A Hungarian Franciscan Preaching in Romanian. The Romanian Sermons of Olti István, Ofm in Hungarian Transliteration

Franciscans carried out an important pastoral ministry in the Diocese of Alba Iulia, which included Romanian-speaking communities. A particular example of this ministry is the decades-long preaching of István Olti, OFM, a Hungarian friar, to Romanian believers, in the first half of the 19th century. This essay discusses his unpublished Romanian sermons given in Grădiștea de Munte, Sibișel, Sebeșel and Rodna Veche, preserved in the Franciscan Archives in Cluj. The sermons, entirely inspired by the Bible, are interesting not only as witnesses of the Franciscan ministry to Romanian-speaking communities, but also as examples of religious texts in Romanian, written with Latin characters, a phonetic transcription using Hungarian letters and digraphs, in a (trans)formative period of the Romanian language, when writing and printing used Cyrillic characters.