Courtesy of our resident historian, John Schweich
A Stamp To Be Issued by Hungary Commemorating the Centennial of the Eparchy of Hajdúdorog
The stamp design depicts the Weeping Icon of the Theotokos of the Greek Catholic Shrine in Máriapócs, Pantocrator by Ádám Kisleghi Nagy, an extract from the Papal Bull ordering the establishment of the Greek Catholic Church of Hungary, and a detail from the iconostasis of the Greek Catholic church in Hajdúdorog.
The four pictures are connected by the symbol of the Greek Catholic Church of Hungary and the composition has the same ornamental decoration which adorns the Papal Bull at the side.
On the first day cover the ceiling fresco of the church in Hajdúdorog is shown, while the special postmark bears the silhouette of the church from an 1859 depiction. The centenary stamp was made in the state printing company Állami Nyomda based on the design of graphic artist Anita Laczkó.
The Magyar tribes first came into contact with Byzantine Christianity during their centuries of migration, and missionaries who used the Eastern liturgy began their conversion. After the Fourth Lateran Council, Byzantine Christianity was forced into the background, but prayers and hymns from the 17th century show that it continued to survive. On 16 April 1868 the representatives of fifty-two Hungarian Greek Catholic congregations held a national congress, where they urged the adoption of a liturgy in Hungarian and the establishment of an independent diocese.
As a result of this, Franz Joseph I established the Vicariate of Hajdúdorog and on 8 June 1898 the National Committee of Greek-Rite Catholic Hungarians was set up. The Diocese was established by Franz Joseph I on 6 May 1912, canonized by the bull Christifideles Graeci of Pope Pius X on 8 June 1912, and enacted by Law XXXV of 1913 of the Hungarian Parliament.
The Diocese originally covered 162 parishes but, after the Trianon Peace Treaty, this number was reduced by almost half. In 1968 the Diocese’s authority was extended by permission of the Holy See to parishes beyond its boundaries. Pope John Paul II extended the authority of the Diocese of Hajdúdorog to all Greek Catholics in Hungary, with the exception of those in the Apostolic Exarchate of Miskolc, in his bull Summis Pontificibus on 17 July 1980. The bull was handed over by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, State Secretary of His Holiness the Pope, in Esztergom on 28 September 1980.
(Source: gorogkatolikus.hu )
