István György Tóth Missions and Missionaries among the Csángó Hungarians in Moldova in the 17 th Century

Most of the detailed and reliable sources on the life of the Csángó Hungarians in the 17th century are found today in the archives of The Holy Congregation of Propaganda Fide (Sacra Congregazione de Propaganda Fide) in Rome. After the 1622 foundation of the Congregation (a College of Cardinals controlling missions around the world), information multiplied on the life and religious life of the Csángó Hungarians of Moldavia and the use of their mother tongue. The missionaries among them included few Hungarians: most of them were Italian, Bosnian, or Polish, with the question of ethnicity being entirely alien to their ideas shaped by notions of the Counter-Reformation. Their reports on the number of the Csángós, the language use, the language of the sermons and the confessions, and the Csángó customs and beliefs are the best sources we have from those times – though they require critical reading. Moldavia was an important missionary field for the Congregation of Propaganda. It was a Christian satellite state of the sultan, in which most of the vojvodes and the majority of the population observed the Greek Orthodox religion but the country also had a significant, mainly Hungarian and, to a lesser extent, Saxon, Catholic population. Polish and Hungarian Jesuits, Italian Conventual and Bosnian Observant Franciscan friars provided them cure of souls who often ended up desperately fighting among themselves for the churches and missions. There was a large Catholic population in Moldavia, Hungarians mainly, but they had neither a permanently resident bishop nor enough priests for every Catholic parish. Although Moldavia was a vassal state of the sultan, the Islam was not a menace to the Catholic population. The Lutheran and Calvinist reformations had an impact 7 MINORITIES RESEARCH Minorities History