Dear visitors!
Welcome to the website of the Religious Tourism Office of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oradea, which aims at sharing the inexhaustibly rich heritage of our founding king.
The ashes of our King Saint Ladislaus were laid to rest in the Cathedral of Oradea, which he had founded, and thus the tradition of pilgrimages took root for centuries in the Crișul Repede region, making Oradea one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Europe.
Together with my colleagues leading the office, I warmly invite and look forward to seeing you in Oradea! Our church and the world needs to find nourishment from a healthy source and choose the right direction in order to build and secure our future. This is the time when the resources of Saint Ladislaus can reopen! Let us draw from them and God’s blessing will be upon us!
László Böcskei, bishop
THE LEGACY OF SAINT LADISLAUS
The living cult of Saint Ladislaus, still flourishing in our own days, began with the death of the king himself. From childhood, wondrous signs of God accompanied the man chosen for kingship and for the defence of the Christian values of Europe, who, in death, became an instrument of divine judgement. The people swore their oaths to him and turned to him in prayer, beseeching him to be their advocate before the heavenly powers. At his own request, his body was laid to eternal rest in the cathedral of Oradea, founded by him. Yet even his arrival there was guided by the heavenly will, and a succession of miraculous healings began as early as the day of his burial.
The presence of Saint Ladislaus in Oradea elevated the city to the forefront of Europe during the Middle Ages, and the city became a place of pilgrimage even before the king was canonised. The elevation of Ladislaus to the altars in 1192 officially confirmed the prayer that had already risen from the lips of the faithful, making Oradea one of the foremost places of pilgrimage in Hungary and Europe. Here bishops and kings met, and throughout the Middle Ages many chose this sacred place as their final resting place. Oradea became the burial place of Stephen II, founder of the Premonstratensian Order in Hungary; here Beatrix of Luxembourg, wife of King Charles Robert of Anjou, was laid to rest, as was Queen Mary of Anjou, beside her imperial husband, Sigismund of Luxembourg.
The fate of the reliquaries containing the head, arm and leg relics of Saint Ladislaus, preserved in Oradea, was exceedingly turbulent throughout the Middle Ages. Fire and earthquakes alike ravaged the cathedral of Oradea and its treasury. Later, as Protestantism gained strength in the sixteenth century, the cathedral and the saint’s tomb were desecrated, while the relics were scattered throughout Hungary and across several cities of Europe. Bishop Demetrius Náprágyi, by a perilous and eventful journey, managed to rescue the second reliquary of the head of Saint Ladislaus and bring it to Győr. A fragment of this relic was returned to Oradea in 1775 through the generosity of Ferenc Zichy, Bishop of Győr. Lőrinc Schlauch, Bishop of Oradea, subsequently commissioned a worthy reliquary for it. Since the fall of communism, on the feast of Saint Ladislaus, the reliquary has once again been carried in procession among the great multitude of the faithful, bearing witness to a living tradition that has endured through the centuries.
