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The Rumanian Catholic Disruption
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2024
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The people of the country we call Rumania are in part descended from the ‘veterans of Trajan’, colonists drawn from several parts of the Roman empire, chiefly Italy and Illyricum, and planted in the province of Dacia in the early years of the second century A.D. They fused with the Thracian natives, and during the great migrations were overrun by Goths, Huns, Avars and other barbarians; the new people thus produced retained a language Latin in origin but modified by Slavonic and other influences—the name ‘Romania’ explains itself.
St Niketas of Remesiana (d.c. 414), to whom the composition of the Te Deum is attributed, is claimed as one of the apostles of the Dacians, and they certainly at first formed part of the Western church. But they were conquered by the Bulgars in the ninth century, passed to the Eastern church, and so were eventually involved in the Byzantine schism during the later middle ages. For a long time the Rumanians (or Vlachs) depended on hierarchs of the Bulgarian and other churches, and it was not till the fourteenth century that three separate metropolitans were given to the Rumanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia by the patriarch of Constantinople; there were some Catholics of Làtin rite and earlier in the middle ages bishops were appointed to look after these Kuman converts and Magyar, German and Polish colonists. The Moldavian metropolitan, Damian, signed the act of union at the Council of Florence in 1439, but his church refused to support him.
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- Copyright © 1949 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. Kalorz's Myths and Realities in Eastern Europe (London, 1946), a book that is much better than its title.
2 This was the famous Dositheos who presided over an important synod at Jerusalem in 1672 which formally condemned Protestantism. Its confession of faith, which bears the name of Dositheos, is one of the official statements of Eastern Orthodox beliefs.
3 It, seemingly is impossible to get accurate statistics. The above figures are estimated from those given in C. A. Macartney's Hungary and Her Successors and in the. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, art. Magyarie.
4 The concept of a patriarchate has now become almost completely degenerate. The latest candidate for patriarchal honours is Bulgaria, looking back to the earlier antonomous status of Okhrida and Tirnova.
5 But in the ‘old kingdom’ the Latin Catholics are thoroughly ‘rumanized’. So much so that in the diocese of Jasi, until 1924, they actually followed the Julian kalendar. For this and other information I have to thank Father Austin Treamer, A.A., who resided in Rumania for years.
6 These religious, up till then exclusively Ruthenian, are successors of the old monks of the Ukraine. But since 1595 they have come to resemble the clerks regular of the West, and as such have done great work among the Ruthenians in Europe and America.
7 Until the seventeenth century the Rumanian liturgy was celebrated in Church Slavonic. It was then changed to vernacular Rumanian in Transylvania, which is now the usage of both Byzantine Catholics and Orthodox throughout Rumania.
8 He had been reconciled from Orthodoxy, Another prelate who took a promineut part, Father Inga, appears to have had a grievance because of an unsatisfied ambition to be a bishop.
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