ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH OF ROMANIA

an Eastern Catholic church of the Byzantine rite, in communion with Rome. The Byzantine rite Catholic Church originated after the Turks ceded Transylvania to the Catholic Habsburgs (1699); at that time a large group of Orthodox Romanians, pressed by the imperial government, accepted the authority of Rome. In 1948 the Byzantine rite church was legally suppressed by the Communist government, and many of its leaders were arrested or dispersed; other priests and the mass of the faithful (numbering about 1,500,000) were accepted into the Orthodox Church. There are approximately 10,000 Romanian Catholic faithful in the Americas and Europe.