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Cycle for Hungarian Mass in Moldavia
3000 km. This is the distance that Zoltan Ferko (31) will make on his bicycle to call attention to the fact that the Csango Hungarians living in Moldavia can not exercise their religion in their mother tongue that is in Hungarian. This pilgrimage was initiated by the Csango Hungarians themselves, among them by Tinka Nyisztor who paid a visit last year to the Vatican in the same issue. A Tour de France distance on bicycle could of course be a sport performance but in this case it is definitely not. It is a religious undertaking, a pilgrimage. The Moldavian Csangos whose mother tongue is Hungarian, are only allowed to attend Romanian language mass in their churches which does not suit neither the message of the Pentecost (Acts 2:7-8) nor the human rights of modern democracies. In the last 17 years the Csangos have asked for Hungarian mass and religious services many times by the Bishop of Iasi, and a Csango delegation led by Tinka Nyisztor has visited the Vatican but nothing changed. There are about a quarter of a million people in Moldavia whose religion is Roman Catholic and though Romanian historians tend to deny it, according to standard historical theories they all are of Hungarian origins and got to Moldavia in multiple waves between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although they never had Hungarian pastors and only for very short periods Hungarian teachers, around 60 thousand of them still speak the most archaistic dialect of Hungarian. They have been asking for Hungarian pastors for centuries but they never got one. On April the 22nd at noon in the Saint Stephan Cathedral in Budapest the holy mass will be said for the Hungarian mass of Moldavian Csangos then around one o’clock after a small party with authentic Csango music and dances Zoltan Ferko and his friends will start the pilgrimage. The pilgrim first rides to Rome and the Vatican through the main ecclesiastic centres of North-Western Hungary, Eastern Austria and Northern Italy. Then he continues the pilgrimage from Zagreb via Pécs, Szeged and Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia) to Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc). He is going to take part on the open air mass attended by hundreds of thousands of people at Csíksomlyó and then rides further to Moldavia to the episcopate of Iasi and Csango villages. He plans to deliver a letter to leaders in the church on the main stops of the route in which he asks for support for Hungarian Mass in Moldavia. You can follow the pilgrimage on the websites www.csango.eu or www.keresztszulok.hu. If you decide to write us, please send your e-mail to zarandoklat@glia.hu We have opened a blog for the pilgrimage: www.zarandoklat.blogol.hu If you prefer to call, please dial +3670-771-9767. You will find the 9078 Report of the Council of Europe on the Csangos here: http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc01/EDOC9078.htm (English), http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc01/FDOC9078.htm (French). Further reading for the history of Csangos: http://www.hi.is/~maurizio/csango/links2.htm or www.csango.hu/en/rend4.html If you feel so, do not hesitate to join the pilgrimage for a day or two or even more! The pilgrim and his friends will be available on the whole route so we can keep in touch and find time and place also for an interview. Two wheel protest for Hungarian mass in Csángó-landBudapest, Friday, 27 April 2007 by Marianne Tharan-Trieb After numerous petitions, letters, and visits to the Pope, a young Hungarian, Zoltán Ferkó has decided to cycle 3000 km, leaving from Budapest, to the Vatican and from there to the Csángó-land, Romania, to call for Mass to be celebrated in Hungarian. He left Budapest on the 22nd April and expects to reach Csángó-land in about 40 days. On his way several voluntary cyclists and cars have escorted him and different clerical and secular organisations have offered him hospitality. The ethnically Hungarian and Catholic Csángó have been settled east of Transylvania for over 1200 years, preserving their Hungarian culture outside of Hungary’s historic borders. In the 1800s the Vatican tried to use this Orthodox surrounded Catholic enclave to propagate Catholicism. As a result they were compelled to use Romanian in their churches. However, the Vatican’s plans backfired, Romanians did not convert and it meant that the Romanian language became normalised in church services. The situation worsened after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon where Hungary lost large swathes of its territory and population to Romania. Several requests were forwarded to different Pope and the Bishop of Iasi, the Episcopal seat of the region who visited the Csángó recently. While the Vatican promised that he would come with the permission to celebrate mass in Hungarian, the Bishop instead offered a compromise saying that “the Rosary can be recited in other languages in the church.” In a 2001 Report the Council of Europe said that "there should be an option for Roman Catholic services in the Csango language in the churches in the Csango villages, and the possibility for the Csango's to sing hymns in their own mother tongue." (Eurolang 2007) |
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