The Confessors of Transylvania
The Romanian priests, monks and laymen of eighteenth-century Transylvania who refused the union with Rome and suffered imprisonment and death for the Orthodox faith, commemorated together on October 21.
In eighteenth-century Transylvania, under Habsburg rule, the Orthodox Romanians were pressed to accept union with Rome. Churches, monasteries and the right to a bishop of their own were tied to submission, and those who refused were treated as rebels. The five commemorated on October 21 are the best known of those who refused.
The monk Bessarion Sarai walked through the villages in 1744 preaching against the union and was arrested within weeks; he disappeared into the fortress of Kufstein in the Tyrol and was never heard of again. Sophronius of Cioara took up the same work a decade later and led a movement that won, for a time, the restoration of Orthodox worship. The priests Moses Macinic of Sibiel and John of Galesh were sent to the same Austrian prisons; the layman Oprea of Salistie, a peasant from the Marginime, twice carried the petitions of his people to Vienna and died in prison for it.
The Romanian Orthodox Church glorified them together in 1955, and they are commemorated on October 21. Their witness is a confession made not in the age of the Caesars but in the age of the Enlightenment, and made largely by parish priests and villagers rather than by hierarchs.
Timeline4 momentsReadHide
- 1700The union proclaimedThe Orthodox of Transylvania are brought under union with Rome; those who refuse lose churches and legal standing.
- 1744Bessarion Sarai preachesThe Serbian-born monk travels the Transylvanian villages calling the people back to Orthodoxy; arrested within weeks and imprisoned at Kufstein.
- 1756–1761Sophronius of CioaraA monk of Cioara leads a wide popular movement that briefly restores Orthodox worship in Transylvania.
- 1955GlorificationThe Romanian Orthodox Church numbers the Confessors of Transylvania among the saints.