For the first time since the project began in 2022, members of the ERC “Negotiating Sovereignty” research team organized a major international conference on June 5–6, 2025, at the Institute of History, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities.
The event not only showcased state-of-the-art research on the political oath of the Catholic clergy but also initiated a dialogue on its meaning and significance with leading historians and legal scholars from Europe and North America. The papers presented at the conference explored state–church relations from the advent of the modern state at the end of the 18th century to 1990. The proceedings are planned to be published in an edited volume in the Central and Eastern EuropeCentral and Eastern Europe series by Brill Academic Publishers.
The two keynote lectures were delivered by Andreas Gottsmann, Director of the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, and András Fejérdy, Principal Investigator of the ERC research group and Deputy Director of the Institute of History, HUN-REN RCH.
Andreas Gottsmann and András Fejérdy
Andreas Gottsmann offered an overview of the evolving attitudes of the (high) clergy towards the state under various regimes of the Josephinist state church (Staatskirchentum) and in the subsequent constitutional era. In his address, András Fejérdy outlined a comparative framework for understanding the clergy’s political oath after 1918 under nationalist and transnationalist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe.
Over the course of the two-day event, papers examining various aspects of the oath of allegiance were presented and commented on by András Forgó, Nadia Kizenko, Éva Petrás, Pál Hatos, Ágnes Hesz and Szilvia Köbel. Several contributions focused on state–church relations during the “long 19th century.” While Katalin Pataki and Miklós Tömöry contextualized the introduction and evolution of the bishop’s oath in the Habsburg Empire, Roberto Regoli, Tomasz Hen-Konarski and Siegfried Weichlein provided a comparative European analysis of the topic.
Papers by Scott Kenworthy, Željko Oset, Przemysław Pazik and Agáta Šústová-Drelová addressed post-imperial transitions and the position of Catholic and Orthodox clergy in Soviet Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, respectively. Finally, Bernd Schaefer, Emília Hrabovec, Anca Şincan and Jan Hlebowicz examined the demands for loyalty made on the churches by the Third Reich, the GDR, and Socialist Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland.
Follow the activities of the Sovereignty research group on their website and on Facebook.
