The enforcement officer arrived accompanied by gendarmes, and spent hours on Tuesday recording and inventorying the monastery’s furnishings and personal belongings.
The abbot was given 30 days to vacate the monastery.
The court in Oradea ruled on January 29, at the request of the city administration, to evict Abbot Rudolf Anzelm Fejes, Provost-Prelate of Váradhegyfok.
The city administration had served the abbot with an eviction order last May, demanding that he vacate the Premonstratensian monastery, as it is considered city property and is to be renovated along with the building of the former Premonstratensian high school, the Mihai Eminescu High School. Since the abbot did not comply with the request, the city administration turned to the court, and they ruled in favor of eviction.
The abbot was celebrating Holy Mass in the Premonstratensian church on Tuesday morning when the bailiff arrived at 9 a.m., accompanied by nearly a hundred armed gendarmes.
About 40 worshipers remained on site to witness the eviction, which was broadcast live on the Premonstratensian Provostry’s Facebook page.
Among the protesters were László Tőkés, former bishop of the Reformed Church District of Királyhíd and chairman of the Hungarian National Council of Transylvania (EMNT), as well as László Toroczkai, chairman of the Our Homeland (“Mi Hazánk”) movement, one of the three parties represented in the Hungarian Parliament. Most of those present held signs reading “Thou shalt not steal!”
The abbot told the press that he would file a criminal complaint, as the bailiff and the gendarmes had “invaded” the premises of the provostry during Mass, broke open the side entrance door, and also entered the cloistered part of the monastery, which is shielded from the outside world.
The Hungarian clergyman stated that the court would hear his appeal, filed in the eviction proceedings, in two days.
“Even before the appeal hearing—as I see it—they want to be on the property to present the court with a fait accompli,”
he stated. He emphasized: “On the basis of an unclear land registry that can be described as forged,” they wanted to evict him by force.
Cristian Popescu, deputy head of the real estate department at the mayor’s office, who was present as a representative of the municipality, stated: The city administration is forced to take over the properties in order to renovate the school, since, according to the land registry, they also belong to the school building, which he can prove with documentation.
The case is just the tip of the iceberg: in recent years it has been a creeping trend in Romania to reverse the restitution of church properties belonging to the Hungarian community with the involvement of courts and predominantly Romanian municipal administrations. The redress of a historical injustice was a precondition for the country’s EU accession.
After European integration was completed, the restitution proceedings began to be delayed, a situation tacitly accepted by the relevant EU bodies. Encouraged by this inaction, the Romanian side proceeded to re-expropriate properties that had already been returned, using flimsy legal arguments.
In Nagyvárad, we are dealing with one of the many forged land registry entries that, like the Sword of Damocles, threatened the free practice of religion by Hungarian-speaking Catholics for decades during the interwar period. The mastermind behind this series of illegalities was none other than Onisifor Ghibu (1883–1972), who was responsible for the expulsion of the professors and the Romanian “takeover” of the Royal Hungarian Franz Joseph University in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár).
Toroczkai rightly claims that neither the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oradea nor the ruling Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (the representative body of Romania’s Hungarians), nor the Orbán government exerted any influence in the matter, which, in his opinion, is related to the fact that “the initiative was launched by the very mayor of Oradea who is now Romania’s prime minister.”
The leader of the Our Homeland Movement called on the future Hungarian prime minister to fulfill his promises to the Hungarian minority in Romania and to take political steps to halt the forced eviction.