The Romanian Greek‐Catholic church

Abstract

The Romanians are very proud of their Latin heritage and traditions; as the name implies, their language belongs to the 'romance' or neo-Latin family, and some historians have even argued that Romanians are descendants of a Roman garrison stationed in Dacia. However, they received the Christian faith from Constantinople in the Eastern Orthodox form. After Latin, the Slavic languages exercised an important influence on Romanian culture. For centuries the Romanian Orthodox Church conducted divine services in Church Slavonic. Even after adopting vernacular Romanian for use in scripture and liturgy, the Romanians continued to use the Church Slavonic alphabet for ecclesiastical purposes. One can still find icons with the inscriptions written in Romanian but in Church Slavonic letters, and even as late as the early nineteenth century Orthodox service-books were sometimes printed in vernacular Romanian with Church Slavonic letters. I Philologists often estimate that 80 per cent of the vocabulary of vernacular Romanian consists of words of Latin origin, while the remaining 20 per cent consists of words of Slavic origin. Like everyone else in the region, the Romanians were conquered by the Muslim Turks; but the Romanian princes, the hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia, succeeded in retaining some autonomy within the Turkish empire, and thus provided the nucleus of the modern Romanian state. However, a very substantial proportion of the Romanian people lived not in those principalities, but in Transylvania. After the Turks were eventually pushed back towards Anatolia, Transylvania became part of the Habsburg dominions, and was formally incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary under the 'Dual Monarchy' arrangement of Austria-Hungary in the nineteenth century. The Protestant Reformation was influential in Transylvania; there is still a substantial Reformed Church in the region, tracing its inspiration to Calvinism, and it made significant inroads into the Eastern Orthodox community. The Calvinist challenge is believed to have been the decisive factor in the Romanian Orthodox move to translate the divine services into the vernacular, since the ordinary faithful (and even the lower clergy) could not understand Church Slavonic. According to oral tradition, these translations appear to have been accomplished by the end of the seventeenth century; no doubt they were circulating in manuscripts much earlier. The effort succeeded: the balance between the Orthodox and the Protestants stabilised, and rather in favour of the Orthodox.