Romanian Greek Catholic Church: The Complete History — From the Union of Blaj to the Seven Martyred Bishops
The Complete Guide
Romanian Greek Catholic Church: The Complete History — From the Union of Blaj to the Seven Martyred Bishops
The story of a church born in a Transylvanian synod in 1701, suppressed by Communist decree in 1948, kept alive in underground homes and prison cells for forty-one years — and whose bishops' last words were: "My struggle is over; yours continues"
On the night of November 28, 1948, all seven bishops of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church were arrested simultaneously. The Communist government had issued the decree: the church was illegal, its properties were to be transferred to the Romanian Orthodox Church, and its faithful were to be absorbed into Orthodoxy whether they wished it or not. The bishops were taken to prison. Most would never leave. They were offered the same deal repeatedly — renounce Rome, become Orthodox hierarchs, live — and they refused it, every one of them, every time. When Cardinal Iuliu Hossu finally died in a hospital after years of imprisonment and house arrest in 1970, he had spent the last two decades of his life refusing a deal that would have saved it. His last words were: "My struggle is over; yours continues."
Those words are the spiritual heart of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church. They contain the entire story: the struggle that began in a Transylvanian synod in 1701, when Romanian Orthodox clergy entered union with Rome under Habsburg pressure and genuine religious conviction; the century and a half of building schools, defending Romanian language and culture, producing the intellectuals who gave Romania its national identity; the four decades of underground existence after 1948; the return after 1989 to find that churches, properties, and generations of memory had been taken; and the continuing effort to rebuild what the Communists tried to erase.
Today the Romanian Greek Catholic Church is a Major Archiepiscopal Church — elevated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 — with approximately 300,000–400,000 active faithful in Romania and scattered diaspora communities including the Eparchy of Saint George in Canton, Ohio. In June 2019, Pope Francis personally traveled to Blaj — the spiritual capital of Romanian Greek Catholicism — to beatify the seven imprisoned bishops on the same Field of Liberty where their church's story had begun three centuries before.
This is the complete history.
Byzantine Christianity Among Romanians: The Transylvanian Context
The Romanian people received Christianity in its Eastern, Byzantine form. Unlike the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians to their west and north, who were Christianized by Latin missionaries from Rome, the Romanians were Christianized through the Byzantine tradition, sharing the liturgical heritage of Constantinople, the Church Slavonic language of sacred worship, and the Eastern theological formation that emphasized theosis, iconography, and the liturgical year as the primary framework of Christian life.
By the 17th century, the Romanian population of Transylvania — the historically contested region of central Europe that forms the heart of the story — was overwhelmingly Orthodox. Transylvania had passed into Habsburg control in 1688, following the long Ottoman occupation, and the Habsburg imperial project involved, among other things, the promotion of Catholic Christianity over both Orthodoxy and Protestantism. Transylvanian Romanians found themselves in a difficult position: a Christian majority in their own villages, but at the bottom of the legal and social hierarchy of the Habsburg system, below the Magyar Catholic nobility, below the Saxon Lutheran townspeople, and below the Armenian Catholic merchants. Their Orthodox faith was tolerated but not recognized; the Romanian Orthodox Church had no legal standing in the imperial order.
It was into this context that the question of union with Rome arrived. For the Habsburg authorities, a uniate Romanian church meant another Catholic constituency aligned with Vienna. For at least some of the Romanian clergy, union with Rome offered something even more valuable: legal recognition, educational opportunity, and — potentially — equal standing with the other recognized communities of Transylvania. The convergence of these interests produced the event that created the Romanian Greek Catholic Church.
The Union of Blaj (1698–1701): A New Church Is Born
The union was negotiated and enacted in stages between 1698 and 1701 — a process often called the "Union of Blaj," though the synods that effected it met at various locations before Blaj became the church's spiritual and educational center. The key figure in the early negotiations was Metropolitan Atanasie Anghel, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania, who in October 1698 convened a synod of Romanian clergy at Alba Iulia and agreed to the terms of union with Rome.
The terms were straightforward: the Romanian clergy accepted the four points of difference between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (papal primacy, the Filioque, purgatory, and unleavened bread in the Eucharist), and in exchange they were promised the same rights and freedoms as the Roman Catholic clergy of the Empire. They kept everything else: their Byzantine liturgy, Church Slavonic and Romanian in worship, the Julian calendar, the iconostasis, married clergy, and the entire Eastern ecclesiastical tradition that had been theirs for centuries. The union was with Rome, not into Latin Catholicism.
The synod of 1698 was followed by further affirmations in 1699 and 1700. Pope Clement XI formally accepted the union and established the Greek Catholic See of Făgăraș-Alba Iulia in 1701. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church had come into existence.
The Romanian clergy who accepted the union in 1698–1701 did so on explicit conditions: they would keep the Byzantine liturgy in Romanian and Church Slavonic; they would maintain the Eastern calendar; they would retain married clergy; and their iconostases, vestments, and liturgical traditions would remain unchanged. They entered union with Rome as an Eastern church, not as a church transitioning to Latin practice. This distinction — genuine Eastern identity within Catholic communion — is what the church fought to maintain for the next three centuries, against Habsburg Latinizing pressure, against Communist suppression, and against the ongoing temptation of assimilation.
Inocențiu Micu-Klein: The Bishop Who Fought for Romanian Rights
The first great figure of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church was not a martyr — he was a fighter, and his weapons were petitions, legal arguments, and an absolutely relentless insistence on the rights his people had been promised and denied. Inocențiu Micu-Klein (consecrated bishop in 1728) was the first bishop of the Greek Catholic diocese of Făgăraș-Alba Iulia to serve for an extended tenure, and he became the most important Romanian intellectual and political advocate of the 18th century.
Micu-Klein had understood from the beginning what the Union of Blaj was supposed to deliver: not merely ecclesiastical recognition but the equal legal and social standing of the Romanian nation in Transylvania. The Habsburgs had promised that Greek Catholic clergy would receive the same rights as Roman Catholic clergy. What actually happened was a series of delays, qualifications, and practical refusals. The Roman Catholic noble establishment of Transylvania had no interest in elevating the Romanian peasantry to their level, regardless of what Rome or Vienna had technically promised.
Micu-Klein spent his entire episcopate fighting this. He petitioned the Emperor repeatedly, arguing that Romanians were the original inhabitants of Transylvania, that their union with Rome entitled them to equal rights under the law, and that the promises made in 1698–1701 were legally binding. He traveled to Vienna to press his case in person. He was exiled, recalled, tried, and eventually forced to spend the last twenty-three years of his life in Rome after the Habsburg authorities issued an arrest warrant for him in 1744. He died in Rome in 1768, never having returned to the land he had fought for so fiercely.
His significance for Romanian history goes far beyond the church: Micu-Klein was the first articulate voice for Romanian national rights, the forerunner of the national movement that would eventually produce the modern Romanian state. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church, from its very founding, was inseparable from the cause of Romanian national identity and human dignity.
The Church and the Romanian National Awakening
The connection between the Romanian Greek Catholic Church and Romanian national identity — which Micu-Klein had established in the 18th century — deepened through the Transylvanian School (Școala Ardeleană) of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This intellectual movement, centered at Blaj and staffed largely by Greek Catholic clergy and scholars, produced the foundational works of modern Romanian linguistics, historiography, and national consciousness.
The Transylvanian School argued — persuasively and with genuine scholarly rigor — that the Romanian people were the direct descendants of Roman colonists from the ancient province of Dacia, that Romanian was a Latin language, and that Romanians were therefore a people of equivalent cultural status to any other European nation. These arguments had both scholarly and political implications: they were deployed against the Magyar and Saxon elites who denied Romanian equality, and they provided the intellectual foundation for Romanian national identity in both Transylvania and the other Romanian principalities.
The Greek Catholic institutions at Blaj — the cathedral school, the theological academy, the printing press — were the institutional backbone of this intellectual movement. The Greek Catholic clergy who ran them were, in the most concrete and practical sense, the educators who created the literate Romanian national class. When the Romanian national consciousness crystallized in the revolutions of 1848 and the eventual unification of Romania in 1918, the Greek Catholic Church of Transylvania was its oldest and most consistent institutional patron.
This historical role — as the church that gave Romania its national identity — is part of what made the Communist suppression of 1948 so devastating and so specifically targeted. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church was not suppressed primarily because of its liturgical distinctiveness or its relationship to Rome, though these were the official grounds. It was suppressed because it was the church of Romanian national consciousness, and the Communist government recognized that a nationally conscious, Rome-connected church was incompatible with the project of a Soviet-aligned Romanian state.
Byzantine Icons for Prayer
The Icons the Romanian Greek Catholics Kept in Their Homes When Their Churches Were Taken
The Eparchies: Building a Church Across Transylvania
Over the 18th and 19th centuries, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church built the canonical structures that would serve it until their violent destruction in 1948. The process was gradual, contested at every stage by both Habsburg resistance to expanding Romanian institutional power and by ongoing tensions with the remaining Orthodox community, which never fully reconciled itself to the 1701 union.
The Metropolitan See of Făgăraș-Alba Iulia, headquartered at Blaj, was the mother church. Blaj — a small city in the Transylvanian heartland — became the intellectual and spiritual capital of Romanian Greek Catholicism: the site of its cathedral, its theological academy, its printing press, and its schools. When the Romanian revolutionary national assembly met at Blaj in 1848 to demand rights and equality — an event that defined Romanian national consciousness in Transylvania — it met on the Field of Liberty in the shadow of the Greek Catholic cathedral. The same field where Pope Francis would beatify the martyred bishops 171 years later.
Additional eparchies were created as the church grew and as administrative needs changed. The Diocese of Lugoj was created in 1853 for the Banat region of western Romania. The Diocese of Oradea Mare (previously known under various titles) served the northwestern Bihor region. The Diocese of Maramureș was established for the mountainous northern region of the same name. These dioceses, together with the Metropolitan See of Blaj and later a diocese in Cluj-Gherla, constituted the full canonical structure of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church as it existed in 1948.
By the late 19th century, the Church claimed over a million faithful in Transylvania and neighboring regions — roughly a quarter to a third of the Romanian population of the Habsburg territories. It ran hundreds of schools, from village primary schools to secondary institutions in Blaj and Lugoj that produced the leading Romanian intellectuals of the age. It was institutionally strong, culturally confident, and theologically mature. It was exactly the kind of institution that a totalitarian state would recognize as a threat — and move to destroy.
The Night of November 28, 1948: All the Bishops Arrested
The Romanian Communist government moved against the Greek Catholic Church with speed, coordination, and total ruthlessness. The process began with a presidential decree on August 1, 1948, formally dissolving the church and transferring its property to the Romanian Orthodox Church. The state then convened a series of "unity meetings" at which Greek Catholic priests were pressured — with threats to their families, their livelihoods, and their freedom — to sign declarations of conversion to Orthodoxy. Many priests refused. Many parishes refused. The resistance was substantial and the government had anticipated it.
On the night of November 28, 1948, the security apparatus moved. All seven Greek Catholic bishops were arrested simultaneously — a coordinated action designed to decapitate the church's leadership in a single stroke. From that night until the fall of Communism forty-one years later, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church had no free bishop on Romanian soil.
The government offered the bishops a deal that was, by the standards of Communist persecutions, relatively generous: renounce communion with Rome, accept the authority of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch, and take positions in the Orthodox hierarchy. The bishops would keep their episcopal dignity, their freedom, their lives. All they had to do was abandon the Pope.
All seven refused.
From that night onward, the only Romanian-language Divine Liturgy available to the faithful inside Romania was the broadcast from Vatican Radio — the signal that reached through the Iron Curtain into the homes of Greek Catholics who were secretly keeping their faith alive in the absence of any public worship.
The Seven Blessed Martyrs: Bishops Who Would Not Abandon Rome
On June 2, 2019, Pope Francis traveled to Blaj — the spiritual capital of Romanian Greek Catholicism, the city of the 1701 union, the Field of Liberty — to celebrate a Divine Liturgy and beatify the seven bishops who had died in Communist prisons rather than renounce Rome. He was the first pope to personally preside over a beatification in Romania, and the choice of Blaj as the location was a deliberate act of theological memory: the church was restored in its heart, in the presence of the successor of the Pope its founders had chosen, on the ground where Romanian national identity had been forged.
The seven bishops — now formally Blessed — are:
Blessed Iuliu Hossu
Bishop of Cluj-Gherla. Arrested October 28, 1948. Imprisoned sixteen years; released 1964 but kept under house arrest. Named Cardinal in pectore (in secret) by Pope Paul VI in 1969 — he never knew. Died in hospital, Bucharest, 1970. His last words: "My struggle is over; yours continues."
Blessed Valeriu Traian Frentiu
Bishop of Oradea. Ordained bishop at only 37. Arrested 1948 and spent the rest of his life in a concentration camp. Died 1952 at the Văcărești prison. His body was thrown into an unmarked grave.
Blessed Vasile Aftenie
Auxiliary Bishop of Făgăraș. When he encountered 36 Greek Catholic priests who had signed conversion declarations, he rebuked them publicly. Arrested 1948. Tortured at the Interior Ministry. Died of his wounds May 10, 1950.
Blessed Ioan Suciu
Auxiliary Bishop of Făgăraș. Ordained priest 1931. Before his arrest, wrote to the faithful: "Do not be deceived by vain words, promises, lies… We cannot sell Christ or the Church." Died of hunger and disease in prison, 1953.
Blessed Tit Liviu Chinezu
Ordained bishop in prison by his fellow imprisoned bishops. When the secret of his ordination leaked, he was transferred to a harder prison. Died of cold and hunger January 15, 1955.
Blessed Ioan Bălan
Bishop of Lugoj from 1936. Arrested 1948. Never tried or convicted — simply imprisoned without legal process. Moved between multiple prisons until he became gravely ill and was transferred to Bucharest, where he died.
Blessed Alexandru Rusu
Bishop of Maramureș from 1931; elected Metropolitan in 1946. Arrested October 28, 1948. Sentenced to 25 years for "instigation and high treason." Died in Sighet prison, 1963, from kidney disease — without any religious rite at burial.
The Underground Church (1948–1989)
For forty-one years — longer than most of its faithful had been alive — the Romanian Greek Catholic Church existed underground. Without bishops (all imprisoned or dead), without churches (all transferred to Orthodoxy), without legal recognition, and under constant surveillance by the Securitate (the Romanian secret police), the church survived through the commitment of priests who served clandestinely and families who kept their faith in private homes and secret gatherings.
The clandestine church developed remarkable mechanisms of survival. Priests ordained secretly by the imprisoned bishops (as Bishop Chinezu had himself been ordained) served hidden communities. Some priests publicly registered as Orthodox to maintain a semblance of legal existence while privately continuing to identify and minister as Greek Catholics. Networks of loyal families passed down the faith through catechesis in the home, through the Byzantine prayers and hymns kept alive in domestic worship, and through the Vatican Radio broadcasts that brought the Romanian-language Divine Liturgy into homes where it could not be heard anywhere else.
The price of this underground existence was enormous. Priests who were discovered were arrested, tried, and imprisoned. The Securitate penetrated Catholic networks repeatedly, using informers who had been coerced or recruited into cooperation. Many clergy were imprisoned multiple times. The psychological cost of living a double life — officially Orthodox, secretly Greek Catholic — was severe, and some could not sustain it.
But the church survived. When 1989 came and the Communist regime fell — and Nicolae Ceaușescu was executed on Christmas Day of that year — there were still Greek Catholics in Romania. There were still priests. There were still communities that had kept the faith. The suppression had been total in its aims and forty years long in its duration, and it had failed.
The 1989 Revolution and the Church's Restoration
The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 — which ended with Ceaușescu's arrest, trial, and execution on December 25 — brought immediate legal recognition to the Romanian Greek Catholic Church. The new post-Communist government formally restored the church's legal status, and the parishes and communities that had existed underground immediately emerged into public life.
The restoration was simultaneously triumphant and painful. Triumphant because forty-one years of underground existence had produced a community that was in many ways spiritually stronger for having been tested — a church whose remaining faithful were those who had refused every offer of apostasy and had maintained their Byzantine Catholic identity at personal cost. Painful because the material reality of 1989 was that the buildings, properties, and institutional infrastructure of the pre-1948 church were overwhelmingly in other hands.
Bishops and priests who had survived Communist rule — often elderly men who had spent years in prison — began rebuilding. New priests were ordained. Communities that had worshiped in secret began worshiping publicly. The theological academy at Blaj was reopened. New churches were built where old ones could not be recovered. In 2005, Pope John Paul II beatified seven more Romanian martyrs (this time including both Greek Catholic and Latin Catholic figures), further recognizing the depth of Catholic suffering under Communism in Romania.
Pope John Paul II had visited Romania in May 1999 — the first papal visit to a majority Orthodox country since the Great Schism of 1054 — and had been received with an extraordinary ecumenical welcome from the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch Teoctist. The visit, in the shadow of communism's recent fall and in the context of the shared suffering of Catholic and Orthodox alike under the atheist regime, represented a moment of genuine reconciliation between the two communities.
The Property Disputes: Churches That Still Have Not Been Returned
The most persistent unresolved wound in the Romanian Greek Catholic Church's post-1989 life is the property question. In 1948, the Communist government transferred the entire Greek Catholic Church's property to the Romanian Orthodox Church — its church buildings, monasteries, schools, and land. After 1989, Romanian law provided in principle for the restitution of confiscated religious property, but implementation has been slow, contested, and deeply incomplete.
The Romanian Orthodox Church, which received the Greek Catholic property in 1948 and has maintained it for over seventy years, has generally been unwilling to return it. Orthodox parishes that have used Greek Catholic church buildings for generations now have congregations that genuinely feel the buildings are theirs. The political will to force returns has been limited in Romanian governments that are sensitive to Orthodox Church opinion. By 2020, according to church reports, approximately 800 churches had been returned to the Greek Catholic community — a significant number, but out of many hundreds more that remain in dispute or Orthodox hands.
This property conflict is the sharpest remaining tension in Romanian Catholic-Orthodox relations. Pope Francis addressed it directly during his 2019 visit, urging resolution and stating that "the union among all Christians, although incomplete, is based on one Baptism and is sealed by the blood and suffering suffered together in the dark times of persecution." The blood and suffering were indeed shared — Greek Catholics and Orthodox alike suffered under Communism — but the post-Communist institutional reality has remained unequal, with the Greek Catholic Church still working to recover what was taken from it.
Pope Benedict XVI and the Major Archeparchy (2005)
On December 16, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI elevated the Romanian Greek Catholic Church from an archdiocese to the status of a Major Archiepiscopal Church — one of the highest canonical forms of self-governance available to an Eastern Catholic church, placing it in the same canonical category as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and a small number of other large Eastern Catholic communities.
The elevation recognized both the church's historical significance and its recovery from Communist suppression. A Major Archiepiscopal Church has the right to elect its own Major Archbishop (subject to papal confirmation), to govern its own internal affairs through its synod of bishops, and to exercise a degree of canonical autonomy significantly greater than a simple archdiocese. For a church that had spent forty-one years suppressed by a government that denied its right to exist, the elevation was a statement of institutional confidence and international recognition.
The Major Archbishop is based at Blaj, the city that has been the spiritual center of Romanian Greek Catholicism since the early 18th century. The church's synod of bishops — comprising the heads of all the eparchies — governs the church's internal affairs. The current eparchies form a comprehensive canonical structure covering all of Romania, with particular strength in the historically Greek Catholic regions of Transylvania and Banat.
| Eparchy | Seat | Region |
|---|---|---|
| Major Archdiocese of Făgăraș–Alba Iulia (Metropolitan See) | Blaj | Central Transylvania; also encompasses communities in Bucharest |
| Eparchy of Cluj-Gherla | Cluj-Napoca | Northwestern Transylvania |
| Eparchy of Lugoj | Lugoj | Banat region, western Romania |
| Eparchy of Oradea Mare | Oradea | Bihor region, northwest Romania |
| Eparchy of Maramureș | Baia Mare / Sighetu Marmației | Maramureș region, far north Romania |
| Eparchy of St. Basil the Great (Bucharest) | Bucharest | Southern Romania and Bucharest |
Pope Francis in Blaj (2019): The Beatification on the Field of Liberty
Pope Francis's visit to Romania from May 31 to June 2, 2019, was one of the most symbolically charged papal visits of his pontificate. He celebrated Mass in the Latin Rite in Bucharest, visited the Marian pilgrimage shrine of Șumuleu-Ciuc in Transylvania, met with the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church, and then traveled to Blaj — to the Field of Liberty, the same ground where Romanian national consciousness had been proclaimed in 1848 and where the church whose bishops died in Communist prisons had its spiritual roots.
There, on June 2, 2019, he celebrated a Byzantine Divine Liturgy and personally beatified the seven imprisoned bishops. It was the first beatification by a sitting Pope on Romanian soil, and the choice to make it a Byzantine rather than a Latin liturgy — conducted in Romanian according to Eastern rites — was itself a theological statement about what the Romanian Greek Catholic Church is and what the Catholic Church's relationship to Eastern Christianity means.
Pope Francis declared the seven bishops' martyrdom in the most direct terms: they "have given all to defend the Church. And at the cost of their lives, they did not accept the situation; they did not deny their very faith." He recalled the forty-one years of Vatican Radio as the only source of Romanian-language liturgy inside the country — a detail that captures the specific, concrete way in which the Church had kept faith with the imprisoned community. And he said: "The Catholic community, both Greek and Latin, is alive and active. We have shown that unity does not take away legitimate diversity."
The liturgical chair from which he presided — made from the wooden planks of prison beds and iron bars from prison windows — was perhaps the most theologically eloquent object in modern Catholic liturgy. The instruments of martyrdom had become the throne of honor.
The Liturgy: Byzantine Rite in Romanian
The Romanian Greek Catholic Church celebrates the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in Romanian — its own national language, which it has used in worship since the 19th century (historically alongside Church Slavonic in earlier centuries). This combination of Byzantine form and Romanian language is both historically natural — Romanian is a Romance language of Latin origin, making it an improbable but genuine carrier of a Byzantine liturgical tradition — and theologically significant, as it reflects the church's specific character as a Byzantine church that is also fully Romanian.
The liturgy is fully Eastern: the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom in its standard Byzantine form, with the iconostasis, Byzantine vestments and chant, the Eastern calendar (though many parishes now also observe December 25 for Christmas alongside January 7), and the Eastern sacramental tradition including leavened bread for the Eucharist and communion under both kinds. Married men may be ordained priests in the Byzantine canonical tradition. The liturgical books used today include a modern Romanian translation of the Byzantine missal.
| Feature | Romanian Greek Catholic Practice |
|---|---|
| Liturgical Language | Romanian (primary); Church Slavonic (historical); some Greek ceremonial use |
| Rite | Byzantine (full Eastern practice) |
| Divine Liturgy | Saint John Chrysostom (standard); Saint Basil (great feasts & Lent); Pre-Sanctified Gifts (Lent weekdays) |
| Clergy | Married men may be ordained priests; bishops celibate |
| Calendar | Primarily Julian; many parishes also observe Gregorian Christmas (Dec 25) |
| Canonical Status | Major Archiepiscopal Church (sui iuris) since 2005; directly under Holy See |
| Headquarters | Blaj, Transylvania (Major Archdiocese of Făgăraș–Alba Iulia) |
| US Jurisdiction | Eparchy of Saint George, Canton, Ohio (covers all North America) |
| Blessed Martyrs | Seven bishops beatified by Pope Francis, Blaj, June 2, 2019 (Feast: June 2) |
Icons for Prayer and Home
The Byzantine Tradition the Romanian Martyrs Died to Preserve
The Romanian Greek Catholic Church in America
Romanian Greek Catholic immigration to the United States came in the same broad Carpathian immigrant wave that brought Ruthenian, Slovak, and Hungarian Greek Catholics to the industrial cities of the American northeast and midwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like these other communities, Romanian Greek Catholics arrived without canonical provision — there was no Romanian Byzantine bishop, no Romanian Byzantine eparchy, and no Romanian Byzantine institutional structure in America. They were Eastern Catholics in a country where "Catholic" meant Latin Catholic, and where even the most sympathetic Latin bishops had little framework for understanding their tradition.
Romanian immigrants — both Greek Catholics and Latin Catholics — settled primarily in the industrial cities where Romanian labor was in demand: Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and the mill towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. In Cleveland, Romanian Greek Catholics established early communities that maintained Byzantine worship even when attending Latin-rite Romanian parishes out of necessity. In Chicago, St. Mary's Romanian Catholic Church (founded around 1915) served as a community center for both Latin and Byzantine Romanians.
The post-World War II wave of Romanian immigration included significant numbers of political exiles — Romanians who had fled the Communist takeover and specifically, in many cases, Greek Catholics who had fled because their church had been suppressed. These exiles brought with them a sharper awareness of Greek Catholic identity and a stronger motivation to maintain it institutionally, since many had left Romania precisely because the Communist government was trying to erase that identity.
The diaspora community grew further after 1989 with economic emigration from post-Communist Romania, and has continued to grow into the 21st century. Today Romanian-Americans are one of the larger recent immigrant groups in certain American cities, and the Romanian Greek Catholic community has benefited from this demographic growth.
The Eparchy of Saint George, Canton, Ohio
The canonical structure for Romanian Catholics in North America — both Greek Catholic (Byzantine Rite) and Latin Catholic — is the Romanian Catholic Eparchy of Saint George in Canton, Ohio. The eparchy was formally established in 1987 (with roots in an earlier apostolic exarchate created in 1982) and covers the entire United States and Canada for Romanian Catholics of both rites.
The current bishop is Bishop John Michael Botean, who has served since 1994 and is the longest-serving active Eastern Catholic bishop in North America. He is notable for his pastoral warmth toward the Romanian community, his commitment to the Eastern liturgical tradition, and his active role in promoting the cause of the seven martyred bishops — including organizing an American tour of their relics after the 2019 beatification.
The eparchy is relatively small — Romanian Catholics in America number in the tens of thousands — but it is institutionally active. In December 2024, relics of three of the seven beatified bishops toured the United States under the eparchy's organization, making stops at Romanian Greek Catholic communities across the country. At St. Mary Romanian Greek Catholic Mission in Astoria, Queens (hosted by Holy Cross Ukrainian Catholic Church in Long Island City), the relics drew faithful who described the experience in deeply personal terms. "I'm really proud of them," said one parishioner from Romania. "I believe that their sacrifice is going to bring some kind of fruit."
St. Mary Romanian Greek Catholic Mission, Astoria, Queens, NY — active Byzantine Rite community, hosted relics tour December 2024
St. Mary's Romanian Catholic Church, Chicago, IL (est. ~1915) — historic Romanian Catholic community serving both Byzantine and Latin Rite
Holy Resurrection Romanian Greek Catholic Monastery, Wisconsin — monastic community maintaining Byzantine Romanian tradition
Cleveland, OH — significant Romanian community with multiple parishes
Communities also in: New York metropolitan area, Detroit, Los Angeles, and cities with significant recent Romanian immigration
The Relics Tour: The Martyrs Come to America
One of the most remarkable recent developments in American Romanian Greek Catholic life was the December 2024 relics tour organized by the Eparchy of Saint George. Relics from three of the seven beatified bishops — Iuliu Hossu, Valeriu Traian Frentiu, and Alexandru Rusu — traveled to Romanian Greek Catholic communities across the United States, including the stop at St. Mary Mission in Astoria. For Romanian-American faithful, many of whom had come from Romania specifically because of Communist persecution, the opportunity to venerate the relics of bishops who had died rather than compromise their faith was an act of profound spiritual continuity. The martyrs who had been arrested in 1948 were now, in a sense, present among the diaspora community that their sacrifice had helped sustain.
The Church Today
The Romanian Greek Catholic Church today is a church that has survived the near-impossible and is still building. Its active faithful number approximately 300,000–400,000 in Romania, concentrated primarily in the historically Greek Catholic regions of Transylvania and Banat. Its institutional life has been substantially rebuilt since 1989: theological academies, schools, new churches, and active parishes across the six eparchies.
The ongoing property dispute with the Romanian Orthodox Church remains the most tangible unresolved wound of the Communist era. Approximately 800 churches have been returned since 1989, but many more remain in Orthodox hands, and the legal and political process of restitution continues to move slowly. The relationship between the two communities — who share a common Byzantine heritage, a common Romanian culture, and a common history of suffering under Communism — is complex: genuinely warm in many personal and pastoral interactions, but institutionally strained over the property question.
The beatification of the seven bishops in 2019 was the most significant recent event in the church's life — not merely as a liturgical milestone but as a statement about identity. The bishops who died rather than abandon Rome are now formally recognized as models of faith for the universal Catholic Church. Their feast day is June 2. Their relics are being venerated in Romanian communities across the world. And their story — of a church suppressed, forced underground, maintained in prison cells and domestic chapels and Vatican Radio broadcasts, and restored after forty-one years — is the story that gives the present-day Romanian Greek Catholic Church its deepest sense of who it is and what it represents.
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"My Struggle Is Over; Yours Continues"
Seven bishops, arrested on a single night in November 1948. Forty-one years of underground worship in homes and secret gatherings. A beatification in Blaj on the Field of Liberty, from a chair made of prison planks and iron bars. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church carried an extraordinary weight. It carries it still — and offers, in exchange, an extraordinary witness to what faith looks like when it costs everything.
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