In April Rome approved a 10-million-square-kilometre expansion of the diocese, adding the entire territory of Canada to a diocese that already covered the United States. While geographically massive, the Eastern Rite diocese serves a modest 6,000 Romanian Catholics in 21 parishes and missions, including two in Canada.
Eparch Michael Botean has been the bishop who oversees the Toronto and Montreal Romanian parishes since 2010. Adding the the rest of the territory of Canada will make it easier to establish new missions and parishes for other Romanian communities scattered across the country.
A Church-planting missionary role has long been a dream of Botean.
“It would be great if I could buy a motor home and do it myself,” Botean told The Catholic Register.
“I thought about doing that when I first became a bishop a few years ago, but there’s so much that needs to be done here in Canton.”
Botean’s vision of a bishop in a Winnebago would put him in the footsteps of the Transylvanian missionary Fr. Epaminonda Lucaciu, who established a string of Romanian parishes across the U.S. midwest at the turn of the 20th century. As some of these historic U.S. Romanian parishes have matured and dispersed, there’s been a temptation to close them. But Botean thinks there are other possibilities.
Twenty kilometres from Canton, one of Botean’s parishes thought the time had come to sell.
“The answer is basically no,” said the eparch. “We’ve started a Catholic Worker community that is starting to serve meals there. We want to keep the doors open so that the Gospel in this neighbourhood, which is actually the poorest in this area, will actually be a parish of the neighbourhood.”
Botean now becomes a member of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is already a member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
With Canada’s open door to immigration, the potential for growth in the Romanian Catholic Church is greatest in Canada, said Botean’s vicar for Canada, Fr. Michael Moisin. Moisin names Mississauga, Ont., the northern edge of Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., London, Ont., Vancouver and Ottawa as potential mission territory.
Many Romanian Catholics in Canada are today attending Romanian Orthodox Churches.
“Unfortunately, the Greek Orthodox Romanians were much more aggressive and established missions 10 years ago,” Moisin said.
“Especially for newcomers, they would rather go to a Romanian community. Since our liturgy is identical to the Orthodox Church, they find it very familiar. If you leave them for another 10 years, they will switch and raise their children in the Orthodox Church.”
But the newly expanded diocese wants to do more than gather the scattered Romanian Catholics. There’s an evangelical purpose to the modern Romanian Catholic Church.
“We open the doors to everybody. We switched to English. There’s no way you can celebrate in Romanian and survive,” said Moisin. “The churches are full. People fall in love with the tradition, with the liturgy, with the fact there’s deep theological meaning in whatever we do.”
Moisin is a campus chaplain at Boston College, where he has attracted a diverse community of Orthodox, Eastern-rite Catholics and Roman Catholics to his liturgies.
“They study theology at Boston College and they want to experience the tradition and understand it first hand,” Moisin said.
Part of the evangelical mission of the Byzantine-rite Romanians is to demonstrate the wide diversity possible within the Catholic Church, said Botean.
“It’s the same Gospel and we serve the same master,” he said.
“There are some folks for whom our expression of Christianity, the way we tend to live it historically, may have an impact on their lives that other forms of Christianity have not… We have many ways of trying to make the face of God visible.”