About the scouts

The Orionine Scouts Community

Oradea · Centrul Don Orione, the Ioșia district · since August 1993

Our community was born in August 1993, at Centrul Don Orione in Oradea, with the help of scouts from Corbetta, a small town near Milan. They brought the method, the experience and — literally — the first tents. From then until today, as we put it ourselves, “we stand alongside young people looking for new friends and adventure”.

We meet every Saturday, from 2 to 5 p.m., in all weathers. There are about 120–130 of us, children and young people, boys and girls together, from the smallest ones up to those who are already patrol leaders. Taking part is free.

The branches by age

Scouting is not the same thing at eight as it is at eighteen. So the community is divided into branches, each with its own language, its own games and its own responsibilities:

The saint we are named after

Luigi Orione (1872–1940) — a road-paver’s son, a friend of Don Bosco, sent to run a diocese an earthquake had flattened.

He was born at Pontecurone, in Piedmont, into a poor family: his father, Vittorio, paved roads. Between the ages of ten and thirteen he laid paving stones beside him — and those working hands never left him. His mother, Carolina, brought him up on two sentences: “God is there” and “God sees you”.

In 1886 he came to Don Bosco’s oratory in Turin, who became his confessor and his friend; he was there when he died, in 1888. He was still a seminarian, twenty years old, when, on 3 July 1892, he opened his first oratory — starting with a single boy, thrown out of catechism class, whom he took into his own room. It grew to fifty children. The cathedral canons cut his pay from twenty-two lire to twelve, as a punishment. The bishop answered them by lending the children his own garden.

On 28 December 1908, when the Messina earthquake levelled the city, he was among the first to arrive. Pope Pius X then made him vicar general of the ruined diocese, for three years. He did the same after the Marsica earthquake, in 1915. A boy of fifteen who saw him then walking among the rubble — “a short priest, in a wretched state, with ten days of beard” — had lost his mother in the earthquake; Don Orione took him into his care, and he would become the writer Ignazio Silone.

He founded the Little Work of Divine Providence, whose religious take a special vow of loyalty to the Pope, then the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity and the houses called Piccoli Cottolengo, on the edges of the cities, for the people nobody else was looking after. The rule of those houses said that whoever came through the door was not asked their name, only whether they were suffering.

Sent to the Riviera in 1940, for his heart, he objected: “It is not among palm trees that I want to live and die, but among the poor, who are Jesus Christ!” He died there on 12 March 1940.

The rest of his life, in brief

1. A house for poor boys Opened a year after the oratory — and still before he was a priest.
2. Ordained priest He already had dozens of children in his care.
3. The congregation is approved The Sons of Divine Providence, who take a fourth vow: loyalty to the Pope.
4. The Little Missionary Sisters of Charity The women’s branch of the Work, in the same year as the Marsica earthquake.
5. He leaves for South America The first of two missionary journeys; the second, between 1934 and 1937, reaches Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.
6. He raises a shrine with the seminarians’ own hands Madonna della Guardia, at Tortona, built by them. A second one, at Fumo, in 1938.
7. Canonised on 16 May By Pope John Paul II, who had beatified him in 1980. His feast day is 12 March.

Today the Little Work is at work in more than thirty countries — among them, since 1991, Romania.

How scouting reached Oradea

A Church out of the catacombs, four Italian priests, and an oratory opened exactly a hundred years after the first one.

To understand where we come from, you need to know what had gone before. On 1 December 1948 the Greek-Catholic Church was abolished by decree: churches confiscated, bishops imprisoned. It spent forty-one years underground. One of those who chose prison rather than give it up was Vasile Hossu, who after 1989 became the first Greek-Catholic bishop of Oradea.

After the revolution, Pope John Paul II asked the religious congregations to turn towards Eastern Europe. The northern Italian province of the Orionine fathers chose Romania. In 1991 they came to Oradea and were received by Bishop Hossu; Father Luigi Tibaldo settled here on 19 June 1991 — at that time, the only Liturgy in Romanian in the whole city was the one they celebrated.

In the summer of 1992, two Italian seminarians, Graziano Colombo and Massimo Bortolasi, opened the Don Orione Oratory — exactly a hundred years after the oratory in Tortona. It still runs today, on Sundays from 2 to 6 p.m., in all weathers, free of charge. In 1993 the scout community was born out of it. In 1995 Liceul Don Orione opened, with 32 pupils — the first private school in Bihor county; today it has around 800, and it celebrated thirty years in October 2025.

Scouting in Romania: a history interrupted

From 50,000 scouts to none, and back.

The first Romanian patrols appear in 1912–1913, at Blaj, Brașov and Bucharest, and the association Cercetașii României (the Scouts of Romania) is founded on 12 May 1914. Baden-Powell sends a message of congratulation himself. Sixty-seven Romanian scouts go to the first World Jamboree, in London, in 1920, and Romania is a founding member of the world organisation in 1922.

The 1930s are the high point: nearly fifty thousand young people and two thousand leaders. Princess Ileana, daughter of Queen Marie, leads the Guides. Then, in 1937, the movement is swallowed by the state organisation “Straja Țării” — which was itself to disappear, in 1940. Under communism its place was taken by the Pioneer Organisation. A museum in Zalău summed the whole story up in the title of an exhibition: “From scouts to pioneers”.

Scouting came back with freedom: Cercetașii României was refounded in 1990–91, and alongside it, at the same time, the Catholic associations appeared — one around Iași, brought by Italian scouts, another Greek-Catholic one, helped by French scouts. Our community, born in 1993 out of the oratory at Don Orione and out of the friendship with the scouts of Corbetta, is part of the same wave.

Scout Day

22 February — Baden-Powell’s birthday. Our celebration, once a year.

It is the day on which what we are shows most clearly. In 2011 we celebrated it in Parcul 1 Decembrie in Oradea, with camp games and a full clean-up of the park — the good turn, on the scale of a city. In 2013, at the Centre, nearly a hundred and fifty scouts between 5 and 25 gathered: Bishop Virgil Bercea handed out the neckerchiefs, there was pastasciutta to eat, fourteen young people made their Promise, and the first partenza in the group’s history was given.

In recent years the day has been kept with workshops on knots, trail signs, Morse code and coded treasure hunts — and in 2026, ten Cub Scouts made their Promise.