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Romania The Roman Catholic Church
The next largest denomination, the Catholic Church in
the late
1980s had about 3 million members, who belonged to two
groups--the
Eastern Rite Church, or Uniates, and the Latin Rite
Church, or
Roman Catholics. After 1948 the Department of Cults took
the
official position that "no religious community and none of
its
officials may have relations with religious communities
abroad" and
that "foreign religious cults may not exercise
jurisdiction on
Romanian territory." These regulations were designed to
abolish
papal authority over Catholics in Romania, and the Roman
Catholic
Church, although it was one of the sixteen recognized
religions,
lacked legal standing, as its organizational charter was
never
approved by the Department of Cults. The fact that most
members of
the Roman Catholic community were ethnic Hungarians
probably
contributed to the church's tenuous position. In 1948
Roman
Catholics were deprived of three of five sees, leaving
only two
bishops to attend to the spiritual needs of the large
membership.
Subsequently all Catholic seminaries and charitable
institutions
were closed and newspapers and other publications
affiliated with
the church were suppressed. A few seminaries were reopened
in 1952,
but they were generally provided little support by the
state.
Although the priest-to-members ratio remained quite high
in the
1980s, more than 60 percent of the active clergy were over
60 years
of age, and owing to restrictions on enrollment in
seminaries and
theological colleges, their numbers were likely to
decline.
After 1982 the church was allowed only fifteen junior
and
thirty senior seminarians per year. Moreover priests
received
minimal salaries and had no pension plans nor retirement
homes. The
state controlled all clerical appointments, which meant
that many
vacancies went unfilled, and effective priests were
transferred
from parish to parish, whereas those who proved most loyal
to the
regime received the highest salaries and key appointments.
Seminaries, priests, and congregations were closely
watched and
infiltrated by the Securitate. Even in the 1980s, the
danger of
being interrogated, beaten, imprisoned, or even murdered
was
apparently very real, as most foreign visitors found
priests and
lay people alike too frightened to communicate with them.
The
government also restricted the amount of work that could
be done to
repair or enlarge church buildings.
In the early 1980s, there were indications that
tensions
between the Vatican and the regime over bishopric
appointments were
easing. Pope John Paul II successfully appointed an
apostolic
administrator for the Bucharest archbishopric. As of 1989,
however,
the Romanian government had not officially recognized the
appointment, and the issues of inadequate church
facilities,
restrictions on the training of priests, and insufficient
printing
of religious materials remained unresolved.
Data as of July 1989
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