“Everything of our beautiful establishment, of our Order was blown away by the political, economic and wartime storm.” From the diaries of a Cistercian religious, Konstantin Horváth

Abstract

Hungarian Church history after World War II contains a great deal of documents from the state authorities, especially from the State Security Authority, but possesses fewer ecclesiastical sources, so we may say: there is irregularity in the distribution of the historical sources. It is especially true relative to the case of a religious order suppressed in 1950, because the years of the dissolution did not pay attention to the issue or to preserve the documents. We know that the leadership of the Hungarian Cistercians had been prepared for the subsequent dissolution by the government; in anticipation and they had destroyed or hidden documents that could have contained compromised data about the members of the order. Even so we still have sufficient historical sources about the functioning of the dissolved order, and we have some fragmented printed remains produced by the members of the order. The latter group also contains the so called “ego-documents”, i.e. letters and memories, but we have only one complete diary (which is rather a diary-series containing 22 volumes) preserved in the National Archives of Hungary of Veszprém County. That’s why the diaries of Konstantin Horváth, the former prior the Cistercian Abbey of Zirc, are not only valuable, but also provide very unique sources of his biography, of the order’s history and of the Hungarian Church history in the XXth century. This paper attempts to present this source material briefly, and – as far as possible – comprehensively.