Abstract
Confronted with a violent challenge at th Abstract: e middle of the 18th century, the Greek Catholic clerical élite had to overcome not only difficulties in producing the theological discourse, but also those resulting from the need to indicate the confessional alterity of individuals that continued to be part of the same ethnic community. As far as faith functioned in the Romanian area of post-Byzantine culture as means for validating the bounds of community, the innovation that intervened at the level of political imaginary, which merged in an unique argument the scholarly explanations on Latin origin and those referring to ecclesiastical past, proved to be decisive in order to legitimize the option of full communion with the Church of Rome. Assuming an approach interested mainly in the confessional formation of the Uniate identity in Transylvania, this article proposes a reappraisal of the role held by the national theme, interpreted as an essential element of Greek Catholic propaganda. There are also questioned the implications that this restructuring of membership criteria had with regard to the games of exclusion, which affected the members of the other Romanian confessional family. The inquiries over the avatars of the confessional nationalism in the period marked by the meditations of the Basilian monk Gherontie Cotore in 1746 and subsequently by the historical and philological works of the Transylvanian School, delineate an image of gradual interdenominational tolerance, that run parallel with the civil tolerance promoted by the State and whose effects largely concerned the longue durée.

Keywords
confessional nationalism, Romanian Greek Keywords Catholic Church, identity, alterity, political community.