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Romania The Uniate Church
Although its members are primarily Romanian, the Uniate
Church
has received even more severe treatment. By the late
seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, the Uniates, or Eastern or
Byzantine Rite Catholics, had broken away from the
Orthodox Church
and accepted papal authority while retaining the Orthodox
ritual,
canon, and calendar, and conducting the worship service in
Romanian. In 1948, in an obvious attempt to use religion
to foster
political unity, the country's 1.7 million Uniates were
forcibly
reattached to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Some 14,000
recalcitrant priests and 5,000 adherents were arrested, at
least
200 believers were murdered during incarceration, and many
others
died from disease and hunger. The suppression of the
Uniate Church
required collaboration between the regime and the Romanian
Orthodox
Church hierarchy, which maintained that the Uniates had
been
forcibly subjugated to Rome and were simply being
reintegrated into
the church where they properly belonged.
That the Uniate Church survived, albeit precariously
and
underground, long after it officially had ceased to exist
was an
embarrassment to the regime and the Orthodox leadership.
Even in
the mid-1980s, there were still some 1.5 million
believers, and
about twenty "Orthodox" parishes that were universally
regarded as
Uniate. Besides 300 priests who were not converted,
another 450
priests were secretly trained. The church had three
underground
bishops. After 1977 some Uniate clergymen led a movement
demanding
the reinstatement of their church and full restoration of
rights in
accordance with constitutional provisions for freedom of
worship.
In 1982 the Vatican publicly expressed concern for the
fate of the
Uniates and supported their demands. The Romanian
authorities
protested this act as interference in the internal affairs
of the
Romanian Orthodox Church.
Data as of July 1989
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