in Transylvania adopted Calvinism during the Reformation, a
period when the Roman Catholic Church was weak in that region. This
weakness of the Roman Catholic Church and the political and economic
independence of the Transylvanian nobles prevented an effective
counterreformation and allowed Protestantism to remain strong in
Transylvania while the rest of Hungary was Roman Catholic.

Next in size are the Lutherans, with an estimated membership of 250,000
in 1950. Lutheranism is represented by the Evangelical Church of the
Augsburg Confession, headed by a bishop at Sibiu, and the Evangelical
Synodal Presbyteral Church of the Augsburg Confession, headed by a
bishop in Cluj. Membership of both churches is predominantly German.
Lutheranism was adopted by the Transylvanian Saxons at the same time
that Calvinism was adopted by the Hungarians. In 1938 there were 400,000
Lutherans in Romania; their number was reduced through the loss of
northern Bukovina and through the emigration of Saxons to Germany during
the 1940s. Continued emigration is further reducing the Lutheran
population.

The Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist, and Pentecostal churches were united
by government decree in 1950 into the Federation of Protestant Cults.
The estimates of the membership at the time of the merger vary greatly,
but it probably included between 50,000 and 100,000 Baptists, 15,000 to
70,000 Adventists, and about 5,000 Pentecostals. Before their merger
none of these churches had a central organization in Romania, as their
congregations were directed from abroad.

In the reorganization of theological education in 1948, the Department
of Cults assigned one school for church singers and one theological
institute for the training of clergy to each Protestant denomination.
There was some indication that all denominations had difficulty
recruiting young men for the ministry after World War II. After more
than a decade of complete isolation from their fellows in other
countries, all the Protestant churches resumed an active association
with the World Council of Churches in 1961.

OTHER RELIGIONS AND CHURCHES

Government statistics on the ethnic composition of the population in
1956 listed 146,000 Jews. Jewish sources outside the country estimated
the size of the community in 1968 at between 80,000 and 110,000. Once an
important ethnic and religious minority, the Jewish community has shrunk
as a result of territorial losses, extermination during Wo