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Rumen Ivanov Stanev is a Bulgarian Roman Catholic cleric, titular bishop of Simidika, auxiliary bishop and vicar general of the Sofia-Plovdiv diocese.

Biography

Rumen Stanev was born on August 19, 1973 in the Plovdiv village of Kaloyanovo. He considers the village of Zhitnitsa, where his parents live, and where he spent his childhood and completed his primary education, to be his birthplace. He completed his secondary education at the School of Catering "Prof. Dr. Asen Zlatarov" in the city of Plovdiv. He is a chef by profession. After completing his military service in 1994, Roumen was sent to Rome, where he attended the Higher Seminary and in 1999 graduated with a bachelor's degree in theology at the Pontifical Urban University of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

He was ordained a priest on September 11, 1999 in the "St. Ludwig" Cathedral in Plovdiv, after which he was appointed assistant parish priest in the "Sacred Heart of Jesus" parish in the town of Rakovski. From September 5, 2005 until he was elected as a bishop, he was a parish priest in the parish "St. Archangel Michael" also in Rakovski.

During his 15-year service in the parish, he mainly renovated the church and its interior, with stained glass windows of the local martyrs of the faith - Bishop Ivan Romanov, Father Flavian Mankin, Geno Burov and Raphael Peev. In 2016 - 2018, with the donations and voluntary work of the faithful, Father Stanev built the "St. Joseph" cemetery chapel. On May 6, 2019, during the Apostolic Pilgrimage of Pope Francis in Bulgaria, Father Stanev welcomed the Pope in the parish church, where a meeting was held with over 750 representatives of the Catholic community in Bulgaria. Despite the restrictions during the virus pandemic in 2020, managed to transport and install in the church a pipe organ from the Parish of St. Jean-Marie Vianet in the city of Basel in Switzerland. Father Rumen Stanev is the chairman of the Caritas Vitania organization and a member of the Episcopal Advisory Board of the Episcopal Conference of the Catholic Church in Bulgaria.

On September 5, 2020, Father Stanev was appointed by the Holy See as auxiliary bishop of the Sofia-Plovdiv Diocese and titular bishop of Simidikan. The seat of the auxiliary bishop is Sofia, where he takes care of the Catholics of the Latin rite, both Bulgarians and foreigners, and together with the diocesan bishop of the diocese "St. John XXIII" maintains relations with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the other denominations in the country. The auxiliary bishop is the representative of the Catholic Church in Bulgaria before the Bulgarian civil authorities.

On November 4, 2020, at the 39th extraordinary National Conference of the "Caritas Bulgaria" federation, Bishop Rumen Stanev was elected its president.

Bishop Stanev was ordained as the titular bishop of Simidika on January 17, 2021 in the Sofia co-cathedral "St. Joseph" by the Sofia-Plovdiv bishop Georgi Yovchev, together with the Eastern Catholic Bulgarian bishop Hristo Proikov and the Skopje bishop Kiro Stoyanov. The ordination was attended by President Rumen Radev, the Speaker of the National Assembly Tsveta Karayancheva and the Apostolic Nuncio to Bulgaria Archbishop Anselmo Pecorari. With this, Bishop Stanev is the first auxiliary bishop of the Sofia-Plovdiv Diocese with a permanent seat in the capital. Until then, there was no bishop of the Latin rite with a permanent seat in Sofia.