In a recent article, published by the National Catholic Register titled ‘Hungary’s Camino: The Road to Mary’s Shrine’, author Evelyn Whitehead speaks of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Assumption in Mátraverebély, located north of Budapest along the Slovak–Hungarian border, and visited by approximately 200,000 visitors each year.
Explaining part of the shrine’s history, which stretches almost a millennium, Whitehead discusses some of the tragedies it underwent, such as its destruction at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1544—it was rebuilt in the 1700s. She also mentions that this sacred place underwent ‘a period of hardship’ under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (r. 1780–1790).
‘In 1780, much beloved Empress Maria Theresa died,’ Whitehead says, ‘and her son took control. Unlike his mother, Joseph II was a man of the Enlightenment. To decouple from papal influence, he forcibly closed contemplative monasteries and convents, sold monastic lands, banned religious orders, and required bishops to swear fidelity to the empire. During his 10-year solo reign, more than 700 monasteries closed and the number of religious in the empire shrank from 65,000 to 27,000.’
Interestingly enough, Whitehead does not provide any details to this so-called ‘period of hardship’, i.e., if the emperor confiscated the land for revenue or if he expelled the Franciscan friars. In any case, this is not the first time Emperor Joseph II, often viewed as the quintessential enlightened despot, is presented as an unsentimental authoritarian who deprecated the Catholic Church through his reforms. Indeed, as certain Austrians tell me, because of the emperor’s religious reforms, he is sometimes referred to as ‘Joseph the Terrible’. Yet, if we take the time to research and grasp the historical context in which such reforms were implemented, and contrast them with the secular ones, we arrive at an altogether different conclusion about the man.
‘Joseph II was a man of the Enlightenment’
The Historical Context
In 1740, at the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession, the Holy Roman Empire was attacked by the absolute monarchs of France and Prussia, dealing it a heavy blow. The Prussians, for example, were able to wrest parts of Silesia (part of present-day Poland and the Czech Republic) from the Habsburg heiress Maria Theresa. In 1749, as empress, she initiated reforms in the body politic, education, and the military to compete with her rivals. And, in order to align with the Enlightenment that had taken hold throughout Europe, despite being a steadfast Catholic, she began to collect taxes from wealthy monasteries and the Church itself, incurring the ire of the Pope in Rome and both the local clergy and the religious authorities.[i]
The Enlightenment emphasized reason, leading many to doubt traditional religious authorities due to the moral failings of some Catholic churchmen and the exploitation by nobles of the monastic lands they controlled. Maria Theresa held that the state, not the Pope in Rome, possessed supreme jurisdiction over secular and ecclesiastical affairs, with the exception of matters of doctrine. She also planned a ban on the clergy from criticizing her ecclesiastical measures, and, as of 1767, papal bulls were no longer held any validity in Austria.[ii]
Secular Reform
When Joseph assumed the imperial throne after his mother’s death, he wasted no time introducing, in what is historically referred to as Josephsim, a wide range of reforms designed to modernize the creaky empire in an era when France and Prussia were rapidly advancing.
Building upon his mother’s legacy, the emperor sought to produce a literate citizenry, making elementary education compulsory for all boys and girls, while higher education was offered on practical lines for a select few. He created scholarships for talented poor students and allowed the establishment of schools for Jews and other religious minorities. He also ensured that those who could not afford proper healthcare—which was essentially everyone within the empire, with the exception of the nobles who held seats in government or were in monasteries—would receive it.
‘He created scholarships for talented poor students and allowed the establishment of schools for Jews and other religious minorities’
In an effort to rectify the incidence of taxation, Joseph ordered a fresh appraisal of the value of all properties in the empire. His goal was to impose a single and egalitarian tax on land, thereby modernizing the relationship of dependence between landowners and peasants, relieving some of the tax burden on the latter, and increasing state revenues. He saw the tax and land reforms as interconnected and strove to implement them at the same time. The various commissions Joseph established to formulate and implement the reforms encountered significant resistance from the nobility, particularly with the Serfdom Patent of 1781. It allowed him to begin abolishing serfdom by granting basic civil liberties to serfs, such as the right to independently choose marriage partners, pursue career choices, move between estates, and place their children in trades.
Religious Reforms
The Emperor Joseph II, like his mother, was a devout Catholic. With rare exceptions, he assisted at Mass every day. His religious vision was Christ-centered in the sense that, as explained by the Jesuit priest Balthasar Gracian (1601–1658), because of the ‘strenuous opposition to the world among earnest Christians led to their practical withdrawal from it [becoming pure contemplatives]…[it] brought it about that the world has been un-Christian. Only one serious attempt has been made to bridge the gap…to make the world Christian by Christians becoming worldly.’[iii]
This is a major reason he had a problem with those who wanted to live a contemplative life—time lost and talent wasted. In fact, he paralleled it to the time when the Apostles, out of ‘fear of the Jews’, locked themselves in the Upper Room after the Ascension of Jesus Christ, unwilling to go out among the people and minister to them (John 20:19)—at least until Pentecost Sunday (Acts 2).
In the spirit of the Enlightenment, referred to as the ‘Klostersturm’ (‘storming of the monasteries’), contemplative life behind monastery walls came to an abrupt end. With the Edict on Idle Institutions (1782), Joseph began dissolving purely contemplative religious houses which ‘had no school, did not care for the sick, did not preach or hear confessions, or distinguish themselves in the schools.’ Initially, this often affected women’s convents, as most women’s religious orders required nuns to lead a strictly enclosed life, withdrawn from the world—a state contrary to the utilitarian ideal of the Enlightenment. And from the sale of the estates and landed property of the dissolved houses, Joseph established the ‘Religion Fund’ of 1782, which financed the salaries of parish priests and curates of the newly set-up parishes. Through this program of reorganization, more than 3,000 new parishes were established.
He reversed many of his mother’s repressive religious policies: he allowed marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics, abolished corporal punishments for religious dissent, extended property rights to non-Catholics, and issued the 1781 Patent of Toleration. He also abolished the private fund Maria Theresa used to pay converts from Protestantism to Catholicism.
As explained in a previous article, he went too far and too fast with his religious reforms. To be frank, some of them seemed preposterous, such as reducing the number of holy days, screening the content of sermons, regulating the length of candle burns, and recycling coffins, among other things.
All things being equal, Joseph II carried out reforms, not from an anti-Catholic mindset, but from a Catholic one. And it can be argued that such policies, likeable or not, did keep (Catholic) Austria from taking the same political path as France did during the French Revolution.
[i] Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement 1700–1800, London, Thames and Hudson, 1973, p. 80.
[ii] Derek Beales, Joseph II: Against the World 1780–1790, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 85–86.
[iii] Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, trans, Joseph Jacobs, London, MacMillan and Co, Limited, 1925, xxi–xxii.
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Author: Mario Alexis Portella
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