Pál Harsányi in Church Policy of the Hungarian ‘Reform Era

Abstract

Pál Harsányi was a lawyer in Pest, and in the 1830s and 1840s he had also many public activities. He had some experiments in literature, worked as a journal editor, and participated in several term of parliament. He was a typical ‘second-line’ public intellectual of the so-called ‘reform era’ in Hungary. He was attracted to liberal ideas from an early age and developed personal connections within the opposition. He was born in a Calvinist family; it is partly due to this that he took a special interest in the heated church political debates of the time. In the case of the regulation of mixed marriages, the liberal opposition accused the Catholic bishops of law-breaking and intolerance. Pál Harsányi in his public speeches and in a manuscript study, argued strongly for the equal rights of the churches and the separation of church and state, and called for the abolition of the medieval privileges of the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, Harsányi is believed to have been an agent of the secret police of the Habsburg Empire, writing confidential reports on his contemporaries. At the end of article, a summary of the relevant hypotheses is given.