ORADEA MARE (NAGY-VÁRAD, GROSS WARDEN, GRAN VARADINO), DIOCESE OF. – United Catholic diocese in northwestern Transylvania, in Romania after 1918.
After the ecclesiastical union of part of the Romanians of Transylvania with Rome (1700), the United Romanians of this region depended on the Hungarian Latin bishopric of O. M. On 12 July 1748, Benedict XIV established in the same city a vicariate 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 vicar. On 16 July 1777, with the bull Indefessum personarum, Pius VI, in agreement with Maria Theresa, transformed this vicariate into a Romanian United diocese, assigning it, by the apostolic brief Ad cumulum of 23 June 1777, as a suffragan of the Latin archbishopric of Esztergom. The first United bishop of O. M. was Moise Dragoș. When an autonomous ecclesiastical province was created for the United Romanians in 1853, this bishopric became a suffragan of the United metropolitan see of Fiigăraș-Alba Giulia (Blaj).
In the United 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 population of 850,122. Bishop since 1922 has been Msgr. Valerio Trajano Frențiu, now in prison.