In order to address the essential question concerning the interrelationships among the (religious) policies adopted by the modern state to ensure its sovereignty and the processes of secularism and nation building, the project is structured along four work packages.

Archbishop József Grősz of Kalocsa signs the oath of allegiance to the Hungarian People’s Republic and its Constitution. 24 April 1959. (Kalocsai Főegyházmegyei Levéltár)

It will identify patterns of continuity and discontinuity among the church policies of different regimes. In accordance with the critical assessment of the secularisation thesis, it will identify individual models of secularism in the region and moments of “resacralisation” (i.e. the “return of religion” to public life). Thus, the project will provide valid outcomes to enrich our understanding of the evolution of the present typologies of church-state relations in Europe. Furthermore, SOVEREIGNTY also aims to overturn approaches 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. Instead, the project proposes to focus on internal church-state relations, and it argues that 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. Given the manner in which the oath of loyalty to the state survived over time as a practice (despite changes to the actual texts of the oaths), this practice offers a revealing perspective from which to examine how the individual political systems related to the Church and the extent to which they sought to use the Church hierarchy as a possible means of legitimizing their claim to power. The relation of the (lower and upper) clergy to the oaths also offers insights into the transformation of local Church elite’s understanding of its own role and the mental frameworks that determined the relationship between secular power and the Church spanning changes of regimes.

Austria-Hungary 1914 (Encyclopædia Britannica)

The project uses the oath of loyalty to the state as an analytical tool to examine, from a new approach, the connections between the process of secularization and nation building and the steps taken to enforce the modern state’s claim to sovereignty. It argues that state religious policy which touched the transnational Catholic Church—whether a policy of secularization or re-sacralization—can also be understood as an instrument with which the modern state sought to secure its sovereignty, regardless of political system or regime. This explains why the states of the region ultimately combined the secularization model of the French Revolution and the patterns of Josephine church policy in their religious policy. Finally, an analysis of the history of the oath of loyalty to the state shows that unilateral state measures to ensure sovereignty in Central Eastern Europe were temporarily effective at most, and long-term solutions were always reached through compromises with the transnational partner.