Chapter 3. Integrating Nominative Data on the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Clergy in Modern Transylvania: An Outline

Abstract

Writing in the late 1830s, the British traveller John Paget described the Romanian clergy near the former Roman-era settlement of Densuș, in the County of Hațeg in Transylvania, noting that “except for a somewhat greater neatness of person, and the long black beard which hung down to his breast, the Wallack priest was in no way distinguished from the humblest of his flock.” Perhaps surprisingly for a traveller used to the ranks of the Anglican Church, the figures of the Romanian (likely Orthodox) ecclesiastical hierarchy were in many respects similar to those whom they shepherded: “With just enough education to read the service of the church, just enough wealth to make them sympathize with the poor, and just enough religion to enable them to console them in their afflictions, these men exercise a greater power over the simple peasant than the most cunning Jesuit, the most wealthy Episcopalian, or the most rigid Calvinist” (Paget, 1839, p. 202). Despite the characteristic traveller’s lens through which Paget viewed the Romanian clergy in Transylvania, as well as most of the affairs in Hungary at the time (Bökös, 2017), the account was deemed, even by contemporary Hungarians, to be quite “effective” in describing the area’s characteristics (Popova-Nowak, 2008, p. 215). It is therefore likely that the image of the clergy as an historical actor who wielded a great deal of influence over the communities of faithful was not far from the truth. Nevertheless, the extent to which the placement of the Romanian clergy on the social-economic ladder in the province conforms to the same image remains an open question. Within the specific milieus of the composite state of the Habsburg Empire, and after 1867, Dualist Hungary, social-occupational groups such as the clergy, who could mobilize the great, critical mass of the