when they tried quite hard to impose the union on my home region (western Transylvania/Partium) -the northern half of present day Arad county- in the eighteenth century the people overwhelmingly rejected it, although for a couple of decades everybody became GK by the fiat of the imperial authorities. Yet there are hundreds of still existing petitions made by the villages/ priests/ bishops of Arad to the imperial court in Vienna asking to be left "non-united" and, in some cases return to the 'non- united faith". That was, i remember, the case of Siria/Villagos. That was happening in the 18th century. So, the union never took root there with the exception of a few larger and richer villages further down in the plain. from my reading of local history it was mostly a sense of desperation (also class-consciousness) that made the people so unwilling to submit. you had a rich elite of landowners keeping all these villages in serfdom -with very high taxes-that also now, as the people saw it, asks them to change their religion. you oftentimes hear in those petitions: you take our land, our grain, money, labor. But our faith you won't. So, it was a sort of those serfs showing the middle finger to the ruling class.
