On 10-11 June, École Française de Rome, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and University of Fribourg organised the second event of a three-stage conference series examining the relationship between Catholicism and anti-communism.
At the Fribourg event, András Fejérdy, PI of the ERC project Sovereignty, in his lecture entitled “The Bishops’ Oath of Allegiance in Central and Eastern Europe: Ecclesiastical legitimisation of the communist regime?”, discussed the role and place of the oath of allegiance required of bishops by the state in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland.
Analysing the post-1945 ecclesiastical policies of the four countries, he argued that, with the exception of Romania, the oath of allegiance was the final point of breaking the bishops’ resistance to the implementation of state domination over the Catholic Church and at the same time a symbolic act of acceptance and legitimisation of a communist ecclesiastical policy that perceived Catholicism not only as a hostile worldview but also as a supranational organisation that threatened the sovereignty of the state.
