Csiksomlyo in Hungarian, for one of their biggest pilgrimages, the Hungarian News Agency MTI and Hungary’s Duna Television reported. The massive Holy Mass Saturday, May 18, was meant to to encourage Catholics "to preserve" the Christian faith, said the regional Archbishop Gyorgy Jakubinyi.
Most visitors came from Hungary and Romania’s region Transylvania, where about 2 million ethnic Hungarians live. Others came from Slovakia, Germany and as far as Argentina and Australia, MTI said.
MOTHERLAND
Speaking to the crowd, Archbishop Jakubinyi urged the Christians to "remain loyal to one’s motherland and foster both one’s religion and mother tongue."
The gathering would have been difficult more than a decade ago, when Hungarian Christians in Romania were persecuted under communism and the rule of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed on Christmas Day, 1989.
Several priests and bishops were tortured or killed, and an estimated 2,500 Catholic churches were seized by the communists since 1948 and transferred to parishes of the Orthodox Church.
TENSIONS
Since the bloody 1989 revolution, Christians have gradually received more freedoms, although tensions remained high between the Catholic and the Orthodox Church, the dominant denomination in this country of just over 22 million people.
However analysts say that the situation somewhat improved since Pope John Paul II arrived in Romania in 1999 for the first ever visit by a pontiff to a mainly Eastern Orthodox Christian country in almost 1,000 years.
The Pope has said he would like to help "heal the wounds” in the relations between the two churches, referring to the persecution of Catholics under communism.
