The Matter of the Dutch Loan of the Parish of St. Michael in Cluj-Napoca

Especially in the minutes or reports of the parish board, I received references to a number of past events at the reference level, but I did not come across a related description. The publications published so far in print cannot be said to be coherent and comprehensive either. I did not even find an acceptable picture of the famous Dutch loan, with clear statements. It is commonly mentioned that the parish of St. Michael in Cluj-Napoca, which had drifted to the brink of bankruptcy due to the famous Dutch loan, was saved from total collapse by Áron Márton. The main goal of my doctoral dissertation was to search for this mysterious and hitherto undiscovered fact. With the help of the official documents available in the archives, I tried to examine and systematize the starting point, background and the course of the Dutch loan case, the people involved, the solution attempts and finally Áron Márton's orderly work. Because of my topic, I chose to use the narrative method, and I tried to strive for objectivity in all situations, even in the cases when there were unpleasant facts I had to declare about church persons and priestly dignities. The Dutch loan is about an internal ecclesiastical affair, in its initial stages it was treated as a kind of secret, but after the outbreak of the scandal it found such a resonance at the Transylvanian level, even ringing to Bucharest and Rome, that it soon lost its secret character. I divided the dissertation into two parts: the development of the Dutch loan during the administration of the parish by priest dr. József Hirschler and Áron Márton, who led the solution, at the time of his being the parish priest.