The Csángó Hungarians — an estimated 250,000 people in the Moldva region beyond the Carpathians, east of Transylvania proper — face pressure that goes further than the Orthodox church-building program in Covasna and Harghita: the outright suppression of the Hungarian language in their own churches.

In the town of Klézse (Cleja), the use of Hungarian is prohibited in the Roman Catholic church itself. The parish priest, though of Hungarian origin, was trained at a Romanian state-financed seminary and, once ordained, serves in practice as an instrument of assimilation — discouraging his own community from using its native language even in private religious life. Csángó Hungarians report being unable to sing in Hungarian even at wakes for the dead, for fear that the priest would refuse to perform the funeral if he learned of it.

Unlike the Hungarians of Székelyföld and the rest of Transylvania, the Moldvai Csángók have no political representation and little visibility — their isolation east of the Carpathians, and the fact that their identity is expressed almost entirely through the Catholic Church rather than through secular institutions, leaves them with far fewer means of defending their language than their Transylvanian kin.

Source: erdelyilobby, “A klézsei ügy,” c. 2000.