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ROMANIA-PRUNIS Aug-3-2004 (970 words) Backgrounder. xxxi
Elderly Romanians fight for return of village's Catholic church
By Jonathan Luxmoore
Catholic News Service
PRUNIS, Romania (CNS) -- When 80-year-old Ioan Sabau inherited his tiny farmstead from his father four decades ago, communist rule was at its height and the Eastern Catholic church to which his family had always belonged was outlawed.
Today, like other Catholics, Sabau still savors the freedom restored after Romania's revolution 14 years ago. But he feels bitter when he gazes up at the gray-walled church, now covered with scaffolding set up by the Orthodox. For the past year, the Orthodox have kept the church bolted shut.
"I'm just hoping new times will come, and it'll be given back to us," Sabau told Catholic News Service. "This church is part of our life, the place where our ancestors lie buried. But now the Orthodox priest won't even allow us to pray there."
Like other villages, Prunis was traditionally inhabited by Eastern-rite Catholics, who celebrate the Eastern liturgy but are in union with Rome.
After World War II, when the Romanian Catholic Church, an Eastern rite, was suppressed, local Christians were placed under Orthodox supervision. When communist rule ended, over half the village's 150 households signed a list certifying they wished to go back to being Eastern Catholics.
It took them until 1999 to regain possession of the church.
Within a year, trouble started when an Orthodox group arrived at the church after Mass and roughed up the Eastern Catholic priest, Father Vasile Pop.
Local police took no action. When Sabau and his neighbors complained to the local council, they were advised to revert to Orthodoxy.
Catholics and Orthodox agreed to use the church on alternate Sundays. In the meantime, Eastern Catholics won two separate court cases concerning the church, but an appeal judge overturned both rulings and placed the building in Orthodox hands.
Over the past year, the church has been renovated and repainted to erase all Catholic traces. Although the Orthodox priest lives in Cluj, 20 miles down the valley, Orthodox own the rectory, too. Father Pop no longer lives in the village and returns occasionally for Masses in private houses.
Sabau's wife, Emilia, was beaten when she and an elderly friend tried to protect the priest.
The women said they believe local officials, many former communists, were bribed to take the Orthodox side. Although Father Pop has advised patience, some villagers worry that they will not be allowed to rest alongside family members when they die.
"The Orthodox are insisting it'll be theirs forever," one villager told CNS.
"There was never any problem between ordinary people here. It all started when people from outside the village came and set Orthodox and Catholics against each other," the villager said.
Before World War II, most churches in Romania's Transylvania region belonged to the Romanian Catholic Church. When communists repressed the church in 1948, more than 5,000 Eastern Catholic buildings were taken over by state institutions and Orthodox dioceses.
Eastern Catholics say only 136 properties have been returned since the church was re-legalized in 1990; they have urged the European Union to make restitutions a condition for Romania's accession in 2007.
However, Orthodox make up about 87 percent of Romania's 21.7 million inhabitants, and Orthodox leaders have dismissed Catholic property demands, claiming demographic changes have left the Romanian Catholic Church with only one-seventh of the 1.64 million members it boasted in the early 20th century.
A 2001 Romanian law on private property restitution exempted church buildings, while a 2002 law on "restoring certain properties" to churches has not been signed by President Ion Iliescu.
A Catholic-Orthodox commission set up in 1998 has failed to make progress on property disputes.
In September 2003, the Catholic Diocese of Cluj-Gherla published a list of local disputes, all involving abuse and intimidation, in what Catholics insist is a deliberate attempt to eradicate their presence.
Things could turn out differently in the case of Prunis.
In 2002, the Sabaus and 70 other elderly villagers appealed to the European Court of Human Rights for the return of the church.
A counterpetition was quickly assembled by Orthodox families.
But Father Matei Boila, a Cluj-based canon law professor who helped draft the appeal, thinks legal challenges like this could bring Romania's long-running Catholic-Orthodox feud to a head by attracting interest from human rights groups.
For traditional communities like Prunis, the church is not just a building, but a way of life, Father Boila said. He blamed the government for failing to regulate church property issues.
"The Orthodox know the people go with the buildings and fear they'll lose whole congregations if they give Catholic places of worship back," said Father Boila.
"All evidence suggests our current disputes could be settled under existing Romanian laws. But the Orthodox sense an open-ended discussion will enable them to postpone a settlement indefinitely -- particularly while the government insists the churches should tackle their own disputes through negotiation," he said.
From the university city of Cluj, a battered road runs uphill through the pine forest and out into a blaze of moorland, where Prunis villagers in boots and head scarves gather to gossip among the wayside crosses and apple orchards.
When the Sabaus were married in 1947, they just had time to have their first son baptized before the Romanian Catholic Church was banned. Their children have long since quit to work in the city, leaving Prunis and its problems to its mostly elderly inhabitants.
The Sabaus still labor in the fields to eke out their meager state pensions, using their horse-drawn cart to sell eggs and gather firewood. Their greatest priority is to see the church finally returned.
"In communist times, we weren't allowed anything -- everything was the regime's property," Ioan Sabau told CNS. "So why, now they say we're free, aren't we allowed to worship God as we want?"
END
Copyright (c) 2004 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method, in whole or in part without the prior written authority of Catholic News Service.
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