ABSTRACT
The thirty years leading up to the Society’s official return to Transylvania was a period of constant growth throughout the Austrian Province. As the Habsburg dynasty strengthened its control over its hereditary possessions to the west and gradually expanded its influence in the east, Jesuits followed, reestablishing schools and restoring missionary programs that had been interrupted a century earlier. Between 1661 and 1694, six new collegia were established, the majority of them in the newly liberated Hungarian regions.1 The replanting of Catholic culture in these territories was undertaken in the face of the privations brought on by the Turkish occupation, a period of destruction and confusion for much of the region that left some districts uncultivated wastelands. The withdrawal of the Turks was immediately followed by the immigration of mostly Slavic and Romanian Orthodox believers from the south and east. In a few instances these immigrants included Catholic refugees from areas still under the control of the Porte, but even in such instances the immigrants were from ethnic groups whose cultures were distant from the High Baroque idiom promoted by the Habsburgs.2 This immigration of non-Catholics was less pronounced in the central Danube Basin, which, while it contained some Orthodox believers who had settled there during the Turkish occupation, had never become a center of Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. The Catholic roots of the Danube Basin region ran deep, and were exemplified by the title of “Apostolic King of Hungary,” bestowed by the pope in the eleventh century and held by the Habsburgs since their acquisition of Hungary in 1526. Moreover, the relative proximity of the basin to the Habsburg hereditary territories of Upper and Lower Austria, which by now had been aggressively recatholicized, made the reintroduction of Catholicism to the heartland of Hungary still a challenging but by no means impossible task. This
1 Joseph Brucker, La Compagnie de Jésus: Esquisse de son Institute et son Histoire (1521-1773) (Paris, 1919), p. 621. By the time of the Suppression, the Society had eighteen collegia, twenty smaller houses, and eleven missions in Hungary. Puskely Mária, Kétezer év szeretesége: Szeretség és müvelődéstörténenti enciklopédia (2 vols, Budapest, 1998), vol. 1, p. 553. As early as 1649, there were already twenty “domicilia” in Hungary, and numerous smaller missions. Lukács, A független magyar jezsuita rendtartomány, p. 41, Catalogus Provinciarum, Collegiarum Residentiarum Seminariorum et Missionum universae Societatis Jesu (Tyrnaviae, 1750).
