ABSTRACT
Not stopping with building a physical presence in the community, the Society sought to influence directly the lives of rich and poor through example, performance and persuasion. The status of Cluj as one of only two “missionary stations” in Transylvania placed the Jesuit community in a spotlight in which it might be expected to accomplish much.1 The connections the Society fostered with the elites of the community aided it in its contacts with the wealthiest, while the absence of any sort of public support for the indigent provided an open terrain for acts of charity.2In addition to efforts at conversion of those still outside the Church, the fathers attempted to regulate behavior of all individuals, it would seem, throughout the community, sometimes interrupting social patterns that had existed for years. Families who were engaged in loaning money at usurious rates suddenly found their business being “corrected.”3 Duelists, including those of gentle birth, were “impeded” from answering the demands of honor.4 Victims of depression and other types of mental illness were rescued and returned to health, women who strayed from their husbands were returned to their families, and houses of ill repute were closed.5 In one year alone, 1717, in addition to the usual litany of troubled marriages, virgins were reported rescued from dire circumstances and polygamists were unmasked.6 How Jesuits obtained this information on their neighbors is not specified in the Society’s documents, but the performance of sacramental penance would have provided the context for the public admission of these faults. In fact, the attention paid to the sacraments was as important an objective of the Society as was the recording of the narratives of reform and repentance themselves, since neglect of the sacraments posed as great a crisis to the community as did any of the specific misdeeds of the penitents. This Jesuit emphasis on the sacraments was, as we have noted, a response to the anti-sacramental stance of Protestant and Unitarian groups
1 Szilas, “Austria,” in Diccionario, vol. 1, p. 288. Later a “tertia missionis statio haud longe Claudiopolitnai dissita” was established. Nilles, Symbolae, vol. 2, p. 972. Gabrielis Kapi, the head of Dacian missions, a responsibility that covered a huge territory, was based in Cluj for one year. Op cit., vol. 2, p. 972.
