The purpose of this article is to review the relations of Béla III of Hungary with the papal curia and the role Lukács, archbishop of Esztergom, played in the development of those relations. To do this, one must first direct one's attention to politics at the Byzantine court, where Manuel Comnenus succeeded to the imperial throne in 1143. Because Emperor Menuel regarded himself as heir to the territorial and intellectual integrity of old Rome and of the crown of Constantine the Great, he let it be known that he had in mind a role for the Hungarian court to play in his policies. He was the grandson of Ladislas I, the Saint of Hungary (1077–1095)—his mother, Pyrisk (Iréne) was the daughter of Ladislas—and looked. upon Hungary as an integral part of the former province(s) of (Upper and Lower) Pannonia. Emperor Manuel decided to have Béla III, educated at the imperial court.

The call for the reform of the life and teachings of the church which emanated from Wittenberg early in the sixteenth century elicited an almost immediate response in southeast central Europe. In the lands which came under the rule of Ferdinand I after the disastrous battle at Mohács, reformation doctrines and practices spread quickly. By the middle of the sixteenth century the majority of the population in the lands ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs adhered to one of the several evangelical reform movements. Hussite, Lutheran, Helvetic, Anabaptist and Anti-Trinitarian theologies all found supporters in the region.

As a doddering old man in 1850, Lyman Beecher told his children about the religious conditions at Yale College fifty-five years earlier. His words have become familiar to students of American religious history. The school had been “in a most ungodly state” when he entered as a student in 1795, he recalled. Its president, Ezra Stiles, had been ineffective as a pastor. Immorality and religious skepticism had been rife. Then Timothy Dwight replaced Stiles as president, and religion revived. Dwight's students embraced evangelical Christianity and followed him into battle against rationalists who challenged orthodoxy and politicians who wanted to separate church and state. Dwight transformed religious life at the college and, together with his students, rejuvenated the congregational churches of New England.

When he was confirmed in 1906 into the membership of Saint John's Church of Lincoln, Illinois, Reinhold Niebuhr, in the custom of the Evangelical Synod, recited a memory verse assigned him by his pastor: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jeremiah 31:3). No doubt this verse, especially selected for the young Niebuhr, also expressed a father's love and faithfulness, since it was given to Reinhold by Pastor Gustav Niebuhr.

The study of history in National Socialist Germany served a demolition function. Students were taught to recognize threats to their way of life, all of which were subsumed under Jewish internationalism and included Christianity, Marxism, democracy, liberalism and modernity. The history written by the Nazis undergirded an ersatz religion whose central theme was the German people's faltering attempts to obey the divine will of a racial deity. A major priority of Nazi educators was the liberation of the fierce Germanic instincts which more than a thousand years of foreign influence had repressed; and in their estimation, Christianity bore a major responsibility for blunting the expression of that Germanic spirit. The new German schools would help create a militarized society which would both purge the national spirit and promote the high-tension ethos which accepted war as a normal condition in a life of struggle.