The Tsangos of Romania - Corvinus Library - Hungarian History

phenomena in a more precise way.The historian is tempted to see the past and history, thehappenings and the personalities through the lenses of hiscontemporaneity. It is a great mistake, though, to measure timeusing the values of another period. That, for historians, is wellknown and recognized by their longing to be scientists, they tryto project themselves into the reality of a certain time, theresearched era, to judge the facts, events and phenomena intheir historical context, detached from their own feelings. Theseare, who say: whether you like it or not, this is reality.4. Cohabiting. Almost all around the world, frominternational and governmental forums to the smallestcommunities, discussions are conducted about human rights andmostly national, religious, or political rights of minorities. Interethnicmisunderstandings and confrontations, the oppression ofethnic minorities are the basis of armed confrontations, withsevere consequences, thousand of dead and wounded people,hundreds exiled from their home, having huge material andspiritual losses, social and national traumas with compleximplications. In spite of the fact, that at least in Europe we areChristians, we still don't understand the deepest meaning of theLord's commandment: "Love your neighbour as yourself". Thisis also very well expressed in the Rumanian proverb: "What youdon't like, don't do it to the other!"During certain times, cohabiting in Moldavia between theethnical and religious minorities was generally peaceful.Historical confessions from that time mention, only a few localincidents. Even these did not last for a long time. The worstwas the destruction and robbing of 24 catholic churches - we'llsee that in the following documents. Then, in some cases, whencatholics were obliged to convert to orthodoxism or orthodox tocatholicism - in one single instance. So we can say, thatRumanians lived side by side in harmony with minorities, - D.Cantemir is talking about 17 minorities - they fought togetherfor the country, they suffered together from different diseases,wars and foreign invasions - as Mihail Kogalniceanuunderlined.The catholics had to suffer more because they hadn't theirown priests and bishops, only itinerant ones and also thesewere small in numbers. For several times they sent their requestto the Holy See, unsuccessfully, asking for priests, who knowtheir language: Hungarian and German. In the XVIth and