Informative note on the life and activity of Bishop Nicolae Popovici of Oradea – 19 July 1946
July 18, 1946
“Viator”
NICOLAE POPOVICI
Bishop of Oradea Mare
He was born in 1903 in Biertan, Târnava Mare County.
He studied at the Andrei Șaguna High School in Brașov, at the Theological Academy in Sibiu and at the Faculty of Theology in Cernăuți.
He then undertook further specialised studies in Athens, Munich, Leipzig and Wroclaw.
Having thus acquired a thorough theological and general education, he was appointed professor at the Theological Academy in Sibiu and was a monk-cleric.
On 28 April 1936 he was elected bishop of the diocese of Oradea Mare.
On 1 June 1936 he was ordained archpriest in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Cluj.
The next day, on 2 June, he was consecrated by the King at the Royal Palace in Bucharest. On 28 June he was installed as Bishop of Oradea Mare.
After the surrender of Northern Ardeal, Bishop N. Popovici remained steadfastly with the people, but after a short time he was expelled because he was a good animator of the masses. After the war, he returned to Oradea.
In his diocese he solved the problem of concubinage, this social plague, by marrying 12,000 concubines at his insistence, not to mention the legitimacy of 30,000 children of concubines, an unprecedented figure in the history of the internal mission of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
Among other things, he wrote 1. Cuvântări”, Beiuș, 1942, 176 pages; 2. “Epicleza euharistică”, Sibiu, 1933, 351 + 8 pages; 3. “The beginnings of Nestorianism”, Sibiu, 1933, 76 pages.
He was a young man, endowed with fine qualities of soul, industrious, intelligent, determined, endowed with a superior culture, not only theological, but also general; he has a wide open road to the future, not unforeseen, but certain; the eyes of the lower and higher clergy are turned towards him when the question of succession to the Patriarchal throne is discussed.
(ACNSAS, Informative fund, file 2669, vol. 2, f. 60-61; document reproduced in the work On the Courage to Speak: Bishop Nicolae Popovici of Oradea, edited by George Enache and Adrian Nicolae Petcu, Partener Publishing House, Galati, 2009, pp. 111-112).