Not stopping with building a physical presence in the community, the Society sought to influence directly the lives of rich and poor through example, performance and persuasion. The status of Kolozsvár as one of only two "missionary stations" in Transylvania placed the Jesuit community in a spotlight in which they might be expected to accomplish much.[1]   The connections the Society fostered with the elites of the community aided it in its contacts with the most wealthy, while the absence of any sort of public support for the indigent provided an open terrain for acts of charity.^[2]  In addition to efforts at conversion of those still outside the Church the fathers attempted to regulate behavior of all individuals, it would seem, throughout the community, sometimes interrupting social patterns that had existed for years.  Families who were engaged in loaning money at usurious rates suddenly found their business being "corrected."[3] Duelists, including those of gentle birth, were "impeded" from answering the demands of honor.[4] Victims of depression and other types of mental illness were rescued and returned to health, women who strayed from their husbands were returned to their families, and houses of ill repute were closed.[5] In one year, 1717, alone, in addition to the usual litany of troubled marriages, virgins were reported rescued from dire circumstances and polygamists were unmasked.[6] How Jesuits obtained this information on their neighbors is not specified in the Society's documents, but the performance of sacramental penance would have provided the context for the public admission of these faults.  In fact, the attention paid to the sacraments was as important an objective of the Society as was the recording of the narratives of reform and repentance themselves, since neglect of the sacraments posed as great a crisis to the community as did any of the specific misdeeds of the penitents.  This Jesuit emphasis on the sacraments was, as we have noted, a response to the anti­-sacramentality of Protestant and Unitarian groups throughout the Habsburg lands. Yet there was a special value attached to the actions associated with the sacrament of penance.  In the middle of the sixteenth century when the disruption unleashed by the Reformation seemed to be reaching its climax, Pius V had stated explicitly that sacramental penance had value in maintaining "social order."[7]  Public acts of penance put the penitent before the community as a warning to others, while also providing a process by which the offender, through considerable exertions, might be restored to the community.  The Jesuit emphasis on penance likewise created a connection between the Spiritual Exercises, which placed considerable emphasis on examination of conscience, and ritual public behaviors that reiterated the relationship between mortification and holiness, a relationship lying at the heart of the baroque sensibility the Society brought to the community.[8]   Through penance the mental distress felt by the sinner who believed himself to be "in a state of enmity with God" was addressed, and the differences between Catholicism and other faiths practiced in the region thrown into high relief.[9]

Penance, in particular public penance, also reinforced the connection between religious conviction and bodily experience.  Like many of his Baroque contemporaries, the Catholic devot moreover sought control over his own body, and engagement with the sacraments provided an avenue for reducing suffering.[10]  Acts of public penance often echoed the plot lines of Jesuit dramas that might have been witnessed by the same townspeople only a short time before. Others who felt the weight of guilt were encouraged to undertake private acts of penance, which might range from abstaining from wine to the wearing of tattered or uncomfortable garments to bizarre public demonstrations.[11] An obscure passage in the Historia of the Jesuit residence from 1713, a year when the plague was particularly deadly, seems to imply that a few women also performed penances, possibly in public on a weekly basis. The outer boundaries of this penitential behavior could verge on what a later era would call pathological, as when it was reported that a man carved the word JESUS into his chest with a knife.[12] Others used chains, nettles or exposure to the elements to mortify the flesh.[13] Such practices point to a tendency in Baroque Catholic piety for public rituals to gain an instrumentality of their own, one which could go beyond or even contradict Church teaching.  For example, in southern Italy in the eighteenth century, the blood shed by flagellants was believed to have the power to purify the soul of the one who shed it, a belief that would have been considered sacrilegious by the standards of Trent.[14]   Yet even such extreme measures were viewed with approval by the Society, struggling as it was to combat not only schismatic and heretical beliefs, but also the specter of atheism that seemed to be lurking behind such movements as Pietism.[15] Yet despite the public staging of demonstrations of penance, reliance on the sacraments was sometimes not enough to regulate social behavior. The unstable and at times desperate atmosphere of an eighteenth century Transylvanian community occasionally shows its shape in the records compiled by the Kolozsvar Jesuit community.  An especially vivid instance of this was recorded in 1739, when nocturnal gatherings of "youths of both sexes" were reported in the town and in the countryside: blasphemies and unnamed "certa corruptella" spewed forth that could only be suppressed with grave penalties, and the Society's chroniclers were unable to report any conversions or acts of public penance.[16]  Significantly, these disturbances occurred long after the Jesuits had been able to establish institutions to help regulate social conduct.  Jesuits in Kolozsvar, like their colleagues elsewhere, went beyond the tools explicitly prescribed by the Council of Trent and found other ways to draw upon the diverse traditions of popular culture as they strove to reach out to the people.[17]  Local rituals of childbirth were supplemented if not supplanted by the aid of the Society, which provided relics of St. Ignatius to aid in the process.[18]  To further support the combat against the non-sacramental view of religion, be it Unitarian, Lutheran, or Calvinist, the Jesuits also had such weapons as the Society of the Good Death, a fraternal organization whose members prepared for death by reading pious literature, prayer, and through the spiritual guidance of a Jesuit. Franciscus Retz, who would serve as the Father general from 1730 to 1750, took a particular interest in the fraternity, whose activities called attention both to the necessity of leading a life modeled on Christ's, and on the importance of the sacrament of Extreme Unction.[19] Unlike the public demonstrations that held the attention of the townsfolk, private devotional practices left few records, but the Jesuits of Kolozsvar probably committed significant resources to their promotion.  But while a Jesuit visiting the home of a rural aristocrat or the lodging of a army officer could focus attention on the care of an individual soul, there remained all around a great sea of unbelievers and the uncommitted, whose uncharted depths were also the object of proselytizing exhortations and dramatic performance.[20]

In addressing the formidable challenge the Society had four tools, which it used in various combinations as opportunity and resources allowed. First, as we have seen, the rituals and sacraments of the Church were brought to bear on social deviants individually, or to communities at large, in the context of spreading the Gospel. Outrageous behavior might be curbed through exorcisms, and prurient thoughts through less drastic pastoral efforts.[21]  Behaviors that might have had their origins in folk customs and which may have been sanctioned --or at least ignored-by other local religious traditions were frequently identified by Jesuits as expressions of "superstitions," or worse. Amulets and "magic pages" were seized, and an elaborate money making scheme involving the donning of "certain sacred vestments" and recitation of parodies of Christian ritual was suppressed.[22]  While some of the users of these occult devices may have been on the fringes of society, others came from more respectable backgrounds. A "vir illustrus," having seen the error of his ways, burned "diabolical" amulets and underwent a tearful repentance under the guidance of the Jesuits.[23]  Social order here was promoted through an approach that went beyond the renewed emphasis placed on the sacraments By identifying some behaviors as totally outside the acceptable limits of the community, the Society helped to foster a sense of what was acceptable, both in terms of Church dogma, and relative to the standards of behavior it sought to impose on the community. Consequently misdeeds identified by the Society might seem at times to lie as much in the civil as in the theological realm. Elsewhere in the Austrian Province Jesuits had helped to unmask a Jew impersonating a physician, or saw to the punishment of a townsman dressed up like Saint Nicholas (who was no doubt continuing a long-sanctioned custom), and were on constant patrol to regulate social behavior.[24] While Jesuit records do not indicate which, if any of the unacceptable behaviors suppressed by the Society were viewed as having ties to other religious traditions, it seems probable that some occult practices were understood as "good magic" or even as legitimate expressions of folk religion by their practitioners.  The yardstick by which the Society assessed unfamiliar and seemingly deviant behavior was never made explicit in surviving documents, and in fact probably was not explicitly taught as such to individual Jesuits sent to settings such as Kolozsvar, largely because the institutional culture of the Society stressed personal initiative and judgment, within guidelines reinforced throughout the period of a Jesuit's formation. The Jesuit priest, trained in theology and in cases of conscience, was considered competent on his own to determine whether an unfamiliar or questionable practice fell into the category of "diabolical," or "superstitious" or whether it might be tolerated.[25] Yet "superstitions" were very much on the mind of the Jesuit moving among the people. Ignatius Parhamer, one of the most famous Jesuit missionaries of the day, compiled a program for rural missions that included an entire day devoted to "superstitiones."[26] Coupled with the other roles of teacher, leader of sodalities, play producer, preacher, confessor, landlord and employer, the responsibility of judging social practices gave Jesuit priests considerable leverage in regulating the conduct of individual men and women. Jesuits also performed rituals that affirmed Catholic beliefs in public settings, and which did not single out individuals.[27] One of the most common of these rituals was the blessing of wells, a ritual that conveyed a message of security and hope to the entire community, while placing the Jesuit priest in the role of the medium by which this blessing reached the people.[28] Closely related to employment of sacraments and rituals was the use of public events connected with schooling to promote a theological agenda. Jesuit records report that communion was distributed on a mass scale each year, although the totals reported do not tell us how many communicants participated or of course what the understanding of attitudes of these communicants might have been.[29] The importance of Jesuit school theatre in promoting morality and an understanding of Catholic doctrine is discussed in Chapter Six; public debates between students were also utilized as venues for extolling piety, as when in 1723 philosophy students debated "Whether the Hungarian nation owed its existence to arms, or to piety."[30]  In this instance, it seems unlikely that the honors went to the martial virtues.

A second approach to regulation of society was through direct influence over the socially marginalized and disadvantaged. A poor family might be employed as servants by the Jesuits in their seminarium or their residence, where they would be exposed to the moral models of the fathers as well as to the strict behavioral requirements of the Society.[31]  Possibly less supervision of morals and religious practice would have been involved when the Society employed local cowherds to watch over the community's livestock.[32]  Captives freed from Turkish or Tartar slavery were another group who might receive particular attention from a Society seeking converts.[33] The Jesuit orphanage provided fourteen boys with an education that undoubtedly reinforced the standards of conduct preached from Jesuit pulpits and promoted in the Society's activities in the town.[34] The Domus Convertiarum or Neoconversiarum was another setting where children, either of noble or common birth, would be exposed to the tenets of Jesuit teaching.[35] The Society found other ways to gain control over the education of youngsters: Father Paul Libenczki, who died in 1733, had been taken at the age of seven from his Unitarian parents and raised by the Jesuits.[36] Jesuit records note the "masculine constancy" of a girl who rejected the Unitarian beliefs of her parents and servants to hold fast to the Catholic faith, but we are not told how she acquired this faith.[37] In somewhat different circumstances, a woman condemned to death was brought back to the Christian faith through the offices of a Jesuit.[38]  A less vulnerable group, but one still subject to the influence of Jesuit teaching, were the clergy of other orders and those students destined for vocations as diocesan clergy who studied in the Jesuit seminarium. Through decades of training such future clergy, the Jesuits of Kolozsvar were able to put their stamp on the entire Catholic clergy of the region, and thereby extend their indirect influence into every parish.

As we have seen, Jesuit residences might serve as places of refuge for soldiers and fugitives from justice, and prisoners of war. When in 1733 a wounded P. O.W. arrived in Kolozsvar on a cart, the Society provided him a place to try to recover, although in this instance, he died.[39] And although the Society never established a facility specifically for women, Jesuits had constant interaction with women and girls, who at the time possessed few legal rights.  In particular women were invited to be part of sodalities set up by the Society, which frequently distributed books to the general population. The Marian Congregations, like the Baroque architecture of the Jesuit complex, were also an import from the Holy Roman Empire and exemplified the brand of Baroque piety found in the Habsburg heartland.[40]   Ironically, the Society was expanding its program of sodalities along the eastern frontier of Latin Christendom at exactly the point when the appeal of these organizations where they had first become popular, the Mediterranean, was waning.[41] The relationship of Jesuit­ sponsored sodalities to the Society's involvement in social control is less clear, but a list of books owned by one of these sodalities at the time of the suppression points to the guidance of conduct through teaching, socialization and, significantly, reading.[42]  Among the books confiscated by Austrian authorities in 1773 that had been stored in the library of the Jesuit supported Congregatio B. V. Mariae were the Imitatio Christi of Thomas a Kempis, Latin lives of Ignatius and Xavier, four copies of Zodiacus Chritianus, nine copies of Trimegistus Christianus, Septi Collis Daciae, a Latin grammar, the Ten Rationes of Edmund Campion, one of the first direct challenges by a Jesuit to Protestant clergy, calling upon them to debate, and volumes of Polydore Virgil, Cicero, and a work presumably praising the most adamantly Catholic of Habsburg rulers, Ferdinandi Secundi Virtutes.[43]  Another highly significant evidence of Jesuit support for female literacy is a "Girl's ABC in Hungarian" found among the stocks of the Jesuit print shop in Kolozsvar after the Suppression.[44]  Whether this volume (which appears without reference to an author) was intended for private or classroom instruction cannot be determined with certainty, but the production of a primer specifically for girls in the vernacular is in itself evidence of the willingness of the Jesuits to address the needs of the local population. At the same time Jesuit ambitions for the books produced at their own printing press in Kolozsvar sometimes reached towards populations located far from the community.  An introductory text in Latin, intended for for the faithful who had been exposed to the liturgy in Old Church Slavonic, was produced in 1746, evidence of the broad view Kolozsvar Jesuits took of their mission.[45] Other lay organizations were sponsored by the Society as it solidified its presence throughout Transylvania and all of the eastern Habsburg domains: in about 1699 the "Congregatio Agoniae" of Ungvár paid for a new altar in the Jesuit church.[46]

Beyond the Society's contact with women already confirmed in the Church that was sustained through the promotion of sodalities, conversion of women figured prominently in Jesuit missionary and evangelizing efforts. The relationship of women to the all male Society was complex, and subject to restrictions occasioned by the limited freedom accorded women and, on the side of the Society, the necessity of avoiding any hint of scandal.  No sooner had the Society begin to reestablish its presence in Kolozsvar when it was able to report that the widow of an Austrian army officer had donated eighty lamps to be lit before the Eucharist. Nevertheless, the Society's records show clearly that ministry to women, above and beyond the formal relationship maintained with socially respectable women through the sodalities, was a significant component of the Jesuit mission, a component that was retained even when Jesuit contacts with women provoked criticism from other Catholic clergy.[47] In Kolozsvar, Jesuits were even prepared to enter bordellos to rescue women and to turn a plague sore of the community into something more wholesome.[48]  Jesuit engagement in the lives of women was an inevitable consequence of the Society's approach to social order and improvement: it would have been difficult for the fathers to have ignored the needs and problems of marginalized women in their community. Anecdotal evidence points to the presence of many women, possibly single and without a support system, living in the eastern Habsburg lands, who were under pressure to convert to one religion or another. [49] The upheavals of war and conquest had left many women dependent on whatever institutions or organizations could help them, and in a baroque culture that stressed the importance of making a "good death," the ministrations of the Jesuits were frequently directed specifically at women facing death, sometimes in the context of impending execution.[50] The process of preparing for a good death would normally include confession and perhaps acts of penance as well, with the groundwork laid through the conscientious reading of one of the many manuals dealing with this subject.[51] Yet the ranks of women encouraged to prepare for a "good death" were by no means limited to the marginalized. The aristocratic lady or burgher matron were crucial to Jesuit sponsored congregations, and no doubt made up a major part of the flock who heard Jesuit sermons each Sunday, or who crowded the small school theatre to enjoy a Jesuit comedy. [52]

The conversion of Jews and Roma might also be considered in the context of control or at least influence over marginalized groups. Occasionally Jews would also convert: eight in 1725 (along with ten "Turks" who could have been Muslims of various nationalities), two in 1732, and one in 1733.[53] Sometimes the process of conversion would require a major effort, as in 1736, when the final step of conversion followed the "longo labore" of a Jesuit.[54] The questionable nature of such conversions, however, is evidenced by the large number of Jewish apostates who reconverted; five apostates are reported reconverted the same year as the five Jewish converts of 1730.[55] A Muslim or Tartar captive would also be marginalized in Habsburg Transylvania, and therefore a prime candidate for conversion.[56] In 1717 a Tartar woman held prisoner in the Temesvar region was converted to Catholicism.[57] Muslim travelers and soldiers also figure in reports of conversions accomplished at unspecified locations throughout the Austrian Province and beyond.[58] The reporting of such conversions from non-Christian faiths was among the most important tasks for the Jesuit chroniclers, for these anecdotes not only demonstrated the accomplishments of the Society, but also provided ammunition for the polemical and pastoral writing of Jesuits struggling against many traditions hostile to Baroque Catholicism. A final example of a conversion story sheds additional light on the Society's approach to the socially outcast and vulnerable. An unnamed Lutheran soldier, captured in 1702, perhaps during the early phase of the Kuruc rebellion, lay bleeding in the street. Taken to a shelter where it was supposed he would die, the soldier was converted by a Jesuit and received into the Church.[59] Our narrative, composed by a Jesuit, stresses the inadequacy of the Lutherans who might have cared for the soldier, and the initiative of the Jesuit who cared for his soul, a concise expression of the pattern Jesuits perceived in their community. Beyond these commonplaces is also visible the way in which the Society was constantly on the lookout for the homeless, the vulnerable and those in need, whose numbers were surprisingly high in a town of 8,000. Nor should this behavior be viewed merely as exploitative or controlling, since Jesuit priestly formation placed great stress on cura personalis, the care of the person, bodily and spiritually. There is every reason to suppose that Jesuit treatment of the unfortunates of Kolozsvar was motivated by what the fathers understood as care for others.

The third of these overlapping strategies was the rural mission. Throughout the Habsburg lands, as well as elsewhere in Central Europe, the pre-Suppression Society devoted significant amounts of resources and manpower to its rural missions, where Catholics might be living without a priest nearby, or where peasants lived without any formal religious affiliation or guidance.[60] In Bohemia, M.-E. Ducreaux notes, the twin tactics of these missions were preaching that stressed doctrine and administration of Holy Communion en masse.[61] According to the records compiled by the Jesuits of Transylvania, the fruits of this endeavor were considerable.  While the Society's missions were part of a unified effort that included the institutions of school and parish church, the rural missions had a distinctly individual character to them reflecting not only the diversity of the Jesuits themselves, but also the fact that the popular cultures with which Jesuit missionaries interacted were far from uniform or monolithic.[62] Obituaries of Jesuit missionaries stress their solitary undertakings, as when we read that Father Stephanus Miksa embarked on a "missione vage" in remote reaches of Wallachia, or that in 1743 Josephus Nemaj was recovering his health in Kolozsvar after the rigors of missionary work in Bács.[63]

As many as twenty missionary expeditions might be launched during a single year, and while some of these were probably of short duration, the resources and manpower required to carry these expeditions out must have had a significant impact on the day to day operations of the Kolozsvar community.[64] Missionary work continued right up until the time of the suppression, as evidenced by the career of Josephus Horvath, a native of Kolozsvar, who was working in that city in 1773.[65] Other Jesuit missionaries worked much farther afield, in situations where there was not only an absence of supportive Jesuit institutions, but where hostile institutions would have surrounded and circumscribed their efforts. Franciscus Miroslavich, the native of Belgrade mentioned earlier, performed the service of "Missionarius in legatione ad Portam Ottomanica anno uno et medio," continuing an old tradition of a Jesuit presence in Constantinople.[66]  The Transylvanian missions also drew the attention of the Bohemian Province: two Jesuit priests, Matthias Schmidt and Joannes Koffler, were working in Transylvania immediately before the Suppression, apparently independently of the missions directed from Kolozsvar.[67] Mission work was demanding and risky, but there was never a shortage of men ready to carry it out, perhaps because of the personal contacts that ensued, or perhaps because of the greater degree of freedom that might be experienced in the countryside.

In order to see the Jesuit missionary project in Transylvania and Moldavia more clearly we might compare with the strategies employed by the Society a century earlier in China, for both undertakings were ambitious projects whose long term objects were the winning for the Church of geographically important regions not under European colonial rule. The four major characteristics of the strategy used in China and in fact throughout the Far East, as identified by Nicolas Standaert, are 1. Accommodation or adaptation to local culture. 2. Propagation and evangelization "from the top down." 3. Indirect propagation of the faith using European science and technology, and 4. Openness to and tolerance of Chinese values.[68] While some obvious parallels between these strategies and those used in Eastern Europe are readily apparent, the differences between the two approaches are more instructive. Far from the direct material support of any European Catholic power, the Jesuits of China turned to the portable evidences of European superiority, such as clocks, telescopes and paintings employing scientific perspective to impress local authorities.  By contrast, although some first rate scientists such as Maximilian Hell worked in Kolozsvar and undoubtedly studied problems far beyond the understanding of many local residents, this intellectual and technological firepower was never employed to strengthen the Society's position vis-á-vis local elites. Again, while the Jesuits of Iai actively courted the local prince's favor, the "top down" model could never work as well in sparsely populated regions where central authority remained relatively weak and there did not already exist a sizeable cultured elite. Instead Jesuits working on the frontiers of the Habsburg lands and beyond relied more on the miraculous as it occurred in nature rather than on technological triumphs to gain attention and credibility, wonders that could be appreciated by both the relatively well off urban burgher and the illiterate peasant.

Some of these wonders appear to have impressed the Jesuit fathers greatly: when a cross appeared on the moon over Papa (in western Hungary) on the night of 2 August 1664, an anonymous Jesuit took pains to sketch the various forms it took.[69] Cynics might claim that the Jesuit penchant for discovering symbolic support for Catholic piety in the natural world was a calculated strategy appealing to the credulous, but the enormous body of devotional literature produced by Jesuits working in Transylvania, including those trained as scientists, would seem to point in another direction. Jesuits who labored in the mountains and remote villages of Transylvania and Moldavia were not chosen-or were not self selected-to confront a sophisticated urban society distant from their own. Unlike the handful of outstanding individuals who encountered the high civilizations of the Far East, these Jesuits did not serve as ambassadors from another world that sought to engage the elites on their own turf.  Instead in their backgrounds and attitudes, the Jesuits of the eastern Habsburg lands sometimes resembled the Observant Franciscans who were occasionally their companions.[70] Yet these attitudes that placed Habsburg Jesuits in more close relationship with the folk culture around them did not always translate into an openness and tolerance for the values of the peoples they encountered. The relatively modest results of the Uniate undertaking were not the only evidence of the difficulties the Society encountered in its efforts to evangelize in central Transylvania. In 1754, at the peak of the Jesuits' strength, and after decades of building institutions and educating boys they could only claim an annual 84 converts from Lutheranism, Calvinism, Socinanism, and Orthodoxy.[71] Of course, the Chinese mission likewise did not win large numbers of converts, but it had other immediate political objectives, whose success might be ascertained by the degree of influence Jesuits could exercise in the midst of a complex Imperial Court.

In Transylvania, the closest the Society could come to the intimate position that they held for a while in the K'ang Shi Emperor's court was their long term role as theologi of the Uniate bishops or as advisors to Catholic bishops, documentation of which is scanty.[72] In the other areas where the Jesuits of Kolozsvar strove to effect major changes in local society the long-term impact verged on insignificant. The Society not only lacked the resources to bring about the kind of major transformation in public and private behaviors that it had identified as one of its major goals, but it also did not have missionary intellectuals of the stature of Schall von Bell or Ricci to advance its work.  Yet there were several areas where the Jesuit mission did make signifcant contact with targeted groups. To the modern historian perhaps the most interesting of these was the Roma.  

 

 

 

Of all the groups living in the district around Kolozsvar, none is more suggestive of the status of Transylvania as a cultural and political borderland than the Roma people.  Romanticized by westerners and persecuted by their neighbors, the Roma have lived in Transylvania for centuries, resisting pressure to assimilate and maintaining their distance from whatever dominant culture sought to control them, both by remaining mobile and by denying outsiders access to their community.  Relations between the Jesuits and the Roma are difficult to reconstruct from the surviving records, although some elements of the encounter are easily identified.  As with the other groups that the Jesuits interacted with, a basic goal of the Society was conversion, and most of the surviving references to Roma in Jesuit documents relate to proselytizing; the most common acknowledgement of the presence of the Roma merely lists those who converted.[73] Yet within the framework of conversion accounts may be discerned glimpses of the cross-cultural encounter in which the means of negotiating the gulf between Roma and non-Roma must be altered with the arrival of the Jesuits.[74]  In 1703, a Romani father brought his child to be baptized by a Jesuit; in the account preserved in the Kolozsvar Jesuit history, the Jesuit performed the sacrament "not for money but for the love of God."  The Roma, were reportedly "stupefied" by this intelligence, and marveled at the priest's behavior.  The emphasis on the exchange of money may also be a Jesuit swipe at Orthodox practices in the region, or it may reflect the nature of relations between Roma and "Gadjo" [non-Roma], in which a price was assigned to most interactions, thereby "buying" the Roma some security.  On a deeper level, the encounter between the Jesuit and Roma hints at the gulf of understanding and communication between priest and parent.  Conversion for the Roma may have been undertaken sincerely, but may have also been the consequence of pressure applied by ecclesiastical or civil authorities to a people who historically had been prepared to take on religious affiliations in order to survive.  Jesuit records hint at these pressures: out of the eighteen Calvinists converted in Kolozsvar in 1708, two are identified as Roma.[75]  We cannot know with certainty the motivations of Roma who had become Calvinists, but it is safe to say that Calvinist clergy would not have approved of the way of life of most Roma, and that the Calvinist restrictions on secular music, smoking, drinking and dancing, to name only a few activities commonly pursued by Roma, would have been a severe burden to a Roma convert.  It is also unclear to what degree Roma converts or near-converts were instructed in the Faith.  When a seventy-year-old Roma was taught the basics of Catholicism by two Jesuit priests, the absence in the account of any mention of an actual conversion suggests that instruction may not have been carried very far.[76]

The actual consequences of a conversion of Roma to Catholicism are equally hard to assess. In 1705 a Romani woman who "had lived for 35 years without baptism in the most obscure darkness and in contempt of salvation," joined the Church.[77]  A quarter of a century later we find a brief reference to a dying Roma (not identified as a convert) attended by a Jesuit.[78]  Were the Jesuit missionaries more accommodating in their view of Roma culture than Orthodox, Calvinist, or other Catholic clergy, or did the emerging political and social prominence of the Society play a role in the conversion?  As a group, the Roma were not viewed as negatively by the Kolozsvar Jesuits in the way the Jews were in other parts of the Habsburg realms; Roma religious beliefs, conveyed orally and in a language not understood by any of their neighbors, to the degree they were understood by Jesuits did not pose the same threat to Christian as the scholarship of the Torah and the anti-Jesus literature of the Talmudic period.  Jesuits even loaned money to Roma: "Georg Buffa Zingarus" owed 12 Rhenish florins and 15 kreuzters that was still outstanding after the Suppression.[79]  While Roma were not infrequently cast as supporting characters of less than sterling morals in dramas related by Jesuit writers, they were not subject to the negative stereotyping suffered by Uniate Romanians, who, through their numbers and ties to a rival religious tradition, did pose a potential threat to the Society's mission.[80]  Roma were occasionally found in Jesuit churches, and probably were encountered in many other settings, including the prisons where Jesuits ministered to the condemned.[81]

Records from Jesuit communities elsewhere in Transylvania indicate that Roma conversions were not always undertaken with a great deal of enthusiasm or sincerity.  A hint of the fragility of some of these conversions is evident in an entry in the history of Kolozsvar Jesuit community for 1711, where two Roma are reported as converts, of which one was an apostate.[82]

 

 

 

Jesuit mission activities reflect both the bureaucratic and the less structured aspects of the Society's work.   The yearly computations of conversions and communions conducted reveal the Jesuits' skill at conducting a large-scale operation in an environment that was, if not actually hostile, at least fraught with many difficulties.   Less explicitly outlined in Jesuit records but crucial to the carrying out of the missionary program were the various public performances that all contributed to the propagation of the Society's basic message.  Even in years of war and plague, the Jesuits of Kolozsvar labored unceasingly to order the internal and external lives of their flocks, as well as to bring order to the larger social sphere that included non-Catholics (and Uniates).   But the achievement of social order was always only half of the program envisioned by the Jesuits; the inward transformation that was the intended goal of the Ratio lay at the center of the entire missionary and educational enterprise and at the heart of the experience of individual Jesuits.  We cannot definitively assess the success of the Jesuits according to their own standards; quantitative analysis does not move our understanding of spiritual development of individuals forward, and the Jesuit records, intended as they were to demonstrate the uniform progress of the order, themselves are neither objective nor nuanced enough to shed light on distinguishing characteristics of the Society's missionary achievement in Transylvania. 

Faced with these obstacles, historians of Jesuit missionary work elsewhere have either opted for silence on the question of the ultimate success of the Society's religious objectives, or contented themselves with repeating the Jesuits' own descriptions of their work.  Here, we offer two observations on the Jesuit missions centered in Kolozsvar, acknowledging that some important aspects of the encounter between Jesuit and local residents can never be known.  First, the Society experienced a tension between the obvious roadblocks that confessional politics, physical circumstances, and the local power vacuum following 1693 produced, and the Baroque worldview that saw signs of Divine favor and ultimate victory everywhere.   Each day there were ample reasons to feel discouragement, as Jesuits labored to educate, convert, regain and unify the society around them.   This much is easily documented from both Jesuit accounts and from our knowledge of large trends (e.g., the resistance of the Orthodox clergy and the ambivalence of some of the Uniate priests) underway throughout the region.  Harder for the modern reader to see is the world of symbols and portents that revealed the power of the religious message they sought to propagate.  While some Jesuits might have been periodically fainthearted or even doubtful about the validity of their mission, most remained committed.

The second element that shaped the Jesuits' missionary project was the unmistakable decline of entire Baroque aesthetic and worldview throughout the eighteenth century.  This decline was very gradual and proceeded more slowly than in some of the western Habsburg lands, but by the 1760s the Baroque understanding of knowledge and beauty would have been estranged, not only from that of Viennese intellectuals, but likewise from reformers within the Society and from artists in touch with developments elsewhere in Catholic Europe.  This isolation and decline was all the more significant because the Society had not had sufficient time to root the Baroque aesthetic deeply in Transylvanian society.   Like a potted plant moved to a distant room, the Baroque wilted quickly when conditions around it ceased to be ideal.

Finally, the makeup of the Society as a celibate male religious order must be reckoned with.  The married Orthodox and Uniate clergy were not the only elements of Transylvanian society whose experience of family and community would have differed greatly from that of the Jesuits.  Both the urban Bürgerschaft of Kolozsvar, with its strong Lutheran or Unitarian ties, or the intermarried aristocracy of the countryside that had long embraced Calvinism represented notions of relatedness and identity fundamentally at odds with a peripatetic, university trained band of Catholic clergy who preached loyalty to distant and sometimes abstract entities.   The Jesuits of course were very familiar with settings where local values were not particularly harmonious with their own, and the challenges faced in Kolozsvar were modest compared to those encountered in Japan or China, but the effects of this prolonged isolation on the Kolozsvar community cannot be discounted.   Like the interior experiences of the laity among whom the Jesuits worked, the cultivation of a corporate identity is not easily dealt with in either quantitative or qualitative analysis.   Yet the Kolozsvar community functioned as an organic whole form many years, and produced collective achievements that easily surpass any of the individual efforts of its members.  While conducting a mission to the diverse nationes of Transylvania, the Society ministered to itself and kept its community healthy enough to remain active and growing until it was extinguished from afar.  Any further investigation into the accomplishments of the Society in Transylvania must take this key fact into account.

 

 

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