Bishop Ottokár Prohászka and the Formation of the Horthy Regime in Hungary

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Ottokár Prohászka (1858-1927, bishop of Székesfehérvár, was an important politician in the public life of Hungary after World War I, the revolutions and the Trianon Treaty. This presentation will show his activities in the first half of the 1920s. He was one of the founders of the official ‘Christian national’ ideology of the Horthy Regime. He became a member of Parliament and for a few months he was the president of the unified governing party. Prohászka was the ‘spiritual father’ of the closed number (‘numerus clausus’) Act of 1920. He was very popular, large crowds followed his public speeches, e.g. in assemblies of different ‘Christian national’ organizations and parties. He wrote many interesting articles in right-wing newspapers, to spread widely his political and religious ideas.
In Hungary there are many debates about Prohászka’s political ideas, mainly his connection to Anti-Semitism. This presentation aimes to point out Prohászka’s place in Hungarian political history, to show his public activity in political life. In a separate chapter I will speak about Prohászka’s connections to Hungarian Catholics in the United States, with special regard to his correspondence with Rev. Francis Grosz, parish priest of Hungarian Catholics in New Jersey.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Csaba Fazekas, a historian, received his MA and PhD degrees in Modern Hungarian history, from the Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest. He started to teach at the University of Miskolc, Faculty of Arts, in 1992. He lectures and gives seminars for history and political science students. Currently he is an Associate Professor and director of the Institute for Political Sciences at the University of Miskolc. Between 2005 and 2009 he was the dean of the faculty. His research focuses on the history of political ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries in Hungary, especially history of the Church and Church-State relations in the past. He has published, both in Hungarian and in English, on the debates of Church policy in the first half of the 19th century (‘Reform Era’ and the 1848 Revolution), Church-State relations of the Horthy Regime, and Church policy of the Communist period.