The Catholic Response to the Josephinist Reforms. Challenges and Reactions

Abstract

The present study focuses on the 18th-century Catholic Church in Hungary through its crisis of identity. Its aim is to examine the action of the Church from the 1770s and demonstrate the challenges posed by the enlightened absolutist state to the secular clergy and the monastic orders. In our investigation we apply the points of view of the research project of the University of Tübingen called Bedrohte Ordnungen (Th reatened Orders). This program examines such social and cultural orders which were disturbed by certain power factors, fi nally resulting in considerable losses.