„A palástot nem hozhattam magammal”

Ablonczy, Balázs (2023) „A palástot nem hozhattam magammal”. In: Hagyomány, Identitás, Történelem 2022. Reformáció Öröksége (10). Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem Hittudományi Kar Egyháztörténeti Kutatóintézet, Budapest, pp. 163-173.

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Abstract

After the First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, some 4 to 500,000 people fled to the remaining parts of Hungary from the disannexed territories. Providing them with food, housing and jobs was one of the most important issues of Hungarian politics at the time. This kind of provision by the state was imperfect, so many lived in railway wagons and military barracks for years. This is the first study about the attitude of the Hungarian Reformed Church towards its refugee pastors, teachers and employees, about the policy, it applied to integrate them, and the church leadership’s efforts to facilitate their pastoral care. The study shows that although pastors and teachers fled from Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, their proportion was lower than that of refugees within the population; and that they were mainly pastors who came to post-WW1 Hungary as diaspora or missionary pastors with a weaker local embeddedness. The Reformed secondary schools, which were mainly on the territories annexed to Romania, had a considerable retention capacity, their teachers, whose number and proportion were far below those of teachers in state employment, came to Hungary only sporadically. The situation was different with schoolmasters, whose emplacement in post-war Hungary often led to confessional tensions between Roman Catholics and Protestants. The Reformed Church did not operate parallel aid structures, and accepting, albeit unwillingly, the government’s labour management approach, it did not set up a separate aid organisation. The solution to the misery of refugees was based on individual integration. At the discursive level, it was integrated into the “national-Christian” revival discourse of the period, which manifested itself, among other things, in the creation of new congregations.

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