The Romanian Orthodox Church is no longer willing to engage in dialogue, so long as the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church fails to withdraw the legal actions it has initiated in Romanian and international courts for the recovery of its own churches that have been the property of the Romanian Orthodox Church since 1948, when the Greek-Catholic Church was abolished by law and its property expropriated. That is the harsh decision taken at the recent session of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Official dialogue between the two Churches on the thorny question of church property officially began on 28 October 1998 with the setting up of the joint Commission of dialogue, but the negotiations have failed to reach the hoped-for results and in more recent years the problems and discontent have grown, so much so that the Pope himself intervened in June 2002, reminding the new ambassador of Romania to the Holy See of the urgent need to implement the accords already signed for the restitution of church buildings. The information service of the Romanian Episcopal Conference recently pointed out, in a lengthy report, that prior to 1948, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church had 2,588 churches, of which only some 160 have been returned since 1989.
