Romanian Catholic Church (Romanian Greek Catholic Church, Romanian Church, united with Rome) - one of the Eastern Catholic churches adhering to the Byzantine rite , that is, belonging to the number of Greek Catholic churches . Five dioceses of the church are located in Romania and one in the United States . One of the four Eastern Catholic churches bearing the status of the Supreme Archbishopric .
Content
History
After the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, a significant part of the territories previously occupied by them was transferred to the Austrian state , including Transylvania . Emperor of Austria Leopold I supported the idea of the union of the Orthodox Romanians of Transylvania with Rome . In 1700, a significant part of the Transylvanian Romanians, led by Bishop Athanasius Angel, entered into full communion with the Holy See . The Greek Catholics of Transylvania were united into two dioceses and subordinated to the Latin bishop of the Hungarian city of Esztergom . Since 1737, the city of Blazh became the center of the Greek Catholic Church in Romania.
In 1744, an anti-Uniate revolt broke out in Transylvania, as a result, in 1759, Empress Maria Theresa allowed the creation of an Orthodox diocese in Transylvania, after which more than half of the Greek Catholics re-converted to Orthodoxy . The Orthodox diocese was part of the Serbian Metropolitanate of Karlovy Vary and was headed by ethnic Serbs until 1810 .
In 1853, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church was elevated to the status of Metropolitanate , which united the four dioceses.
After the First World War, Transylvania was annexed to Romania , and the territory of the Greek Catholic Metropolitanate spread to this whole country. By the beginning of World War II , the church included more than one and a half million people.
After the communist regime came to power, the church was severely persecuted. In 1948, it was legally liquidated, and all property was transferred to the Romanian Orthodox Church . Six bishops were arrested, five of them soon died in prison, and the sixth - Julius Hossa died in 1970 in a monastery under house arrest. Already after the death of Hossa, Pope Paul VI announced that he was a cardinal in pectore . The church existed only underground.
In 1982, an apostolic exarchate was formed for Romanian emigrants in the United States , having received the status of a diocese since 1987 . After the fall of the Ceausescu regime, Romanian Greek Catholics were able to leave the underground. In 1990, Pope John Paul II appointed the Primate of the five restored dioceses. As in Ukraine , the Romanian Greek Catholic Church had conflicts with the Orthodox because of property owned by Greek Catholics until 1948. On December 16, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI granted the church the status of Supreme Archbishopric.
Current status
The Romanian Catholic Church has the status of Supreme Archbishopric . Data on the number of parishioners vary widely and are the subject of heated debate. If according to the Vatican Annuario Pontificio in 2016 there were more than 500 thousand parishioners [1] , then according to the census of Romania, conducted in 2002 , Greek Catholics were only 191 556 people [2] . Most parishioners of the church are concentrated in the northwestern regions of the country.
The supreme archbishopric consists of the archdiocese-metropolis of Fagaras and Alba-Julia and five suffragan dioceses - Oradi , Lugoj , Cluj-Gerla , Maramures and the diocese of Vasily the Great , founded in 2014, with its center in Bucharest . In the United States there is a separate diocese of Romanian Greek Catholics - the Diocese of St. George in Canton .
From 1994 to the present, the church is headed by Cardinal Lucian Mureshan , who since 2005 has the title of Supreme Archbishop . The residence of the head of the church is located in the city of Blazh . The service in the church is conducted in Romanian .