Venerable Szilárd Bogdánffy

Szilárd Ignác Bogdánffy (21 February 1911 – 3 October 1953) was a Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Satu Mare and Oradea of the Latins. On 30 October 2010 he was proclaimed blessed in a ceremony held in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Mary, Oradea, Romania, being recognized as a martyr of the Communist period. Szilárd Bogdánffy was born to ethnic Hungarian parents on 21 February 1911 in the village of Feketetó, then part of Torontál County, Austria-Hungary; today called Crna Bara, near the town of Kikinda, district Northern Banat, autonomous province of Vojvodina, Serbia. He lived there with his family until 1925. He was baptized in the parish church of Čoka to which his village belonged and where his father was a cantor. The Bogdánffy family is a Transylvanian Armenian family which was granted nobility by the Habsburgs. The Bogdánffys are a branch of the ancient Armenian Gajzágó family, one of the families that built the Transylvanian town of Szamosujvár (Armenopolis, Gherla now in Romania) in the 18th century, and which gave many Armenian Catholic (in union with Rome) priests to the town which became the Armenian Catholic bishopric of Transylvania. Bogdánffy went to elementary school in Crna Bara until 1925, when the Bogdánffy family moved to Timișoara, /* start https://en.wikipedia.org/ */ .mw-parser-output .citation{word-wrap:break-word}.mw-parser-output .citation:target{background-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133)} /* end https://en.wikipedia.org/ */ a city in Romania, in the eastern part of Banat. There he went to the Piarists high school. After his final exams, he was accepted to the Catholic seminary of the Latin Diocese of Oradea. He was ordained a priest by the bishop of Oradea, István Fiedler, on 29 June 1934. He continued his studies at the University of Budapest, where he earned a PhD in philosophy and dogmatics, with a thesis on "Apocalyptics in the Synoptic Gospels".