It is not often that an abbot wakes to find a hole smashed through the wall of his abbey. Even rarer, I should think, that the hole is smashed through on the orders of the local mayor. This, however, was the scene that greeted Fr Rudolf Anzelm Fejes, abbot of the Premonstratensian canons in Oradea, this spring, as just the latest dramatic episode in a long-running dispute between one of Romania’s oldest Catholic foundations and the city authorities.
The incident saw municipal workers – accompanied by gendarmes – break through part of the monastery complex which the Premonstratensians insist belongs to the Church and forms part of a religious presence in the city stretching back almost nine centuries.
