Religious Cold War: Catholics and the Communist Regimes in East Central Europe

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The opening of Pope Pius XII archives in Vatican led to an addition of a new collection of documents to the Religious Cold War Archives. The current roundtable will discuss the challenges of researching the relationship between the communist regimes of East Central Europe and the Church in a comparative framework. We’ll look at how the newly opened collection in the Vatican archives helped this research. Patterns of continuity and discontinuity among the church policies of different regimes are easier to trace. However, there are limits to the study of relations between the Holy See and Central Eastern Europe that focus almost exclusively on the bilateral relations between the states and the Vatican. Focusing on internal church-state relations, these kinds of relations, viewed over time, can provide an entirely new angle on the relations between the Holy See and the Central Eastern European region. Concepts like the oath of allegiance, secularism, re-sacralization, state sovereignty, national Catholicisms, could prove instrumental in researching comparatively multilinguistic, pluri-religious communities and different East and Central European communist experiences.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• James Kapalo, U College Cork (Ireland)

Roundtable Members

• András Tamás Fejérdy, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities (Hungary)

• Przemysław Pazik, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities (Hungary) / U of Warsaw (Poland)

• Zeljko Oset, HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities (Hungary)

• Anca Maria Sincan, Romanian Academy (Romania)