"300" is the title of a well-known film about the Spartan heroes of
Thermopylae, who fought against the Persian emperor Xerxes in 480 BC.
But just as well, "300" also evokes the history of the church built by the
Jesuits — called at the outset Milites Papae — in the heart of Cluj, which
later became the Piarist Church and then the University Church. The history of
this place of worship is marked by three different kinds of conflict.
Already the church's dedication, inscribed in the bas-relief on the pediment —
"HONORI SANCTISSIMAE TRINITATIS" — polemically expressed the manifesto of the
Catholic Counter-Reformation against Unitarianism, the Cluj version of the
Protestant Reformation begun locally by David Ferenc. Emblematic of the
Jesuits' Trinitarian reply is precisely the College-Church complex, in which
education and faith enlightened and strengthened one another from the start.
Of another struggle, one of life and death, the Statue of the Virgin Mary in
front of the University Church speaks to us — made by Anton Schuchbauer at the
end of the last great plague epidemic (1738–1740). Here is expressed the
devotion of the Jesuit missionaries to the Madonna della Strada, the Guide of
the Way, who shows us in her Son the One who is our Way, Truth and Life.
Finally, to this same church is linked one of the most important moments in
the history of the anti-communist struggle. In 1956, Greek-Catholic faithful
and priests organised in front of the Piarist church one of the largest
protests against the communist regime, attended by more than five thousand
faithful. All the priests who celebrated the liturgy under the open sky were
later arrested and imprisoned.
The film 300 ends tragically and solemnly: Leonidas's soldiers die, but they
do not surrender. Three hundred years after the inauguration of the Church of
the Holy Trinity, it no longer belongs to the Jesuits, but the spirit of the
struggle for the Greater Glory of God and the salvation of souls continues.
Many happy years — not in the Spartan spirit, but the Ignatian one:
OMNIA AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM!