The founding document of Pázmány Péter Catholic University

Our University was founded in 1635 and has been continuously operating ever since. During the Ottoman occupation, the most tragic years of our country's history, Archbishop of Esztergom Péter Pázmány established the university, which proved to be of epochal significance in the history of education and religious culture in Hungary. He was convinced that the university was the only way to guarantee the survival of the nation's moral and intellectual culture.

The university he founded, adopted both his intellectual heritage and his name. The university was moved to Buda from Nagyszombat (now Trnava) by Maria Theresa.

In the spirit of the 1848 reforms the university became a modern and autonomous educational centre. After a short period when its self-governance was limited by Habsburg absolutism, it regained its previous rights in 1860, and by the beginning of the 20th century it became one of the world's finest universities. In 1921, after the grisly calamities of World War I and the restrictions imposed on it by the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the "Royal Hungarian University of Science" in Budapest was once again named after its founder, Péter Pázmány, and it bore his name until 1950, when the communist state restructured the university by separating the Faculties of Medicine and Theology, and changed the name of the remaining institution to "Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences". In 1993 the Hungarian Parliament registered Pázmány Péter Catholic University (and along with it the Faculty of Humanities) as a university accredited by the state. We currently have five faculties: the Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, the Faculty of Information Technology and the Postgraduate Institute of Canon Law, which also has faculty status.

The Faculty of Humanities was opened in Budapest in 1992. It moved to its campus in Piliscsaba in 1994, and established a separate venue for certain Master's and later Bachelor's trainings in Budapest in 2012. Due to the increasing significance of, and number of programmes in social sciences, our Faculty was renamed Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2012. The former Vitéz János Faculty located in Esztergom was integrated into our Faculty as the Vitéz János Centre for Teacher Training in 2013. Our Faculty attaches importance to the training of future teachers.

Therefore the faculty has campuses in three different cities: Piliscsaba, Budapest and Esztergom. At the faculty there are over 40 different Bachelor and Master degree programmes in the fields of humanities, social sciences and economics, ranging from Hungarian and several foreign languages to history, art history, philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, sociology, international studies and more.