István Pongrácz [SEP] religious order
István Pongrácz
István Pongrácz (1584-1619) was a Hungarian Jesuit priest, martyr and saint of the Catholic Church.
Biography.
Father István Pongrácz was born in Alvincz Castle in Principality of Transylvania, entered the Society of Jesus in 1602, and studied in Bohemia and Austria. He had been ordained for four years when he was sent to Kassa, Kingdom of Hungary, (today: "Košice, Slovakia") with fellow Jesuit Melchior Grodziecki.
The two Jesuits were working in small towns when they
before around 1590, when Franciscan friars took charge of the diocese reestablished in Bacău (1611) and first led by Bernardino Quirini. After 1644, more Jesuits from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth settled in that country, founding a college in Cotnari and establishing a branch in Iaşi.
Around that time, the ethnic Romanian Transylvanian intellectual Gheorghe Buitul joined the Jesuit order, the first member of his community to study in the Roman College of Rome, while the Transylvanian-born István Pongrácz was one of the Jesuits executed by Calvinists