The Forgotten Saints
On April 13, 1948, the constitution of the Romanian People’s Republic was published. With this date, for the Roman Catholic as well as for the Greek Catholic Church in Romania a wave of suffering and suppression began which only ended on December 22, 1989, when the last dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was overthrown. At the beginning of this dark period the Romanian episcopate of the Latin Rite included Bishop Marton, Archbishop Alexandru Cisar, Bishop Anton Durcovici, Bishop Maru Glaser, Bishop Janos Scheffler and Bishop Augustin Pacha. While Archbishop Cisar was made to live in the Franciscan monastery at Orastie and forbidden to administer his diocese from 1949 on, the other bishops were imprisoned. Bishop Pacha was arrested on July 19, 1949 and imprisoned as a ‘Vatican spy’ for the next eighteen years. Bishop Glaser was imprisoned in May 1950 and died the same month. Bishop János Scheffler died on December 6, 1952 at Bucarest. His martyrdom was officially recognized by the Holy See on July 1, 2010, and he was beatified on July 3, 2011.
in 1910. After Romania entered World War I on the Allied side, he was sent to an internment camp — being an Austrian citizen — until freed on the orders of King Ferdinand I.
Durcovici became rector of the Bucharest seminary in 1924, and held the office until April 1948, when he was consecrated Bishop of Iasi by the Apostolic Nuncio to Romania, Bishop Gerald Patrick Aloysius O’Hara. He had become an adversary of the post-World War II Communist Party authorities, who initially attempted to have him accept a decrease in Papal authority over Romanian Catholics. Placed under surveillance in 1947, he was arrested by the Securitate on June 26, 1949.
He was held in Jilava, then transferred to Sighet prison together with Bishops Áron Márton and Alexandru Cisar, being the target of torture and deprivations. Stripped naked and exposed to the winter weather, and denied food and water, Durcovici died as a result of the treatment. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Communist authorities subsequently attempted to erase all evidence of his stay in prison.
The process of his beatification was begun in 1997.
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Bishop Durcovici was born in Austria but left for the Romanian Kingdom together with his mother, a widow, and his brother Franz, and settled in Iasi (1895). He was ordained a priest