CWNews.com - In an interview with Aid to the Church in Need, Bishop Florentin Crihalmeanu of Cluj-Gherla--who was ordained a priest at 31 and a consecrated a bishop by Blessed John Paul II at 37--recalled Romanian Communists’ attempts to liquidate the Romanian Greek Catholic Church.
In 1946, “the Communists convoked what they called a ‘synod’ of the clergy stating that it was a meeting to re-evaluate the union with Rome … They said that all Greek Catholics would now be Orthodox and decreed, on the 1st of December, that all Greek Catholic institutions and properties be dissolved and expropriated.”
Today, the Romanian Catholic Church has approximately 700,000 members in Romania--less than one-half of its 1940 population of 1.5 million.
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