Topic: Building Bridges Between Orthodox and Catholic Christians

[mike]

So in the areas where neither the Most Orthodox Czar nor the Soviet Commissar had control before 1945, the return to Orthodoxy had been well under way.  That includes Czechoslovakia too, btw.

In terms of numbers forced convertions greatly outrun those guerrilla ones.

You didn't ask about numbers. Nor, for that matter, do you provide them now.

Synod of Polotsk - 1.6 M
Chelm diocese - 0.2 M

These are numbers of state-supported conversion.

I couldn't get the numbers of grass-root conversion in Austro-Hungary but I really doubt they are greater.

[ialmisry]

So in the areas where neither the Most Orthodox Czar nor the Soviet Commissar had control before 1945, the return to Orthodoxy had been well under way.  That includes Czechoslovakia too, btw.

In terms of numbers forced convertions greatly outrun those guerrilla ones.

You didn't ask about numbers. Nor, for that matter, do you provide them now.

Synod of Polotsk - 1.6 M
Chelm diocese - 0.2 M

These are numbers of state-supported conversion.

I couldn't get the numbers of grass-root conversion in Austro-Hungary but I really doubt they are greater.

Under a million, but in the hundreds of thousands (it is hard to tell the exact number, because, given the length of time, they were able to produce cradles (60+ years in the former Austrian Hungarian territories outside of interwar Romania, 40 years inside: Northern Bukowina's population of just under a half million was almost entirely a convert population and their descendants. In Southern Bucovina, IIRC the Vatican's Uniates, what there were of them, were not affected by the state-supported conversion of the 1940's).  Besides the "state-supported conversion" (the non-conversion was also state supported) of the Czar and King of Romania (who, btw, was a loyal son of the Vatican), the Communists already had a base of around a million converts and their progeny in Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia to work from.  A million persons you implied did not exist.

[augustin717]

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.

[JoeS2]

I will come back and read the article, but very quickly I wanted to mention that for some reason the prayer 'union of all men' kept sticking out to me like a light beacon this past week. 

Who knows the mind of God, but can it be anything but GOOD?

 

My family remains RC - and for me, the hope is that we will be one before the judgement seat.  I love them.  Can love ask for anything less for ANY person who calls upon the Name of Christ?

My whole family is RC and when I converted their only worry was: "Is this religion Catholic"? To which, I answered, Of course, very.