A minor pet peeve of mine is how many Unitarian Universalists when recounting the history of our liberal faith make Hungarian speaking Unitarianism the ancestor of English speaking Unitarianism. This can happen because the continental Unitarians come first. But in fact they’re parallel movements, two separate streams that had almost nothing to do with each other until the last couple of decades when American Unitarian Universalists “discovered” our oppressed cousins as the iron curtain rusted and shattered…
There is no doubt in my mind that this was a good thing. We UUs in the West are for the most part a privileged class, the best educated religious group in North America, and by and large middle class – and that’s American middle class… What we encounter by those who don’t like us is (mostly) polite disdain.
The Hungarian speaking Unitarians, on the other hand, have just come out of two generations of significant persecution. In both the nations where they have measurable populations, Hungary and Romania they have been pushed to the bottom of the economic heap and often denied even basic rights such as access to an education.
The conversation between our English speaking and Hungarian speaking religious liberals has been useful for both sides, a powerful testament to what is important, and what is not.
Today, interestingly, is an anniversary for one of the few times when continental Unitarianism did touch England’s shores before contemporary times. Although it pushes back even farther to common history. Faustus Socinus, an Italian who in the sixteenth century fled to the relative freedom of Poland published a catechism in Racow, a town just north of Krakow. (go here for the text)
The Rakovian Catechism, composed in Poland by an Italian national in the Latin language, would prove singularly important in the development of both Hungarian speaking and English speaking Unitarianism.
And, today is a marker. In 1652 the House of Commons ordered John Biddle’s English translation burned as blasphemous and seditious…
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