the greatest representative
of German enlightenment, is manifest. Bacsinszky must have been acquainted with
the works of Herder in Vienna[14].
The bishop’s enlightened circulars, his orders and the measures he took do not
reveal an original, independent conception in the framework of the Hungarian
enlightenment. They are simply adaptations of enlighted imperial, absolutist
arrangements for the local conditions, even if Bacsinszky sometimes does not
refer to them.
In the appendix I publish some
documents in transcription. They were written in the contemporary literary
language of the Rusyns[15].
The short content of these circulars is the following:
Udvari István
The circulars of András Bacsinszky, bishof of Munkács (1732–1772–1809)
belonging to the period of Maria Therese
[1] Cf. Kosáry Domokos: Művelődés a XVIII. századi Magyarországon. Budapest, 1996; Niederhauser Emil: Kelet-Európa története. Budapest, 2000. 99-156.
[2] About Maria Therese’s activity rich material in Hungarian. Cf. Barta János, ifj. Mária Terézia. Budapest, 1988; Marczali Henrik: Mária Terézia. 1717–1780. Budapest, 1891; Németh Andor: Mária Terézia. Bp. 1999; Niederhauser Emil–Alekszander Kamenszkij: Mária Terézia, Nagy Katalin. Budapest, 2000.
[3] About the life and activity of András Bacsinszky see in detail: Udvari István: Ruszinok a XVIII. században. Vasvári Pál Társaság Füzetei 9. Nyíregyháza, 1992. 196–215; Pirigyi István: A magyarországi görögkatolikusok története. II. Nyíregyháza, 1990. 59–61; Іштван Удварі: Образчик? з історії пудкарпатськ?х Русинув. ХVІІІ. cтолїтіе. Ужгород, 2000. 65-107.
[4] Cf. Гаджеґа В.: Наші културні и церковні справ? на епископских нарадах р. 1773. у Відні. Подкарпатська Русь IV. 1927. 105–108, 167–170, 199–201, 213–215; Pirigyi I.: A görögkatolikus magyarság története. Nyíregyházaza, 1982. 96–101.
[5] Cf. Udvari I.: Adalékok a kárpátukrán írásbeliség történetéhez. Megjegyzések De Camelis J. nyomtatott műveinek és körlevelének nyelvezetéről. Russzisztika. Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Nyíregyháziensis. t.11/E. 1987. 157-165.
[6] Episcopal Archive of Hajdúdorog = HPL. Nyíregyháza.
[7] Cf. Udvari István: Ruszin (kárpátukrán) hivatalos írásbeliség a XVIII. századi Magyarországon. Budapest, 1995.10-13; idem: Материалы к истории карпаторусинской письменности. Окружные послания Михаила Григашия (1758–1823). Studia Slavica Hungarica 40. 1995; 311-330; idem: Кириличные циркуляры мукачевского епископа Андрея Бачинского относящиеся к проблемам воинской повинности. К генезису карпаторусинского язычия. Studia Russica XIX.2001.
[8] Cf. Bendász István–Koi István: A munkácsi Görög Katolikus Egyházmegye lelkészségeinek 1792. évi katalógusa Nyíregyháza, 1994; Udvari István (ed.): A munkácsi görögkatolikus püspökség lelkészségeinek 1806. évi összeírása. Vasvári Pál Társaság Füzetei 3. Nyíregyháza, 1990; idem: Education in the diocese of Munkács in the 18th century. Posztbizánci Közlemények. IV. Debrecen, ...
[9] In several parishes of counties Szabolcs and Szatmár some circulars of bishop Bacsinszky were translated into Hungarian then read out and copied in the protocollum in this language.
[10] Ember Gy- – Heckenast G., (edit.): Magyarország története 1686-1790; Budapest, 1989. 1043–1057, 1125–1159.
[11] The circulars of bishop András Bacsinszky and of Gergely Tarkovics, Greek Catholic arhdecon of county Szabolcs, from the time of the Austrian – Prussian and Austrian – French wars see in: Udvari I.: A keletszlovák irodalmi nyelv ismeretlen emléke 1778-ből. (Magyar helyesírású keletszlovák nyelvjárási emlék Mária Terézia korából). In Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Nyíregyháziensis. tom 12/c. Nyelvészeti Közlemények. Nyíregyháza, 1990.; idem: Ein unbekanntes handshriftliches Denkmal der ostslowakischen Schritsprache aus dem Jahre 1778. Studia Slavica Hungarica 38. 1993. 247-269.
[12] András Bacsinszky’s cirkular. March. 24 1799 HPL. Fasc. 4. No 28. See: Шлепецький А.: Мукачівський єпископ А.Ф. Бачинський та його послання. Науковий збірник Музею української культури. Пряшів, ІІІ. 1967. 226-227.
[13] András Bacsinszky’s circular. Dec. 5 1780.
[14] Cf. J.G. Herder: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit. 1792; idem: Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, erste Sammlung. Riga, 1793.
[15] In detail see: Udvari István: Ruszin (kárpátukrán) hivatalos írásbeliség a XVIII. századi Magyarországon. Budapest, 1995; idem: Ruthenisches amthiches Schrifttums im Ungarn des 18. Jahrhunderts. In. Studia Slavica Savariensia 1993. 1. sz. Szombathely, 1993. 65-83.