VATICAN CITY - Pope John Paul II urged Romania on Saturday to return Church assets confiscated by the Communists.
John Paul made the request in a meeting with Romania's new ambassador to the Holy See, Mihail Dobre.
"It's my sincere hope that, for example, implementation is given — in terms of ecclesiastic structures — to the agreements reached among those responsible of the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church and the Holy See," the pope said.
The Eastern Rite Catholic Church was banned by the Communists in 1948, and authorities seized almost 2,500 churches. Since communism ended in 1989, only about 120 churches have been handed back. The ban on the church was lifted when communism ended.
Almost 90 percent of Romania's 23 million are Orthodox and about 1 percent of Romanians are Eastern Rite Catholics.
John Paul visited Romania in 1999 — the first by a Roman pontiff to a mainly Orthodox country since the Eastern church definitively broke from Rome in the Great Schism of 1054. He has since visited several other mainly Orthodox countries but has yet to visit Russia.
The Polish-born pope has made reconciliation among Christians a principal goal for the start of Christianity's third millennium.