Oradea Mare, Diocese of

ORADEA MARE (Nagy-Várad, Grosswardein, Gran Varadino), Diocese of. - A united Catholic diocese in north-western Transylvania, in Romania after 1918.

After the ecclesiastical union of a part of the Romanians of Transylvania with Rome (1700), the Uniates of this region depended on the Hungarian Latin bishopric of O. M. On 12 July 1748, Benedict XIV established in the same city a vicar with jurisdiction over the Romanians of the Eastern rite living in the Latin dioceses of O. M., Csanád and Vács. Meletie Kovacs, a Romanian from Macedonia, was appointed as vicar. On 16 July 1777, with the bull Indefessum personarum, Pius VI, in agreement with Maria Theresa, transformed this vicariate into a Romanian-Uniate diocese, designating it, by the apostolic brief Ad cumulum of 23 June 1777, as a suffragan of the Latin archbishopric of Esztergom. The first Uniate bishop of O. M. was Moise Dragoș. When in 1853 an autonomous ecclesiastical province was created for the Romanian Uniates, this bishopric passed as a suffragan to the Uniate metropolis of Făgăraș-Alba Giulia (Blaj).

In the Uniate eparchy of O. M. (10,000 sq km) there were (in 1949) 285 churches and 235 parishes with 272 priests and 203,122 faithful out of a total of 850,122 inhabitants. The bishop, since 1922, is Msgr. Valerio Trajano Frențiu, today in prison.

Petre Vălimăreanu