Church Subsidies and Their Legal Development in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia : Hard Is the Life of the Priest Whose Daily Bread Depends on Lecticale...
Abstract
The monograph aims to describe the historical background and legal development of natural church subsidies paid by the members of a parish to their priests in the area of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, with special regard to the late 19th and 20th centuries, up to 1949. These natural church subsidies were known in Latin as lecticale, in Hungarian as párbér and in Slovak as ložné.
Lecticale was a traditional institution of Hungarian customary law, implemented into Czechoslovak law following the declaration of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. This legal institution was continuously adapted to the needs of actual legal practice until it was abolished by the communist regime in 1949, a year after the communist coup d'état of February 1948.
It was typically adhered to by the Catholic Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church. In the introduction, the author describes the incentives that have led him to the research of lecticale.
As the contemporary awareness of lecticale is limited, the author decided to reveal the elements of the researched legal institution one by one, proceeding from very basic information to the most complicated problems of legal practice. Therefore, the beginning of the monograph deals with references to lecticale in numerous Hungarian church law textbooks.
The treatise then moves to the 1880s, when the greatest controversies arose regarding the issue. The next part of the monograph deals with the etymology of the word lecticale in Latin, Hungarian, Slovak and German.
Following on, the author describes the most important legal aspects of lecticale in the Hungarian legal practice. The core of the monograph then follows, as the author moves on to the legal practice of lecticale in the Czechoslovak Republic after 1918.
The author ends the final chapter by presenting five cases, which he employs to demonstrate the most significant problems linked to lecticale regarding its daily legal practice during the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938).