Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/45



CATHOLIC ORGANISATION AND PROPAGANDA IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

South-Eastern Europe belongs to orthodoxy, with the sole exception of the Adriatic coast, which has remained true to its original Catholicism. It was not always so, however, and the Greek creed was not always proof against the strong, often fanatic and ever-exemplarily disciplined propaganda of the western Latin church, whether in the former Latin or in the Slavonic and Greek states.

The history of this struggle has often been written, true to the smallest detail, though separately for each national state. A short survey of this religious struggle in all territories under the impulse of the same orders and feelings may serve, therefore, to rectify some prejudices and to offer fresh and perhaps useful explanation.

In South-Eastern Europe there are two provinces which of a certainity belonged to the church of the Latin language even in the distant past. All Roumanians, on the north and on the south of the Danube, had the same names for the notions relating to Christianity. For the Dacian Roumanians this is explicable: communications with Dacia being by the pan-Roman way, the via of Tiberius, and not through the Balkans which were reached by the via Aegnatia, ultimately leading to Constantinople. Over the Dalmatians also, whose connections with the same Italy were by way of the Adriatic along the two paths of Roman penetration in the Balkans, the Latin church established