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Faith and Secularization. A Romanian Narrative (Silvesan - Legislative) PDF
Faith and Secularization. A Romanian Narrative (Silvesan - Legislative) PDF
Faith and
Secularization:
A Romanian Narrative
Romanian Philosophical Studies, IX
Christian Philosophical Studies, VII
Edited by
Wilhelm Dancă
Box 261
Cardinal Station
Washington, D.C. 20064
Introduction 1
Wilhelm Dancă (University of Bucharest)
Epilogue
The Priest’s Temptations and the People’s Escape from Church 161
Wilhelm Dancă (University of Bucharest)
Index 179
INTRODUCTION
WILHELM DANCĂ
Epilogue
DISJUNCTIONS BETWEEN
CATHOLIC CHURCH AND PEOPLE WITHIN
THE ROMANIAN ORTHODOX CONTEXT
CHAPTER I
“WELLNESS” IN RELIGION,
A WAY OF EMPTYING CHURCHES?
WILHELM TAUWINKL
1
Lucia Iorga, De la ateism la sfinţenie. O abordare psihologică a
motivaţiei comportamentului religios [From Atheism to Holiness. A
Psychological Approach to the Motivation of Religious Behavior] (Bucharest:
Elena Francisc Publishing, 2007).
2
The questionnaires and their results are published online only: Cultura
persoanei. Situl Asociaţiei Programele Bunavestire Bucharest. Sondajele INTC
[The Culture of Person. The Website of the Annunciation Programmes
Association of Bucharest. The Surveys of the National Meetings of the Catholic
Youth], accessed on December 28th, 2013. http://www.culturapersoanei.ro/index
.php?action=sondaje.
12 Wilhelm Tauwinkl
METHODOLOGY
3
The results of the most recent census are, for the time being, available
only online and in Romanian: Institutul Naţional de Statistică [National Institute
of Statistics], Recensământul populaţiei şi al locuinţelor 2011 [Population and
Housing Census 2011], last modified July 4, 2013. http://www.recensamant
romania.ro/rezultate-2.
4
We owe thanks to Mr. Petru-Ciprian Bradu for his help in disseminating
the questionnaire.
“Wellness” in Religion, a Way of Emptying Churches? 13
The answers of the clergy were not taken into consideration in the
present study, as these should be analyzed in a differently structured
interview. The questionnaire did not require any mention about the
respondent’s occupation, yet the occurrence of some answers that
seemed to be taken out of theological text books or biographies of saints
was taken as a clue that the respondent could be a clergyman, a monk, or
sought to promote a vision much more optimistic than reality.
The results were collected between the 5th-29th of October 2013.
The online questionnaire was closed upon receipt of derisive answers,
taken as an indication that the link accidentally reached persons outside
the aimed-at circle, who did not relate to the purpose of the
questionnaire.
5
Visible by means of specific questions; see below.
6
In what follows, the correspondence between our questionnaire and that
of Lucia Iorga will be signaled by the abbreviation “LI”, followed by the
question number in Annex 2, see Iorga, De la ateism la sfinţenie, pp. 231-243.
Questions that are similar to those in Emanuel Cosmovici’s survey are signaled
by the abbreviation “EC”, followed by the question number of the 2003
questionnaire, see Cultura persoanei, Sondajele INTC – Oradea 2003,
“Chestionarul distribuit” (The Culture of Person. The Surveys of the National
Meetings of the Catholic Youth – Oradea 2003], “The Distributed
Questionnaire”, accessed on December 28th, 2013: http://www.
culturapersoanei.ro/index.php?action= chestionar2003).
14 Wilhelm Tauwinkl
Sincerity Test
7
In what follows, the questions are grouped thematically and not
following the order in the questionnaire; the latter can be deduced from
numbering.
“Wellness” in Religion, a Way of Emptying Churches? 15
8
We will show below how this situation can be interpreted within the
context of our theme, as well as those presented next.
9
We considered the answer “Jesus Christ” to be correct, just as it results
from the canonical text of the Gospels. In fact, we did not receive any answers
related to uncertainties of New Testament exegesis.
16 Wilhelm Tauwinkl
Ethical Views
10
Cf. CCC, nos. 2357-2359.
11
Joachim Cohen et al., “European Public Acceptance of Euthanasia:
Socio-Demographic and Cultural Factors Associated with the Acceptance of
Euthanasia in 33 European Countries”, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 63
(2006), p. 748.
12
Cf. Ilsa L. Lottes and Tapani Alkula, “An Investigation of Sexuality-
Related Attitudinal Patterns and Characteristics Related to Those Patterns for 32
European Countries”, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, vol. 8 (2011), p. 82.
However, in the case of abortion, statistics offer an annual average of 600
abortions per 1,000 live-births for the period 2005-2010 (cf. National Institute
18 Wilhelm Tauwinkl
These four questions regard the way in which the Christian young
people perceive themselves within the Church or in relation to it.
Question 22 seeks to gather information about the concrete commitment
of Christians within the community they are part of; the personal, real
contribution means more than the theoretical knowledge of belonging to
a society of people. One single detail, as the one included in question 37,
is usually ignored or overlooked by persons who belong only in name to
a certain community.
14
Francisca Băltăceanu et al., Vladimir Ghika, profesor de speranţă
[Vladimir Ghika, Teacher of Hope] (Bucharest: Editura Arhiepiscopiei Romano-
Catolice, 2013), pp. 324-325; French ed.: Vladimir Ghika, profésseur
d’espérance (Paris: Cerf, 2013), pp. 326-328.
20 Wilhelm Tauwinkl
15
Cf. John Paul II, Apostolic Constitution Fidei depositum (11 October
1992), no. 2.
16
Cf. John Paul II, Fidei depositum, no. 3.
17
Cf. CCC, no. 1129, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III,
68, 8.
18
Cf. CCC, no. 1804.
22 Wilhelm Tauwinkl
19
Cf. CCC, nos. 1434-1439.
20
Iorga, De la ateism la sfinţenie, p. 180.
“Wellness” in Religion, a Way of Emptying Churches? 23
CONCLUSION
21
Herbert Braun, “Die Problematik einer Theologie des Neuen
Testaments”, Gesammelte Studien zum Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt
(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr / Paul Siebeck, 3rd ed. 1971), p. 341.
24 Wilhelm Tauwinkl
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRADICTORY SIGN OF
WHAT IS MISSING:
A NARRATIVE OF ROMANIAN
POSTCOMMUNIST RELIGIOSITY
VIOLETA BARBU
required in the process of adhering to the European Union, all the ideals
of democracy and of European values that could otherwise have
stimulated powerful beliefs, merely looked like a kind of feeble ontology
– to employ Giani Vattimo’s words – even if this was and still remains
the only social project embraced by the Romanian society with steadfast
enthusiasm, as statistics show.1 The key word was “reform”: the reform
of the state institutions, the reform of the justice system, the reform of
education etc.
1
The percentage reflecting the trust of the Romanian people in the
European Union (about 45%), has been decreasing since 2007 (65%), when the
process of adhering was taking place, until 2013, but remained however within
the average of the other European countries. http://ec.europa.ue/romania/docu
ments/press_releases/11_07_eb67romania_presentation.pdf; Vasile Puscas,
România de la preaderare la postaderare [Romania from Pre-Adhering to Post-
Adhering] (Cluj-Napoca: Eikon, 2008).
2
http://redcresearch.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/RED-C-press-release-
Religion-and-Atheism-25-7-12.pdf.
3
Results published by the Romanian group for the study of social values
under the signature of Madalina Voicu: http://www.iccv.ro/valori/newsletter/
newsletter%202.%20religiozitatea.pdf, see also Eadem, România religioasă
[The Religious Romania] (Cluj-Napoca, Editura Institutului European, 2007).
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 27
the rating for Romania had dropped to 8.6. As the religious practice is
concerned – “the average of going to church per month”4 – according to
WVS and based on surveys carried out in the context of a Greek-
Orthodox majority, Romania had a percentage of 46% in 2005, which
places it at the top of the chart of European countries after Poland and
Italy.
These data offered by sociological indicators, data that are most
amazing for a European country at the beginning of the 21st century,
have in great measure justified the lack of a public debate with respect to
whether Romania is or is not secularized. The question of secularization
or of its absence within a society such as the Romanian one represents a
difficult intellectual enterprise, as there are no adequate patterns and no
suitable instruments of analysis. Possible key questions are themselves
prone to pitfalls, of either historical or statistical nature. Is the present
day Romanian society a post-secular one, whose resistance to the
decrease of religiosity, to the shrinking of its significance within the
individual life and the public space, have made possible these indicators
of religious adherence present in the international surveys and national
statistics? If so, which are those “anti-bodies” that have defended the
social organism against secularization? Or maybe, on the contrary, these
statistics are merely un trompe l’oeil, which covers a slower but
inescapable process of secularization of which its social actors
(believers, institutional Churches, the society as a whole) are still
unaware?
Seen from the outside, Romania seems to correspond to a pattern
of post-secularization. Most unexpectedly, “the Romanian situation” has
been the study object of a brief analysis made by David Martin, in the
context of an East European model of secularization. According to his
point of view, the case of Romania, which pretends to be “one of the two
or three most religious countries in Europe”, can be explained by the fact
that the Church proved to be, even during communist times, “the one
vehicle to continuing Romanian identity”.5 It is again David Martin who
classifies Romania with all its cultural and historical particularities
within a pattern characteristic for several other East European countries
(Poland, Serbia, Greece, Romania), an ethno-religion that perceives “the
Church as a vehicle of identity and a continuing holistic cultural
tradition”, unlike the pattern in which “the Church is conceived as a
4
By this it is understood, as forms of Orthodox religious practices, the
visiting of a church, the lighting of a candle, saying or writing a prayer; it
doesn’t necessarily mean attending the religious service on Sundays.
5
David Martin, The future of Christianity. Reflections on violence and
Democracy, Religion and Secularization (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 145.
28 Violeta Barbu
6
Ibid. p. 146; idem, On Secularisation. Towards a Revised General
Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), p. 118.
7
Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, William Jones Revisited
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 71-75.
8
Religion in Britain since 1945. Believing without Belonging (Oxford-
Cambridge: Blackwell), 1994; eadem, “Vicarious Religion: A Methodological
Challenge”, Nancy T. Ammerman, (ed.), Everyday Religion: Observing Modern
Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 21-35.
9
The thesis belongs to the Hungarian historian István Bibó, Misère des
petits États d'Europe de l'Est (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986).
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 29
point of view, that Romanians live in a secular age.10 The arguments are
generated by a historical perspective, which separates in the long term
the level of the public revelation of the Orthodox Church as institution
(the majority denomination), from the level of the individual beliefs and
behavior. Obviously, the Orthodox Church in Romania has had in the
long run of history a somewhat more difficult relationship with
modernity,11 than the Roman Church had. In comparison with other
significant institutional vectors of Romanian society, it is more
responsible for the tardiness, the delay, the overt resistance or the
passivity shown towards those factors of modernity (individualization,
privatization, urbanization, liberalism) which we commonly
acknowledge as characteristic for the installment of secularization in the
Latin West. Paradoxically, all those conservative and anti-modern
features of the Romanian Orthodox Church, tightly interconnected in a
self-regulating system dating back from the Middle Ages and which still
functions even at present, pertain in a large measure to the secular sphere
and not to the spiritual mission of this institution: its mainly patrimonial
character, its symbiosis with the secular power,12 the comparatively low
standards of the believers, except for the rituals of passage and of a
common ethic – a significant gap manifested in the institutional model
of the Church itself.
For instance, when attempting to illustrate this last feature from a
historical point of view, it is enough to draw a brief comparison between
the three historical provinces that form Romania at present: Transylvania
attached to the Hungarian Kingdom until 1526, Moldavia and Wallachia,
countries which from the first half of the 16th century were both tributary
to the Ottoman Empire. In Transylvania, the Catholic Church has
promoted the cult of the saints beginning with the 13th century, when the
network of parishes and chapters with notary role was established. In the
other two Romanian provinces, the cult of the saints begins to be shaped
as a public religious practice during the second half of the 17th century,
the network of parishes and Church tribunals (offices) being established
even later on, in the second half of the 18th century.
In opposition to this type of analysis, the opinion largely shared
by the majority, explicitly present in the statements of certain
10
Daniel Barbu, “The Geopolitics of the European Spirit in Post-Secular
Romania”, Justine Lacroix and Calypso Nicolaidis (eds.), European Stories.
Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), p. 247.
11
Iuliana Conovici, “L’orthodoxie roumaine et la modernité”, Studia
Politica, 2004, vol. IV, no. 2, pp. 414-418.
12
Daniel Barbu, Rome, Byzance et les Roumains. Essai sur la production
politique de la foi au Moyen Age (Bucarest: Editions Babel, 1998).
30 Violeta Barbu
13
These ideas have already been supported within the public space by
representatives of the right fascist party during the interwar period: Nichifor
Crainic, Ortodoxie si etnocratie [Orthodoxy and Ethnocracy] (Bucurest: Roza
vânturilor, 1938); from a politically correct perspective of the values of
democracy, a new approach of these ideas in Alexandru Duţu, “Political Models
and National Identities” Orthodox Europe (Bucharest: Babel Publishing House),
1998; Theodor Baconsky, Decadenta etatismului si renasterea ortodoxă. [The
decadence of etatism and the revival of orthodoxy], Ioan I. Ică Jr. and Germano
Marani, (eds.), Doctrina socială a Bisericii: Fundamente, documente, analize,
perspective [The social teaching of the Church: Fundamentals, documents,
analysis, perspectives] (Sibiu: Deisis, 2000), p. 355.
14
One of the theoriticians of the resistance through culture was Mircea
Eliade in his essay written in 1953, “Destinul culturii românești” [The Destiny
of Romanian Culture], idem, Împotriva deznădejdii. Publicistica exilului
[Against Despair. The Journalism of Exile] (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 1992), pp.
28-37; Constantin Noica, Modelul Cultural European [The European Cultural
Pattern] (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 1993); see also Gabriel Andreescu, Spre o
filosofie a dizidentei [Towards a Philosophy of Dissidence] (Bucuresti: Editura
Litera, 1992).
15
Iuliana Conovici, “Etapele asumării unui proiect. Discursul public al
Bisericii Ortodoxe Române despre integrarea europeană” [The Stages of
Assuming a Project. The Public Discourse of the Romanian Orthodox Church
With Reference To the European Integration], Radu Carp (ed.), Un suflet pentru
Europa. Dimensiunea religioasă a unui proiect politic [A Soul for Europe. The
Religious Dimension of a Political Project] (Bucureşti: Anastasia, 2005), pp.
311-323.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 31
16
George Pagoulatos, Xenophon A. Yataganas, Europe Othered, Europe
Enlisted, Europe Possesed. Greek Public Intellectuals and the European Union,
in European Stories. Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts, pp.
183-202; Olivier Gillet, Ousia “Mythes Religions” (Paris: Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 2012).
17
Horia-Roman Patapievici, Omul recent. O critica a modernității din
perspectiva întrebarii “Ce se pierde atunci cind ceva se câstigă”[The Recent
Human. A Criticism of Modernity from the Perspective of a Question: “What Is
Lost When Something Is Gained”] (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2001), passim.
18
Daniel Barbu, “The burden of politics: Public space, political
participation and state socialism”, in Studia Politica. Romanian Political
Science Review, 2012, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 329-346.
19
See the secularist and anti-clerical tendencies in Czechoslovakia in
comparison with the Catholic resistance or that of the Evangelical Church in
Poland or Eastern Germany, René Rémond, Religion et société en Europe. Essai
32 Violeta Barbu
sur la sécularisation des sociétés européennes aux XIXe et XXe siècle (Paris:
Seuil, 1998), pp. 232-233.
20
Even the members of the Communist Party used to baptise their children
or to celebrate a religious wedding clandestinely, i.e. at home where the priest
officiated the ritual of baptism or wedding.
21
Gail Kligman, Calus: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual,
forward by Mircea Eliade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981);
eadem, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics and Popular Culture in
Transylvania (Berkeley: University of California Press Series), 1988.
22
The interaction of ritual and religion can still be seen today in parts of
Europe (ex. gr. Sicily-Italy) that have managed to retain their old tradition
Henry Kamen, Early Modern European Society (London-New York: Routledge,
2001), p. 52.
23
About the communist Romanian ritualism, see Mary Ellen Fisher, “Idol
or Leader? The Origins and Future of the Ceausescu Cult”, Daniel N. Nelson
(ed.), Romania in the 1980s (Colorado: Westview Press, 1981), pp. 118-119.
24
Martin, The Future of Christianity, pp. 184-185.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 33
that was powerful enough and which proved to be resistant both against
the attempts made by the atheistic propaganda to remove it, and to the
offensive of the post-modern consumerism culture, adopted by the
Romanian society during the last two decades. In other words, the
Orthodox Church used to furnish under communism, and still continues
to furnish even during the capitalist democracy a package of services
relevant for the lives of the members of society. This assures it a stable
position in the top of the tertiary sector, wholly integrating it in this
category of entities, while removing it from the sphere of civil society.
25
Klaas Runia, “The Challenge of the Modern World to the Church”,
Europäische Jahrbuch fur Theologie, 1993, Vol. 2, no. 2, p. 149; Peter Berger,
(ed.), The Desecularisation of the World. Resurgent Religion and World
Politics, Ethics and Public Policy Center (Washington DC and Eerdmans,
Grand Rapids, 1999), p. 4.
34 Violeta Barbu
26
Marcel Vauchez, La religion civique au Moyen Age et à l’époque
moderne (Roma : Collection de l’Ecole Françiase de Rome, 1995), p. 1.
27
Rémond, Religion et société en Europe, p. 46.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 35
constant preoccupation of all the majorities that have held the power
during the last two decades, regardless of their ideological orientation.
Sheltered from any attempted criticism concerning its tacit or explicit
complicity with the nationalist-communist regime28 as briefly and
sporadically had happened during the first several months after 1989, the
majority Church has come out well – due to the same political support –
from the conflicts generated by the question of the Greek Catholic
patrimony, a Church whose clergy and faithful had suffered incredible
persecutions during its dissolution in 1949. Essential influence factors
in any electoral campaign, the Orthodox clergy and hierarchy insisted on
making the most of the symbolical capital they have in society, although
the political support they offer – always negotiated – is almost never
transparent for the public. In relationship with the institutions of
democracy and with the state, as fragile, as little valued in surveys by the
society as a whole,29 the majority Church proved to be the institutional
performer that has mostly benefited from the transition phenomenon,
succeeding to recover its traditional privileges and, more recently,
assuming the leading position of a movement both nationalistic,
conservative, and skeptic in its attitude towards Europe, a trend ever
more acclaimed due to the economic crisis that has been afflicting
Europe since 2008.
While in the European West, secularization was passing through
an almost century-long process of transition from the ecclesiastical to
the secular state independent of the Church, in post-communist
Romania, immediately after the violent movements which resulted in the
fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Government and the Parliament decided
to resume the denominational religious education as a compulsory
subject in the curriculum of the public educational system, at secondary
school level. In 2007, by a Decree of the Ministry of Public Education,
the theory of evolution could no longer be taught in public schools. Such
measures meant a return to the circumstances from before 1945, the only
difference being that the parents could in advance agree or not to their
children attending these courses.30 The training of the teaching staff,
required for teaching religion classes, imposed that certain special
28
Olivier Gillet, Réligion et nationalisme. L’idéologie de l’Eglise
Orthodoxe Roumaine sous le régime communiste (Bruxelles: Editions de
l’Université de Bruxelles, 1997).
29
In 1996, the rate of trust in the Church was 83%, compared to that in the
Parliament which was only 23%; in 2003, the percentage was 85% and
respectively 14%, see Florin Frunză, “Biserica Ortodoxă Română si laicizarea”,
Un suflet pentru România [The Romanian Orthodox Church and Secularization,
in A Soul for Romania], p. 285.
30
Article 9 from Law no. 84/1995 stipulates the facultative and optional
character of moral and religious education classes.
36 Violeta Barbu
31
Taking the vow on the Bible has been re-introduced for trial court
witnesses and for the investing of new ministers, without having a compulsory
character, see Frunză, The Romanian Orthodox Church, pp. 290-291.
32
See the documentary made by the journalist Tessa Dunlop, broadcast by
BBC on August 13th, 2013, according to which at every three days in Romania a
new church is built, although it is the poorest country in Europe. The Press
communicate of the Romanian Patriarchy from August 5th, 2013, claims that
since 1989 and up to the present – in order to satisfy the religious needs of the
population – the Romanian Orthodox Church has built about 2,000 new places
of worship; according to official statistics, within the territory of the Romanian
Patriarchy, in 1990, there were 10, 500 ecclesiastical units, in 2003, 13,808, and
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 37
the local communities. The frequency with which new places of worship
are being erected, new parish churches but monasteries as well, reaches
proportions far superior to the rate of public utility buildings, such as
hospitals, kindergartens or schools. However, the most controversial
project remains that of the People’s Cathedral, a gigantic and extremely
expensive design, placed close to the People’s House – the dimensions
of which it almost exceeds – and which is intended as the future
Cathedral of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch.
Last but not the least, by virtue of the same Law for Cults enacted
in 2006, as all Churches and Cults were classified as being subjects of
public utility, they have been exempted from any taxes on rents, on
financial compensation, on donations, including various profit-making
activities. By far, the most privileged is the Orthodox Church, whose
properties, trading companies listed at the stock exchange, agricultural
farms, forestry operations,33 pensions, dental surgeries and any other
profit-making activities have immensely flourished, having thus brought
extremely profitable economic benefits, relentlessly revealed in the
mass-media especially since Patriarch Daniel Ciubotea34 became the
head of the Orthodox Church (2007).
The premise of this economic prosperity was ensured by the
retrocession of their former patrimony (lands, buildings, forests, schools,
hospitals, various other establishments etc.),35 which had been
previously confiscated by the state, in accordance with the Law for
Nationalization after the establishment of the regime. In time, due to
juridical decisions all traditional Churches in Romania (the Orthodox
Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek Catholic Church, and
the Reformed Churches) have benefited from certain return actions.
Imposing an interpretation of the law that was actually going beyond its
legal limits, some of the Orthodox Dioceses (Bishoprics) have taken
possession of various real estates that had been expropriated as the result
of the Law for Confiscating monastic properties enacted in 1863.
36
For a historical perspective, see Violeta Barbu, Purgatoriul misionarilor.
Contrareforma în tările române în secolul al XVII-lea [The Missionaries’
Purgatory. The Counter-Reformation in the Romanian Countries during the 17th
Century] (Bucuresti, Editura Academiei, 2008).
37
It is estimated at about 46% of the total population of the country, living
mainly out of subsistence farming, see Béatrice von Hirschhausen, Les
nouvelles campagnes roumaines. Paradoxes d'un «retour» paysan (Paris,
1997); this phenomenon is politically used by the ecologist movement which
appeared on the political scene in 2013 by means of organising street
demonstrations.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 39
38
Ioanichie Balan, Il mio padre spirituale Cleopa di Sihastria (Lipa,
2002).
39
Danielle Hervieu-Léger, Françoise Champion, Vers un nouveau
christianisme (Paris: Cerf, 2008), pp. 343-344.
40 Violeta Barbu
40
Gheorghe Calciu (1927-2006), priest and political prisoner between
1948-1964 and 1970-1984, well-known dissident at international level for his
protests against the atheist indoctrination and against the campaign of
demolishing churches in Bucharest between 1977-1979. In 1979, together with
other dissidents he founded the first Free Syndicate in communist Romania. He
was released from prison by Nicolae Ceausescu at the insistence of several
personalities such as Mircea Eliade, Eugen Ionesco and John Paul II, and of
certain political leaders such as Margaret Thacher, Ronald Reagen; see
Gheorghe Calciu, Christ is calling you. A course in catacombs pastorship
(California, Platina, 1997). See the obituaries in the newspapers Washington
Posthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/11/25/AR200
6112500783.html; and The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/
jan/10/guardianobituaries.religion.
41
Arsenie Boca (1910-1989), monk, arrested and cross-examined for
several times by the communist regime during 1951-1956; he was marginalized
by the authorities, but very esteemed by the believers: his tomb has since
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 41
the success of the new charismatic movements and of the prayer and
apostolate communities have been facilitated by the New Evangelization
proclaimed at the beginning of the pontificate of John Paul II and
continued afterwards by his successors. Pope Paul VI and John Paul II
identify the separation (disjunction) between the Gospel and the culture
as the main factor of secularization, while interpreting the enculturation
of the Gospel (Evangeli nuntiandi) within a society marked by a
predominant non-Christian culture as the major aim of the Catholic
Church. This is together with encouraging the laity to participate in the
evangelizing mission (Christifidelis laici) and the re-composing of the
Christian social texture within secularized societies. The recognition of
the manifold charisma inspired by the Holy Ghost, without a
programmatic character on the part of the Church, took place at
Pentecost in 1998 when the Pontiff blessed these movements (1,000,000
participants). The attempt to create a theology of ecclesiastical
movements has never been encouraged, lest it should restrict the
freedom of action of the Holy Ghost by establishing conventional forms.
The only statement made in this respect was that which characterized
them as being “coextensive” with the Church. Seen from outside the
Church – from the perspective of political analyses and sociologists of
religion, that interpret them by virtue of various typologies – the
ecclesiastical movements appear either as a fundamental radicalisation
of certain groups and communities in an internal attempt to obstruct and
slow down the implacable desertion of religious values, or as “tools”
attached by absolute loyalty to the person of the Pope,45 or as an
expression of religious emotionalism aroused by the charisma of certain
founders, in reply to secularization, to the psychedelic culture and to a
society in crisis. Despite the enormous diversity of these charisma,
Danielle Hervieu-Léger46 can summarise a few features: the increasing
sentiment of urgency specific to this age, hence the tremendous dynamic
of these movements; the role of affection in modelling one’s conscience,
conversion through personal encounter; the primacy of experience over
knowledge; personalising one’s belief within the dimension of a
community; the crucial role of credible witnesses; and charismatic
apprenticeship. The variants range from various types of normative
contexts integrally in accord with the traditional requirements of the
Church, to informal connections, of a subjective nature (narrative
Catholicism), detached from any norms and rites.
45
Gordon Urquhart, The Pope’s Armada: Unlocking the Secrets of
Mysterious and Powerful New Sects in the Church (Bantam Press, 1995), pp.
66, 100.
46
Danielle Hervieu-Leger, Vers un nouveau christianisme, p. 349-360.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 43
47
For instance, the Superior of the Agapia Greek-Orthodox Monastery,
which at the time counted 350 nuns, Sister Eustahia, after personally meeting
Chiara Lubich during the ’70s, used to read in front of the nuns the Meditations
of the founder of the Focolare Movement. Certain monks, with scholarships at
Regensburg, have later become bishops or superiors of various orthodox
monasteries.
44 Violeta Barbu
Romania are one masculine and two feminine. There are over 600
members belonging to this Movement, out of which 30 are Orthodox
and several are from Reformed Churches. There are about 6,000
followers, but their spirituality is widely spreading from priests to
various other persons. Throughout the country there are different groups
of families that periodically gather together and various initiatives of
“the economy of gift”.48 Out of the members of this Movement there
have been recruited missionaries who left Romania in order to work in
the USA, Croatia, Italy, or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Beginning with the year 1975, in a similarly clandestine manner,
members of the Movement “Comunione e Liberazione”49 from
Switzerland and Italy came to Romania. Their mission, which was also
developing in other communist countries (Poland and the Czech
Republic), was directed by CSEO (Centro Studi Europa Orientale), a
research institute co-ordinated by one of the leading members of the
Movement, Rev. Francesco Ricci. The purpose of these missions was to
gather information about the situation of the Churches in the Catacombs
and to support the believers living in those countries. Until 1989, tens of
persons succeeded in making such missionary visits, learned about the
unofficial ecclesiastic reality, about the religious dissidence in Romania,
and came into contact with lay people from all denominations (Roman
Catholic, Greek Catholic, Orthodox, Calvinist). After 1990, one of the
main purposes of the Movement “Comunione e Liberazione” was to
support the Greek Catholic Church which was just coming out of
clandestinity and completely lacked any pastoral means. Communities
with numerous followers, both catholic and orthodox, were founded and
houses were opened for consecrated persons recruited out of the
Romanian population.
After 1990 many other ecclesiastic or charismatic movements
(Communauté Emmanuel, Charismatic Renewal) have been established
in Romania. Their presence is due to a dynamic somewhat different from
the orthodox charismatic culture and their relative success when
compared with other occidental countries can be explained by the fact
that the community life style promoted by their adherents better
corresponds to the social and cultural data of the Romanian society. The
capacity to inspire people from a lay medium and to engage in a
dynamic movement persons who are seekers of meaning, and whose
48
Luigino Bruni, Le nuove virtu del mercato nell’era dei beni comuni
(Roma: Citta Nuova, 2012), pp. 174-190.
49
Salvatore Abruzzese, “Religion and Modernity: The Case of Comunione
e Liberazione”, Social Compass, 1989, vol. 36, pp. 13-32; Comunione e
Liberazione. Dalle aule del liceo Berchet al meeteng di Rimini: sotira e identità
di un movimente (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001).
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 45
50
Kristina Stoeckl, “The Human Rights Debate in the External Relations
of the Russian Orthodox Church”, Religion, State and Society, 2012, vol. 40, nr.
2.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 47
BIBLIOGRAPHY
51
Paul Froese, The Plot to kill God. Findings from the Soviet Experiment
in Secularization (Berkley-London: University of California Press, 2008), pp.
254-264.
48 Violeta Barbu
1
His name is Gilles Labelle, professor at the School of Political Studies at
the University of Ottawa, Canada.
2
See, e.g., Tessa Dunlop, “Romania’s Costly Passion for Building
Churches”, BBC News Magazine, August 7th, 2013, accessed on February 3rd,
2014: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23420668.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 51
and Cults that on December 31st, 2011, “the founding stone was laid for
92 new churches, the building works were continued at another 755 new
churches which had begun to be constructed during the previous years,
and 190 newly built were already completed....”3 Without being able to
identify what precisely these “previous years” mean, it can be inferred
that after 1990, 1037 Orthodox churches were built or were still being in
construction. At least.
The building-site of religious architecture encompasses more. We
further learn from the same site that on December 31st, 2011, “172
places of cult are being consolidated or re-constructed; the repair and
restoration works continued at 507 churches; 423 churches are being
painted or re-painted; 273 churches were re-consecrated; and 58
ecclesiastical edifices are being repaired or restored.”4 Briefly, during
these years, 1,433 places of cult – “which are not historical
monuments”5 – were revived.
As figures in themselves do not mean much, in order to better
understand their significance, we should make a comparison with the
total number of Orthodox churches. Therefore, it results that by
December 31st, 2011, “within the country borders and belonging to the
Romanian Patriarchy, there have been functioning a number of 14,648
church units”,6 one out of 15 churches is a new church and one out of 10
churches has been re-built, consolidated, painted or re-painted. 15.000
Orthodox churches for 17 millions Orthodox people (of all ages) if we
take into account that the population of Romania is, after the last census,
20 millions and the Orthodox people represent 86.5%.
I cannot be wrong when supposing that a Quebecois would
wonder how such an “abundance” of churches could be possible. The
answer could be manifold. One could be the “compensation” effect for
the communist period during which churches used to be demolished,
many of them “invaluable monuments”. Some old churches were
demolished and the construction of the new churches was forbidden. The
Orthodox Church did suffer in communist times. It suffered as a great
part of the Romanians. And similarly to many Romanians, the Orthodox
Church was bereaved of a large part of her patrimony, which meant that
the land formerly occupied by churches could become vacant land used
3
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserica-ortodoxa-romana.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Organized as follows: 1 Eparchial Center, 6 Metropolitan Sees, 10
archdioceses, 13 dioceses, 1 vicariate, 176 deaneries, 11,394 parishes, 2,360
filial churches, 493 monasteries, 184 hermitages, 10 succursale monasteries.
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserica-ortodoxa-romana.
52 Gabriela Blebea Nicolae
7
See, e g., Juliana Maxim, “Socialist Mass Housing in Bucharest, 1950-
1970”, SAH News, October 16th, 2013, accessed on February 3rd, 2014: http://
www.sah.org/about-sah/sah-news/2013/10/16/socialist-mass-housing-in-
bucharest-1950-1970.
8
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserica-romn-unita-cu-roma-greco-catolica
9
According to the same official site, the Greek Catholic Church has 760
parishes for its 191,566 Greek Catholic believers (according to the census made
in 2002).
10
See, e.g., the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Jassy, Romania, image
accessed on February 3rd, 2014: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File.CatolicCathe
dral.Iasi-Romania.JPG. The construction of St. Queen Mary’s Cathedral in
Jassy, began in 1990 and was completed in 2005.
11
The Law for Cults (No. 489/2006) officially recognizes in Romania 18
religious cults: the Romanian Greek-Orthodox Church and the Serbian Greek-
Orthodox Church (dominant), the Roman Catholic Church, the Calvin-
Reformed Church (protestant), the Greek Catholic Church, the Pentecostal
Church, the Baptist Church, the Adventist Church of the Seventh Day, the
Unitarian Church, the Muslim Cult, the Christ Gospel Church (the Church of
Christ), the Religious Organization of the Witnesses of Jehovah, the Evangelical
Church of Augustan Confession, the Christian Cult of Ancient Rite (the Lipovan
Church), the Evangelical (Synodal Presbyterian) Lutheran Church, the
Romanian Evangelical Church, the Mosaic Cult, the Armenian Church.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 53
12
The Serbian-Orthodox Diocese of Timisoara: 20,000 believers, the
Archdiocese of the Armenian Church: 16 churches for 700 believers, the
Russian Christian Church of Ancient Rite: 57 places of worship for 38,000
believers, the Romanian Evangelical Church: 220 churches for 20,000
believers.
13
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserica-evanghelica The Evangelical Church
has 250 parishes for the 8,761 believers recorded at the census made in 2002,
compared with the 250,000 believers in 1944. http://www.culte.gov.ro/cultul-
mozaic. In the case of the Jewish Communities: 124 temples, synagogues and
houses of prayer for 6,000 believers.
14
The pastor of this Church is Răzvan Mihailescu.
15
See, e.g., Manastirea Prislop”, Crestin ortodox, accessed on February
3rd, 2014: http://www.crestinortodox.ro/biserici-manastiri/manastirea-prislop-
67979.html.
16
See, for instance, Sucevita Monastery (16th century): “Sucevita
Monastery”, Romanian Monasteries, accessed on February 3rd, 2014:
http://www.romanianmonasteries.org/bucovina/sucevita.
54 Gabriela Blebea Nicolae
17
For instance, http://www.orthodox-monasteries.com/romania.
18
The Mihai Viteazu Monastery in Caraș Severin, built in 1976, and the
Radu Negri Monastery in Călăraşi built in 1980.
19
The Marcus Monastery in Covasna and the Holy Trinity Monastery in
Breaza, Maramureş, the Tet Monastery in Village Susag built by father
Ghenadie.
20
The Oasa Monastery built in 1983 by Ionel Pop and Mihail Sadoveanu
in the Alba County.
21
See, e.g., “Manastirea Sambata de Sus (Brancoveanu)”, Romanian
Monasteries, accessed on February 3rd, 2014: http://www.romanianmonasteries.
org/ro/alte-manastiri/manastirea-sambata-de-sus-brancoveanu.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 55
the Râmeţ Monastery from the 18th century,22 the Rohia Monastery from
the beginning of the 20th century),23 or according to antiquity.
Interested also in the monasteries of other denominations, the
French Canadian would be – I am sure – astonished by the Roman
Catholic monasteries, monasteries built after 1990, of unprecedented
dimensions in our history: the St. Agnes’ Monastery in Popeşti-
Leordeni, Bucharest, the Monastery of the Discalced Carmelite Brothers
in Ciofliceni,24 the Holy Virgin’s Franciscan Monastery in Oradea, the
Monastery of the Jesuit Brothers in Cluj Napoca.
The churches and monasteries that any tourist can visually
“record” are accessible to anyone. No one could be familiar with the
history of every church and of every monastery, but the contact with
them is an “open” one. Less public is the information regarding the
denominational education system, even if one might “come across”
some of their buildings – faculties, seminaries, high schools, schools,
and kindergartens – opened after 1990. If he wants to learn about the
denominational education, especially the one developed after 1990, the
French Canadian would find the following.
DENOMINATIONAL EDUCATION
22
See, e.g., “Ramet Monastery”, Turism-Transilvania, accessed on
February 3rd, 2014: http://en.turism-transilvania.ro/location/ramet-monastery.
23
See, e.g., “Rohia”, Maramures. Romania. Gatekeepers of History,
accessed on February 3rd, 2014: http://www.visitmaramures.ro/index.php?task=
=page&page=Rohia
24
See, e.g., http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g6cQm0_qJvA/TINFy4ednI/AAA
AAAAAAP0/4RLo7P3g1YI/s220?P1010016.JPG.
25
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserica-ortodoxa-romana.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserici-culte The Serbian Greek-Orthodox of
Timisoara: 20,000 believers; the Archbishopric of the Armenian Church: 700
56 Gabriela Blebea Nicolae
believers; the Russian Christian Church of Ancient Rite: 38,000 believers; the
C.A. Evangelical Church: 20,000 believers; the Jewish Communities: 6,000
believers; the Lutheran Evangelical Church: 8,761 believers; the Romanian
Evangelical Church: 20,000 believers; the Christ Gospel Church in Romania –
the Union of the Christian Churches following the Gospel in Romania: 44,476
believers; the Unitarian Church: 70,000 believers; the Muslim Cult: 67,000
believers.
29
At the census in 2011, their number decreased to only 870,774.
30
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserica-romano-catolica “1,026,429 believers
out of whom 587,000 are Hungarian, 345,557 Romanians, 36,040 Germans and
11,580 Slovaks.”
31
Ibid.
32
After the census in 2011, today there are many controversies about the
correct percentage of each denomination. Some statistics start from the number
of inhabitants of Romania, others – which seem more relevant – start from the
high number of persons who do not wish to declare their religious identity. For
instance, following the census in 2011, the National Institute for Statistics stated
that, “These percentages do not take into account the population segment that
did not wish to reveal their religious orientation to the census staff. More
precisely, out of 20,121,641 inhabitants of the country, almost 1,259,741 did not
declare their religious identity. This means that over one million Romanians
refused to declare anything about their religion. Therefore, it is important to
bear in mind that the percentage obtained by the various denominations in
Romania would also look different if they were set in proportion to the total
number of inhabitants. Thus, Roman Catholics are 4.32%, Reformed are 2.98%,
Pentecostals – 1.80%, “without religion” or atheists – 0.19%. The other
denominations mentioned in the report have a percentage of 0.74% – Greek
Catholics, 0.56% – Baptists, and 0.40% – Adventists.”
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 57
33
http://www.culte.gov.ro/biserica-romana-unita-cu-roma-greco-catolica A
Faculty of Theology in Cluj (with departments in Cluj, Blaj and Oradea) and
another one in Baia Mare.
34
http://www.culte.gov.ro/uniunea-bisericilor-crestine-baptiste. The
Baptist Theological Institute in Bucharest, with a specialization of Baptist
Pastoral Theology, and the Emanuel University in Oradea with the following
specializations: Baptist Pastoral Theology, Baptist Didactic Theology – Social
Assistance, Musical Pedagogy and Management of Organizations. Moreover,
within the University of Bucharest, there also is a faculty of Baptist Theology –
Letters and Social Assistance, while within the University of Oradea there is the
specialization Baptist Theology – Letters.
35
http://www.proeuropa.ro/norme_si_practici.html
58 Gabriela Blebea Nicolae
Catholic ones, and some of the Baptist institutions. I did not check all
the data, but I expect this picture to be almost accurate.
After a passage so dense with data, it’s time to sit down together
with my French Canadian friend and to reflect on their meaning. Most
probably we won’t grasp all the significance of this obvious “coming
back to religion”. However, as neither did my French Canadian friend
make me thoroughly understand the issue of the Quiet Revolution in
Quebec, a revolution during which over a brief span of time the
Quebec’s society became completely secularized; he won’t be
reproachful if I fail to make him see a clear picture of religion in
Romania; above all because a well-grounded analysis demands time for
a retrospective view and the time necessary to a well-structured research.
Therefore:
I say that in a great measure the explosion of religiousness was
the expression of the freedom that the Revolution in 1989 made
possible. Freedom was its formal frame; still its inner motivation is one
that pertains to the identity of a Christian. For, obviously, freedom did
not necessarily mean also a “coming back to religion”. I say “also”
because immediately after the Revolution, Romania was the site of
various outbursts: an overwhelming number of newspapers and
magazines, of television channels, of publishing houses, of private
universities, for instance. I mention them because they could weigh as a
counterpart. During communism, there were only two or three
newspapers (all of them under the supervision of the Communist Party),
two television channels, which used to broadcast for only several hours a
day. Access to academic education was restricted through a small
number of places, which meant that the entrance examination often
implied a competition of between 20 and 50 candidates for one place,
especially at faculties with humanist, artistic or scientific profile.36
During communist times the constitution “guaranteed” religious
freedom. However, even in the absence of a clear interdiction as in the
case of the Greek Catholic Church or the Witnesses of Jehovah, the
pressure of atheism was overwhelming. Those who held a leading
position or intended to have one could not publicly attend church
services. The reports of the “Securitate” (the Secret Police)37 reveal that
36
At the Faculty of Plastic Arts or at Theater and Cinematography there
could be up to 100 candidates competing for one place.
37
Under the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Securitate employed some
11,000 agents and had a half-million informers for a country with a population
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 59
40
See, e.g., http://www.biserica-sfantul-anton.ro/media/biserica-
sfantulanton/foto/500/original/dsc_0338.jpg.
62 Gabriela Blebea Nicolae
All these people put their trust in God. Even when attempting
various sociological interpretations, such as “only their trusting in God
was left to them” as a consequence of all the constant deceptions they
suffer from the part of politicians, of the medical system, of the justice...,
even if speculating about the fascination of miracles, one cannot fail to
admit that “these people place their hope in the power of God”.
This act of faith may be punctual. For several minutes during one
Tuesday, they ardently pray to God, after which they continue their lives
as if God wouldn’t even exist. Similarly, on the feast day of certain
saints, when the holy relics of those saints are displayed outside the
church, they queue sometimes as early as the previous day, in order to
have the chance of touching them. Two days of piety, after which hatred,
vanity, hypocrisy, indifference, division, perfidy...again.
It is as if God is present in the heart of the Romanians, of certain
Romanians, only on moments of distress, while otherwise absent.
I might be exaggerating, or I might be wrong, but I have seen so
many “faithful Romanians”, who after coming out of the church lie, steal
that – it is also possible – that I extend their example to a general image.
Do not think – I should tell my French Canadian friend – that I have
absurd expectations of them to be “irreproachable”, I don’t expect all of
them to be “model believers”, but – I admit – I rarely have the
opportunity to see loving believers, attentive toward others, generous,
earnest, sincere; hence the feeling of a Pharisee rhetoric.
I must add a few more remarks, which you should take as
extremely subjective. My feeling is that in the minority Churches I
happen to know (Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist),
there is a better accord between the faith they proclaim and the lives they
lead, and that the melody of their lives is marked by lesser dissonance.
Nobody is perfect, but maybe also motivated by their status as a
minority, these “minority believers” are more concerned with living a
Christian life. It is my own impression, I repeat, an impression fatally
incomplete and restricted by the limitations of my personal experience.
Obviously, the Orthodox believers form the majority, so in this Church
there is a larger place for error, for “sin”. Still, it may be something more
than that.
This harmony, which haunts me, can become the lens through
which we contemplate the life of a certain believer or that of a priest. I
do not enter here into the field of consecrated life, for it demands a space
of its own. I only mention that the number of consecrated men and
women in post-communist Romania is – again – impressively large,
several times larger than those in the communist decades.
About the clergy, it is useless to say that their numbers have also
increased several times.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 63
After witnessing the many new churches that have been built or
are still being built in Romania, one would think it unnecessary to
wonder which is the true relation between the Romanians and the
Church. The coming back to religion would normally imply being in
good terms with the Church. Unfortunately, this is not all the time the
case. Frequently, the relation with the Church is one thing and the
relation with the clergy is another. It may happen that the priest is
identified with the Church to which he belongs, but not necessarily.
There are certain priests famous for their charisma, there are churches
visited for the sake of a wonder-working icon or for certain holy relics.
Immediately after the Revolution this disjunction – theoretically
inconceivable – between clergy and Church (as God’s House where the
priest is meant to celebrate) did not exist. The clergy was one with the
Church. Moreover, pilgrimages made to charismatic priests, perceived as
“foreseers” (such was the case of Iustin Pârvu41) – a token of absolute
trust in the holiness of a priest – seemed to unconditionally encompass
the whole clergy. I mean the Orthodox priest. Therefore, during an
initial phase, the admiration towards priests was independent of any
judgment. It went so far that, when it was made public that some of the
priests had co-operated with the Secret Police,42 initially – I repeat – the
Romanians did not dare to “condemn” them. The priests remained
sacred. Gradually, people began to make abstraction of their divine
status and tended to judge them as human beings.
Gradually, again, mainly through the voices of sociologists and
political analysts, remarks began to be heard against the ever-more
conspicuous opulence of the Orthodox Church, i.e. of the clergy, against
their “business affairs”, against the discrepancy between their status of
state employees and the protection which they enjoy when coming to
explain the money they receive as donations, or as taxes for
administering the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Matrimony, or for
funeral services. For the first time these days a member of the
Parliament dared to insist that Court of Accounts should also investigate
the BOR (Orthodox Romanian Church). The immunity of the Orthodox
41
See, e.g., http://roncea.ro/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Pelerinaj-la-
Petru-Voda-pentru-Parintele-Justin-Parvu-19.06.2013-coada-zi-Roncea.Ro_.jpg.
42
The Securitate was, in proportion to Romania’s population, one of the
largest secret police forces in the Eastern bloc. The first budget of the Securitate
in 1948 stipulated a number of 4,641 positions, of which 3,549 were filled by
February 1949: 64% were workers, 4% peasants, 28% clerks, 2% persons of
unspecified origin, and 2% intellectuals.
64 Gabriela Blebea Nicolae
Church has become an issue, her credibility more and more uncertain. If
immediately after the Revolution the Church together with the Army
were at the top of the list as the most trusted institutions, today its
reliability has dramatically decreased. From about 90% during the first
years after the Revolution it fell to 63.9% in August 2013. Most
probably because the discrepancy between the opulence of the Orthodox
Church, thought as unreasonable by many, and the poverty suffered by a
consistent part of the population. This disagreement is complex. One
point is the People’s Salvation Cathedral.43
Visits do not end with the moment when one leaves, no matter if
one wishes to have stayed longer, or to have left earlier. The feelings,
the impact follow you. Even more when the difference between your
43
See, e.g. http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/5629/catedrala1php.jpg.
44
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_People's_Salvation_Cathedral.
Contradictory Sign of What Is Missing 65
own country and the one you have been visiting is considerable. I cannot
know what would be in the mind of a French Canadian after leaving
Romania. Neither can I guess what precisely he thinks about the coming
back to religion in our country. I believe, nevertheless, that he would be
passionate about finding out more on the relation between religion and
politics – a relation which in Romania is not as secularized as is
officially stated – about the modern character of Romania, about the role
religion plays in education and in social life. I could bet that the most
fascinating aspect would be the divorce between communism and
religion, and the marriage between democracy and religion, more
precisely, between the birth of Romanian democracy and religion.
Which elements belonging to the two political regimes make possible a
certain positioning in relation to religion – I am certain – will be a
question haunting him long enough.
As far as I know him, sensitive at “cultural differences”,
interested in the alterité, he will be impressed by the religious attitude
seen in Romania. As an intellectual he will ask himself questions and
seek answers beyond appearances.
For myself, I should thank him for everything I have learned
while acting as his guide. As it often happens, I have discovered this
facet of Romania together with him. His questions have since become
mine, as much as I have also shared my interests with him.
We will probably discuss again about all these. Then, I will
definitely insist on the identity of a believer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BECOMING SECULAR?
DYNAMICS OF TEACHING RELIGION AND
ETHICS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE:
A COMPARATIVE STUDY
FOCUSING ON ROMANIA
RALUCA BIGU
INTRODUCTION
1
The generic term “schools” will be used in this article only in connection
with pre-tertiary public educational institutions.
2
The research focuses only on states that are traditionally conceived
within the Central and Eastern European bloc, now part of the European Union,
as these states shared a communist legacy and their approach to RE can prove
relevant for the Romanian context.
68 Raluca Bigu
context that gave way to the specific formula adopted by this country for
religious instruction in public schools.
3
This overview follows Luce Pepin, Teaching about Religions in
European School Systems (London: Alliance Publishing Trust, 2009), pp. 20-22
and Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu, Church, State and Democracy in
Expanding Europe (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 206-207.
Teaching Religion and Ethics in Central and Eastern Europe 69
4
By an “elective-compulsory” subject, I will understand, from now on, a
subject that is elective for students, but mandatory for schools to offer in the
curriculum.
70 Raluca Bigu
5
This information appears in Hristo Berov, “Religion in the Public
Education System of Bulgaria”, in Gerhard Robbers (ed.), Religion in Public
Education (Trier: European Consortium for Church and State Research, 2011)
p. 74.
72 Raluca Bigu
Since the fall of the communist regime over two decades ago, the
Romanian educational system, along with other former communist ones,
underwent several reforms, most significantly by introducing private
education along with public schools. After more than two decades since
the fall of communism, the overwhelming majority of pupils (96%) are
still enrolled in public educational structures, while the private ones are
concentrated at the kindergarten and at the tertiary level. Furthermore,
the Romanian education system is still heavily centralized, especially in
what concerns the curriculum and the funds received, with few powers
left to schools or local authorities.
This post-communist educational landscape differs significantly
from the pre-communist one, in which confessional schools dominated
the educational offer in Romania. These confessional schools were
firstly established in Transylvania (one of the three main historical
provinces of Romania) during the Middle Ages, especially by Orders of
Catholic priests. In the 19th century, a study showed that private
confessional schools were considered the best schools in Transylvania.
Still, in nowadays Romania, enrolling children to private confessional
schools remains a very limited and somehow eccentric option for
parents, even within the private educational system. Moreover, these
schools were established in most cases very late after the fall of
communism, after approximately 10 years, and their number remains
very limited.
The reinstatement of RE in public schools was the one of the first
requests asked by the churches in post-communist Romania and, in
1995, religion classes were introduced by the previous Education Law
(Law 84/1995), later amended in 1997.
The current legal framework for teaching RE in public schools is
Education Law No. 1/2011, which states that RE is an elective subject
(integrated in the field “Man and Society” within the core curriculum),
that schools have to offer compulsory, for one hour a week. Thus, in
Article 18 (par. 1), the law states, “The framework curricula for primary,
lower secondary, high school and professional education include the
subject Religion as a part of the core curriculum. Students who belong to
state-recognized religious denominations are ensured, irrespective of
their number, their constitutional right to attend Religion classes in
accordance with their own religious faith.” While students can opt out, at
the written request of the parents or legal tutors, no alternative is offered.
Thus, according to the law, “At the written request of students of the age
of majority, or of the parents or legal guardians in the case of minors,
students are able not to attend Religion classes. In such cases, the overall
average mark is computed without said subject. A similar procedure is
applied for students for whom, for objective reasons, the conditions
Teaching Religion and Ethics in Central and Eastern Europe 73
6
The problem is also mentioned in Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu,
Church, State and Democracy in Expanding Europe (Oxford University Press,
2011), p. 145.
74 Raluca Bigu
7
The declaration of the spokesman of the Romanian Orthodox Church,
father Constantin Stoica, is cited by Evenimentul Zilei, 2012. “Face Changing of
the Religious Education Textbooks”.
Teaching Religion and Ethics in Central and Eastern Europe 75
CONCLUSIONS
8
Soros Foundation Romania, 2011. “Religion and Religious Behavior”.
9
According to data offered by the National Institute for Statistics, 86.81%
of Romanians declared themselves Orthodox in the 1992 census, 86.79% in the
2002 census, and 86.45% in the last census in 2012.
76 Raluca Bigu
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Websites:
Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sport (www.edu.ro)
National Institute of Statistics (www.ins.ro)
Legislation:
Constitution of Romania (English)
(http://www.cdep.ro/pls/dic/site.page?id=371)
Education Law No. 1/2011(Romanian)
(http://www.uaiasi.ro/ro/files/legislatie/LEGEA%20nr.1_05.01.201
1_Legea%20educatiei.pdf)
Educational Law No. 84/1995 (Romanian) (http://legislatie.resurse-
pentru-democratie.org/84_1995.php)
“SECULARIZATION” AND
PUBLIC RELIGIOUS LIFE IN ROMANIA
CHAPTER V
IS NATIONALISM A FORM OF
SECULARIZATION FOR ORTHODOXY?
GELU SABĂU
Secularization
1
The most influential authors for the classical theories of secularization
and modernization are the authors from the end of XIXth century and the
beginning of the XXth (S. Freud, A. Compte, M. Weber or E. Durkheim). These
theories were prevalent until the ’60-’70s and had many proponents such as
Peter Berger, David Martin, Brian Wilson, Steve Bruce, Karel Dobbelare etc.
80 Gelu Sabău
Laicité
Other significant terms for this field are laic and laicité. The word
laic, of Greek origin,4 has come to the fore as a consequence of the
process that led to the separation of the Church from the state, which
took place in France, after the French Revolution. In the Middle Ages
religious vocabulary, the laity were baptized Christians, but who were
not involved in the official administration of faith. So, unlike the clergy,
the laity are believers from outside the Church’s institutional frame.5
Beginning with this term, we speak, in the modern period, of laicité,
which defines the process of separation of the political from the religion,
but also of laicism, which designates the ideology calling for the
2
For the meanings of the term see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 1-3.
3
“The basic idea behind secularization and modernization, and one that
still holds much attention in the social sciences, is that religion loses its
importance as countries develop or become more modern”. (See Philip W.
Barker, Religious Nationalism in Modern Europe [London and New York:
Routledge, 2009], p. 17).
4
In Greek language laos means meeting, crowd or mob.
5
According to Simona Nicoară, O istorie a secularizării. Avatarurile
creștinismului și triumfalismul mesianismelor noilor ere (sec. XIX-XX), vol. II
(Cluj Napoca: Editura Accent, 2006) p. 64.
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 81
In the present study I will use the term secularization, both for its
general application, and because of the fact that this term is settled in
Romanian language since Cuza’s reforms. If we keep in mind the three
meanings of the term as drawn by Charles Taylor, and refer it to the
Romanian society, we can notice that Romanian modernity has a pretty
sinuous relation to the secularization phenomenon.
1) According to the first sense, that concerning the presence of
religious symbols in the public place, we notice a different evolution as
the political regimes change. Up to World War II, within the
predominantly rural Romanian society (about 80% of the population live
in rural areas), with a strong traditionalist mentality, the problem of
6
According to S. Nicoară, O istorie a secularizării, “Glossar”, p. 343.
7
The French term laicité has its equivalents in Mexican language
(laicidad) and Turkish language (laiklik). The English language has the term
secularity and the German language weltlicher Charakter (S. Nicoară, O istorie
a secularizării, p. 63).
8
René Rémond affirms that laicité is definitely marked by the peculiarity
of French history (R. Rémond, Religie și societate în Europa. Secularizarea în
secolele al XIX-lea și XX, 1780-2000, trad. Giuliano Sfich [Iași: Editura
Polirom, 2003], pp. 17-19).
9
Cf. M. Jacquemain & N. Rosa-Rosso, Du bon usage de la laicité
(Bruxelles: Editions Aden, 2008), pp. 5-7.
82 Gelu Sabău
excluding the religious symbols from the public place did not arise.
After the end of the war and with the instauration of the communist
regime, the religious symbols were forbidden from the public place, and
replaced by representations of the communist leaders and symbols of the
newly emerged power. Religion classes were banned from schools and
some churches were demolished in cities in the name of urban
systematization. After the fall of communism in 1989 a recurrence of
religious references in the public place happens. There are Orthodox
icons in schools and religion classes are reintroduced, high
representatives of the Church participate in political ceremonies of great
impact (the National Day, the opening of the Parliament’s sessions of
work, taking the oath of the president etc.), and politicians are keen on
being present to the most important religious celebrations. One can also
note an intense pace of church building, within the twenty years that
have passed since the 1989 Revolution: a number of 2000 churches have
been built, the majority being Orthodox churches.10 In short, one can
note a strong recovery of the Orthodox Church in the public place.
If what is definitive for the emergence of political modernity in
the West is the withdrawal of the religious from the public place, and
politic neutrality towards religion, in the Romanian space, modernity
brings about the reverse phenomenon. Religion does not withdraw from
the public place, for, at least until the instauration of communism,
religion is openly and legitimately manifesting itself in the public place.
So religion is not, in modern Romania, a matter of individual conscience
in the strict sense of the word. The modern Romanian state, although
formally neutral, does manifest a predilection towards the dominant
religion. This predilection is manifest in the statute that the Orthodox
Church enjoys in various modern Constitutions,11 in the various
legislative measures concerning the cults that the state is enacting, in the
functions taken by high hierarchs of the Church, or in the way by which
politicians relate to the institution of the Church.12 The state’s
10
There does not exist an official statistic for the number of churches built
in Romania after 1989. The approximated number of 2000 churches is often
given in the mass media by the different specialized NGO.
11
In Romania’s Constitutions, the Orthodox Church holds the status of
“dominant Church” (Constitution from 1866, Art. 21; 1923, Art. 22; and 1938,
Art. 19) and “Romanian Church” respectively (Constitution from 1923, Art. 23;
and 1938, Art. 19).
12
The first minister of Carol the Second’s government, after the
disintegration of political parties, was Patriarch Miron Cristea. The state’s
religious politics in this period followed the direction of the Orthodox
Romanian Church’s ideology, namely fighting against the Protestant cults and
nearing the state to the Orthodox Church. The Church’s representatives enjoyed
this political context, thinking that the time had come for the Church to play the
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 83
predilection for the Orthodox Church will find a similar answer on the
other side, coming from the Church’s representatives who, by the theory
of symbiosis, which asserts an intimacy between the orthodox faith of
the Romanians and their national identity,13 provide important support
for the ideology of the national state.
This type of discourse has been defended ever since the 19th
century, by representatives of the Church, and by important men of
culture, some of them being close to the Church.14 It was such an
ideology which led, in the inter-war period, to a nearness of the state’s
politics to the Church, a fact which culminated in appointing patriarch
Miron Cristea as prime minister, and which had created, during the
communist period, a bridge between the communist-atheist state and the
Orthodox Church within the ideology of national-communism.15 The
effect of this was that not even in the communist period was the Church
ever separated from the state. After the 1989 Revolution the theory of
symbiosis represents one of the reference points for the Church’s
relation to the new democratic state, and the Orthodox Church is using
this doctrine in an attempt to reconquer the public place. The Romanian
Orthodox Church’s most evident actions in this direction are linked with
the official recognition of St. Andrew’s feast16 and the initiation of the
central role it deserved within Romanian society. The political leaders as well
appealed to the Church’s institution and to the “ancestral faith”, as religious
means of legitimizing their power (see Costel Coajă, Relația stat-biserică în
perioada 1938-1948. Cazul Bisericii Ortodoxe Române [Iași: Princeps Edit,
2007], ch. “Politica religioasă a statului”, pp. 15-62).
13
For more details on this theory see Iuliana Conovici, Ortodoxia în
România postcomunistă: reconstrucția unei identități publice, vol. 1 (Cluj-
Napoca: Editura Eikon, 2009), pp. 304-339.
14
The cases of Bishop Melchisedec Stefănescu, Nichifor Crainic, Dumitru
Stăniloae, Mihai Eminescu and Nae Ionescu were analyzed in Gelu Sabău,
“Religion and modernity. Instruments of ideologizing the religious discourse”,
Cogito. Multidisciplinary Research Journal, vol. IV, no. 4, December 2012, pp.
113-132.
15
See Olivier Gillet, Religie și naționalism. Ideologia Bisericii Ortodoxe
Române sub regimul comunist, trad. Mariana Petrisor (București: Editura
Compania, 2001), pp. 139-142.
16
Saint Andrew, one of the twelve Apostles, contributed to the expansion
of Christianity in Dobroudgea, a province from the southeast of Romania. The
acknowledgment, on the state’s part, of Saint Andrew’s day as an official feast,
is of great significance for the Romanian Orthodox Church. The fact that Saint
Andrew Christianized the populations from this territory, even before the
Romanian people was formed, is an important clue for the historiographical
perspective of the Romanian Orthodox Church, according to which Romanians
were born Christian.
84 Gelu Sabău
17
The project of the Cathedral of National Redemption was proposed for
the first time in the inter-war period by Miron Cristea, the first Patriarch of the
Romanian Orthodox Church (see I. Conovici, Ortodoxia în România, pp. 329-
338).
18
“The 1992 census indicates that Romania is one of the most religious
countries in Europe: 99% Christians, 86.67% of the population declared itself
Christian Orthodox, 0.04% atheists. The same situation has been registered in
2002: 99% Christians, 86.81% Christian Orthodox, 0.05% atheists. Again, the
level of confidence in the Orthodox Church has been constantly high – 70-90%,
in polls and surveys after 1990”. (Dan Dungaciu, “Alternative Modernities in
Europe. Modernity, Religion and Secularization in South-Eastern Europe”, The
CENSUR 2003 International Conference, organized by the Center for Religious
Studies and Research at Vilnius and New Religious Research and Information
Center, Vilnius, Lithuania, April 9-12, 2003. The conference is accessible on-
line at the address www.censur.org/2003/vil2003_dungaciu.htm; Accessed at
10.30.2013).
19
The number of pilgrims published by the mass media for the most
important pilgrimages in Romania is between 30.000 and 150.000 pilgrims.
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 85
20
I. Conovici, Ortodoxia în România, pp. 182-190.
21
D. Dungaciu, “Alternative Modernities”, art. cit., accessed at
10.30.2013.
86 Gelu Sabău
22
“The Orthodox Church has not been part of the process of
modernization – it has been involved in it, but not part of it.” (Idem).
23
“This solution – compromises for sacraments – has been adopted, in
fact, everywhere in Eastern Europe: Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox areas”.
(Idem).
24
D. Dungaciu, “Alternative Modernities”, art. cit.
25
Olivier Clément, “Creștinătate, secularizare și Europa”, în Ioan I. Ică jr.
& Germano Marani (coord.), Gândirea socială a Bisericii. Fundamente –
documente – analize – perspective (Sibiu: Editura Deisis, 2002), p. 511.
26
“If the Church was not isolated, on the Jacobin model, it was enslaved
by the national ideology who proclaimed that the Church was and it is a
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 87
After the double election of Al. I. Cuza and the Union of the two
Provinces (1859), the new prince started a vast process of reforms,
among which there are religious reforms. Their major purpose concerns
the elimination of the Greek influence from our religious life and a
greater closeness of the Church to the new state. One of the most
difficult problems was the situation of monasteries dedicated to holy
places. If, in the beginning, these monasteries were beneficences of the
Romanian princes, as marks of their affiliation to the Byzantine world
and of their support for the orthodox faith, now, the situation of these
monasteries was a matter of internal politics and, at the same time, a
complicated diplomatic problem for Europe’s high chancelleries.29 The
relevance of this problem was that the dedicated monasteries were
administered by Greek monks, and their income was directed towards
the Patriarchy of Constantinople. Given that these monasteries held 25%
of the Romanian territory, a redirection of the respective resources
towards the state’s budget would have meant a significant increase for
the economic consolidation of the young state. Also, the respective areas
were important resources that later helped the enactment of the agrarian
reform and the impropriation of the peasants. The diplomatic dimension
was given by the fact that, besides the Patriarchy of Constantinople, this
conflict also involved Turkey (as suzerain power), and Russia (as
protective power), and, indirectly, other great chancelleries of Europe.
So the question of dedicated monasteries was one of prime importance.
The solution to this problem will come in December 1863, with
the prince’s decree:
30
C. Vasilescu, Istoricul monastirilor, p. 85.
31
According to the articles 3-6 of the same Decree (Ibid., pp. 85-86).
32
Ibid., p. 62.
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 89
33
Communication of M. Kogălniceanu on the secularization of dedicated
monastery’s fortunes, read in Legislative Assembly, on December 13/25, 1863
(Ibid., p. 84).
34
Ibid., p. 90.
35
Mircea Păcurariu, Istoria Bisericii Ortodoxe Române (secolele XIX și
XX) (București: Editura IMBOR, 1994), vol. 3, pp. 115-116.
36
Ibid., pp. 117.
37
Idem.
38
The new Synod had gathered in three work sessions, but he was
contested by some hierarchs and declared non-canonical and anti-orthodox
(Ibid, pp. 120-121).
90 Gelu Sabău
39
Ibid., pp. 121.
40
The patriarch from Constantinople condemned, in 186.5 the intrusion of
the Romanian state in the Church’s affairs. There were also protests from the
Romanian hierarchs. A famous case is that of Moldavia’s metropolitan Sofronie
Miclescu who, because of having opposed the prince’s reforms, was first
arrested and then forcibly retired (see C. Vasilescu, Istoria monastirilor, p. 72
and M. Păcurariu, Istoria Bisericii, pp. 121-123).
41
M. Păcurariu, Istoria Bisericii, p. 127.
42
To rectify the deficiency of the law from 1872, in 1909 was adopted the
Law of Superior Consistory of the Church, an organism with an advisory
function, composed of members of the Holy Synod, theology professors and
representatives of the priests and of the monks. The foundation of this organism
had initiated a crisis in the Church, between 1909-1911, a crisis with a deep
echo in political and public life. (Ibid., pp. 138-139);
43
The Holy Synod was composed of two metropolitans and six bishops.
Further the government appointed eight titular hierarchs without episcopal
siege, a procedure contested as anti-canonical in Orthodox Church (Ibid., p.
127).
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 91
The Church life after the year 1865 and until the end of
First World War has known great convulsions and
deficiencies. This situation was created because of the
unceasing interference of political parties (conservative and
especially liberal) in our Church’s affairs [...]. Under these
circumstances the members of the Holy Synod themselves
– beginning with the most important metropolitans –, as
chosen by the ruling political parties, were no longer a
moral authority and they never raised to the eminence of
their predecessors.44
44
Ibid., p. 141.
92 Gelu Sabău
45
Paul Brusanowski, Autonomia și constituționalismul în dezbaterile
privind unificarea Bisericii Ortodoxe Române (1919-1925) (Cluj-Napoca: Presa
Universitară Clujeană, 2007), pp. 16-17.
46
Ibid., p. 21.
47
Ibid., p. 352.
48
Ibid., p. 23.
49
Ibid., p. 24.
50
“Like a constitutional state runs its business, and decisions are being
made in Parliaments, likewise in our Church canons are established, like all
matters, the election of bishops, hegumens, protopopes and priests, good
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 93
for themselves”53 could also take part in it. This stipulation, which
restricted the implication in the Church’s life according to one’s income,
made some say that it was a way of introducing census in the Church,
something which could not be accepted.54 Another controversial point is
the right to put a veto on, which the bishops held in episcopal
assemblies. It was considered that this right, which gave priority to high
hierarchs over collective organs, in administrative, and not spiritual
matters, was a severe distortion of the synodal principle imposed by
Şaguna’s Statute.55
As we can note, although the new project of law departs from the
precepts of Şaguna’s Statute, it represents a compromise with the Old
Kingdom’s realities. For some, this compromise was so big that the
spirit of the old statue was lost. No doubt, this compromise was reached
because the Church needed to play a role in the consolidation of Great
Romania’s unity. This is why the new statute did not give full autonomy
to the Orthodox Church. The political role that the Church is playing in
this new configuration can also be seen in the fact that, in 1925, the
Metropolis of Bucharest becomes the Patriarchy. This fact aims at
underlining the regional importance of the new Romanian Orthodox
Church and Romania’s prestige among other states from the Eastern
Europe.56 Also, the fact that Transylvanian Miron Cristea is appointed as
patriarch is not at all accidental. Miron Cristea is one of the orthodox
Transylvanian priests that had maintained connections with Bucharest
even before the Union from 1918.57 His election as prime metropolitan
was done in three days only, with the active involvement of political
factors.58
The purpose of Miron Cristea’s election was the administrative
unity between the Old Kingdom’s Church and that from Transylvania.
Then, his election also signifies the compromise of the two Churches
within the new theological-political situation. This is why Miron
Cristea’s view over the relation between the Church and the state will
also change, as the political situation evolves. If in 1898, as a member of
the Church from Transylvania, M. Cristea was a supporter of Cavour’s
53
Law of organization of the Romanian Orthodox Church, art. 8 (Ibid., p.
364).
54
Ibid., p. 357.
55
Ibid., p. 350.
56
M. Păcurariu, Istoria Bisericii, p. 410.
57
P. Brusanowski, Autonomia și constituționalismul, p. 98.
58
On December 29, 1919 Parliament approved the royal decree of the
union of Romanian provinces, on December 30 the extraordinary session of the
Holy Synod was called, and on December 31 Miron Cristea was chosen primary
metropolitan (Ibid., pp. 98-99).
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 95
59
“My opinion, my principle is that the American system is better, more
reasonable. The basis of this system is the separation between state and the
cult’s affairs. If we cannot reach this goal immediately, we keep this goal in
front of us and we support the actions leading there; [...] We say: a free Church
in a free state”. (M. Cristea, Dotațiunea clerului. Aprecierea Proiectului de lege
despre întregirea veniturilor preoțești, apud. P. Brusanowski, Autonomia și
constituționalismul, p. 101.
60
The parliamentary speech of patriarch Miron Cristea on the occasion of
the debates on the law of organization of the Romanian Orthodox Church, apud
P. Brusanowski, Autonomia și constituționalismul, p. 343;
96 Gelu Sabău
Can the Government, can the head of the state, can the
ruling factors of the country be uninterested about who is a
bishop in Hotin, Bălți, Cetatea Albă, Cernăuți, Chișinău,
Dobrogea [border territories in the East of Great Romania]
or in any other different parts? It cannot be. If any
Government would not be interested in these important
matters, not Church matters only, but vital matter for the
state, then it would commit a great error.61
By the end of the Second World War, Romania passes under the
Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and, after the abolition of monarchy
at 30 December 1947, the communist regime takes over, and the Popular
Romanian Republic is installed. In April 1948 the new Constitution is
enacted, which provides, in article 27, religious freedom and liberty of
conscience. Even though the ideology promoted by the new regime is
anti-religious, the Constitution from 1948 doesn’t stipulate the
separation between the state and the Church. It is only stipulated that
“School is separated from the church”.62 The consequence of this article
was the exclusion of religion classes from the public teaching, and the
preservation of theological seminaries only, for the education of priests.
Some theological institutes were also closed.
The year 1948 is a year of radical changes for the religious life of
the new Republic. Following the enactment of the Constitution, the
Concordat signed between the Romanian State and Vatican in 1927,
according to which the Vatican received some jurisdictional rights over
the Romanian Church United with Rome,63 will be dissolved. In a time
when the world was already divided between the camps that were going
to confront each other during the cold war. Breaking the connections
with Vatican meant, for the communist regime, the elimination of the
61
Idem.
62
Constitution from 1948, art. 27.
63
After the subscription of the Concordat, the Romanian Church United
with Rome, was recognized in the Constitution as a Romanian Church (in the
national meaning of the word), was embedded in the Catholic Church and
organized according to the canonical Roman law. One article of the Concordat
provides that the bishops, the priests and the subjects of the Catholic Church on
the territory of Romanian state can communicate with Vatican without the
control of civil authorities. This article was often invoked to accuse the Catholic
Church of circumvention of the stipulations of the Constitution.
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 97
intrusion of the enemy from the imperialist camp. Another reason for the
denunciation of the Concordat referred to national sovereignty and
independence. If one state is fully sovereign, then it is not possible for
another state to have jurisdiction on its own territory. This perspective
was also supported by men of the Orthodox Church, which welcomed, in
the respective period, the abolition of the Concordat by the communist
state:
In the same year, after the enactment of the new Law of cults and
the abolition of the Concordat with Vatican, the Romanian Church
United with Rome will be dissolved, and its believers will be forced into
orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church was a supporter of this act of the
communist state, considering it an act of restoration by which the
Transylvanians which had converted to Catholicism by force in 1700,
were now free to come back to Orthodox faith. This is the reason why
representatives of the Orthodox Church have considered that dissolving
the Romanian Church United with Rome was an act of “restoration of
the unity of faith for priests and believers”65 from Transylvania. In this
case, the state’s interest coincided with the interest of the Romanian
Orthodox Church, the two institutions collaborating in taking their plans
to a good end.
For that matter, the Romanian Orthodox Church did not exert a
systematic opposition towards the communist regime, but collaborated
with it for the purpose of saving the Church and the liturgical life, as has
been said. The basic principles that regularized the relation of the
Church to the state were those from the anterior period.66 The premises
64
Liviu Stan, “Legea cultelor”, Studii teologice, II-nd series, 1949, no. 9-
10, p. 840.
65
M. Păcurariu, Istoria Bisericii, p. 489.
66
After the instauration of the communist regime the Romanian
theologians affirms that the principles who regularize the relation between
Church and the state are consistent with the byzantine tradition of the Orthodox
Church: autonomy, synodalism, nomocanonism and the principle of “iconomy”
(according to O. Gillet, Religie și naționalism, pp. 59-71).
98 Gelu Sabău
of the collaboration between the two powers were tacit and, to a certain
extent, reciprocally convenient: the state assured the liberty of the cult,
and enjoyed in exchange the Church’s partnership, a dominant
institution within the Romanian population. Also, the communist state
used to employ the traditional anti-Occidental rhetoric of the Romanian
Orthodox Church, something that was obvious in the period of the
dissolvation of the Romanian Church United with Rome.67 The
Orthodox Church’s representatives considered that the collaboration
with the state (without minding the political or ideological orientation of
the political regime) was something peculiar to the tradition of eastern
orthodoxy. One of the principles theorized here was that of the loyalty
towards the state, which follows from the fact that each form of
governance comes from God.68 The principle of loyalty manifests
67
Ibid., p. 54.
68
L. Stan, “Legislația Bisericii Ortodoxe Române în timpul arhipăstoririi
prea fericitului părinte patriarh Justinian”, Ortodoxia. Revista Patriarhiei
Române, vol. XX, no. 2, 1968, p. 286.
69
Idem.
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 99
region,70 after Romania had declared its independence in 1877, and had
become a kingdom in 1881. Then, after Great Romania was formed in
1918, the Romanian Patriarchy was founded in 1925. In all this time the
state is financing the Church’s activity, exerting its influence over it. The
relation between the state and the Church is a close one, because the
Church, both by its institutional organization and by the ideology it
promotes, is a good instrument of consolidation for the national state.
This relation between the state and the Church will not be broken even
during the communist regime. Although the communist regime had
marginalized the activity of the Church and had persecuted the members
of the Church that opposed the regime, the Romanian Orthodox Church
did collaborate with the state during the communist period, the basis of
this collaboration being the nationalist ideology, which constituted the
common ground especially during the national-communist period.
This is the question I have advanced even from the title, following
Olivier Clément’s hypothesis. As we can note, the French author refers
to a specific form of nationalism, namely religious nationalism, which is
distinct from secular nationalism. Secular nationalism is a modern form
of nationalism, which is specific to Western civilization, and appears in
the matrix of religion and as a result of the decline of religion in the
modern world.71 It constitutes, just like religion, as an “ideology of the
order”72 and receives, as some author think, the marks of a political
70
The Greek Orthodox Church declared its autocephaly in 1833, the same
year the Greek state became a kingdom. The autocephaly of the Greek
Orthodox Church was recognized by the Patriarchy from Constantinople in
1850. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church declared its autocephaly in 1872 and
was recognized only in 1945. The Serbian Orthodox Church declared its
autocephaly in 1879, one year after the recognition of Serbia’s independence by
the European powers.
71
E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
NY, 1983; A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion
and Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, 1997; A.D. Smith, Chosen
Poeples (Oxford University Press, 2003).
72
This thesis is affirmed by Mark Jurgensmeyer. The author doesn’t use
the term “ideology” in the political sense (of Marx or Manenheim), but in the
original sense, used by the French ideologists: “I will refer to what I have in
mind as ideologies of order. Both religious and secular-nationalistic frameworks
of thought conceive of the world in coherent, manageable ways; they both
suggest that there are levels of meaning beneath the day-to-day world that give
coherence to things unseen; and they both provide the authority that gives the
100 Gelu Sabău
social and political order its reason for being. In doing so they define for the
individual the right way of being in the world and relate persons to the social
whole”. (M. Jurgensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism
confronts the Secular State [University of California Press, 1994], p. 31).
73
See, for example, Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1960).
74
Rogers Brubaker, “Religion and Nationalism. Four approaches”,
Nations and Nationalism, vol 18, no. 1, 2012, pp. 3-4.
75
M. Jurgensmeyer, The New Cold War? p. 15.
76
R. Brubaker, “Religion and Nationalism”, pp. 5-8.
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 101
77
Ibid., p. 9.
78
Ph. Barker, Religious Nationalism, p. 20.
102 Gelu Sabău
79
Idem.
80
Ibid., p. 35.
81
Ibid., p. 37.
82
Ibid., p. 36.
83
Ibid., pp. 45-142.
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 103
84
For the critique of the Western civilization by the autochthonous
movement see: Gelu Sabău, “Religion and modernity,” pp. 121-131.
85
These expressions are frequently used by representatives of the Church
in inter-war period to nominate the communist regime from USSR (see C.
Coajă, Relația stat-biserică, pp. 176-184).
86
Ph. Barker, Religious Nationalism, pp. 165-167.
87
Ibid., p. 165.
104 Gelu Sabău
88
See Dimitry Pospielovsky, “The Neo-Slavophile Trend and Its Relation
to the Contemporary Religious Revival in the USSR”, in Pedro Ramet (ed.),
Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics (Duke
University Press, 1984), pp. 41-58.
89
As it has already been written about the difficult relation between the
orthodox ethos and the democratic pluralism or the human rights. See, for
example, O. Gillet, Religie și naționalism, ch. “Etica ortodoxă – o frână în calea
pluralismului democratic?”, pp. 263-278; or Adamantia Pollis, “Greece: A
Problematic Secular State”, in William Safran (ed.), The Secular and the
Sacred. Nation, Religion and Politics (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005),
pp. 147-160.
90
“The term religious nationalism does not necessarily refer to any
specific relationship between the church and the state. Again, countries with an
established church may not exhibit religious nationalism (Church of England)
whereas countries with no established church may”. (Ph. Barker, Religious
Nationalism, p. 14).
Is Nationalism a Form of Secularization for Orthodoxy? 105
BIBLIOGRAPHY
91
I had analyzed the mechanisms of such a transformation in Gelu Sabău,
“Religion and Modernity”, pp. 114-132.
92
The auto-secularization of the Church aims at more aspects: 1) By
assuming a national identity the Church risks transforming herself into an
“institution of social or political memory” and betraying its religious vocation;
2) The supremacy of the Church in public space based on the majority’s
argument follows the logic of democracy and has no affinity with Christian
values; 3) The claim of the Church to be an “implicit actor of civil society”
risks hiding its nature as a “different” institution (See I. Conovici, “Aspecte ale
discursului public al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române după 1989:
(auto)secularizarea”, Studia Politica, vol. VII, no. 3, 2007, pp. 785-790).
106 Gelu Sabău
atheism.1 Through his book, The Red Flag. An introduction in the history
of communism,2 David Preistland performs a very interesting analysis of
the communist system whose ideological origins, he identified in
relation to the emergence and crystallization of the communist ideology
in the French Revolution from 1789.3 Based on the above-mentioned
issues, we launch the following question: was communism only an
ideological system that propagates atheism, or more than that? We speak
in this case of a secularized religion?
The origins of communist ideology (Marxist), Bolshevik
propaganda practice and the exporting of those “confirms that we can
always talk about totalitarianism of the left (and right-wing extremism)
in terms of political religion”. The concept of political religion “was
imposed first by Eric Voegelin (in a response to Thomas Mann) and
refers to the typical phenomenon of Resacralization of the modern world
through utopia”.4 Given the framing of communism in the category of
political religions, we will pursue further features that argue the above
claims.
According to the ideas expressed by the prominent historian of
mentalities, Professor Lucian Boia, communism as a scientific religion
pursued three characteristic goals of any religious synthesis: “a complete
and coherent explanation of the world; the interpretation of man's
destiny; a code of ethics and behavior”.5 Marxism
1
For more details, see Stéphane Courtois (ed.), Dicționarul comunismului,
trans. Mihai Ungurean, Aliza Ardeleanu, Gabriela Ciubuc (Iași: Polirom, 2008),
pp. 525-526.
2
David Preistland begins his book with a challenging title 1789-1889-1989,
dates referring to three important moments of communism history. David
Preistland, Steagul roșu. O istorie a comunismului, translation: Corina Hădăreanu
(București: Litera Internațional, 2012), p. 20.
3
For ideology origins, see the introduction (pp. 15-30) and the prologue (pp.
31-48) in Preistland, Steagul roșu.
4
Mihail Neamţu, “Comunism și religie. Comisia Prezidențială pentru
Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România. Raport final Editura Humanitas,
2007” in Dilemateca (iulie 2008).
5
Lucian Boia, Mitologia științifică a comunismului (București: Humanitas,
1999), p. 24.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 109
6
K. Bockmuehl, The Challenge of Marxism, IVP, Leicester, 1980, p. 17,
apud Paul Negruţ, Biserica şi statul: interogaţie asupra modelului “simfoniei”
bizantine (Oradea: Editura Institutului Biblic “Emanuel”, 2000), p. 84.
7
Raymond Aron, Opiul intelectualilor, trans. Adina Dinițoiu, Ed. a 2-a
(București: Curtea Veche Publishing, 2008), p. 303.
8
Ibidem, p. 304. According to Alain Besançon, this is a collective salvation,
being comparable to the biblical salvation. Alain Besançon, Nenorocirea
secolului: despre comunism, nazism și unicitatea “Șoah-ului”, trans. Mona Antohi
(București: Humanitas, 2007), pp. 93, 91.
9
Richard Wurmbrand, Torturat pentru Hristos (Suferința Bisericii din țările
comuniste), trans. Dragoș Alexandrescu (București: Living Sacrifice, Book
Company, USA, c/o Forumul Civic Creștin, 2007), p. 67.
10
Preistland, Steagul roșu. O istorie a comunismului, p. 21.
11
Boia, Mitologia științifică a comunismului, p. 24.
12
Historian, Lucian Boia, considered that Marxism “took the place of
religion in the sense of building a unitary world in which man will finally find the
motive of being”, Ibidem, p. 50.
13
K. Bockmuehl, The Challenge of Marxism, p. 17, apud Negruț, Biserica și
statul, p. 84.
14
Aron, Opiul intelectualilor, p. 303.
15
We identify in this position both the communist party and its
leader/leaders. It’s interesting to mention in this case, a remark made by Lutheran
110 Marius Silveşan
pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed because of his opposition shown to
the supreme leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer mentioned that
“the leader and the function which call themselves gods mocked God and […]
must collapse”, DBWE, vol. 12, pp, 280, 282, apud Emanuel Conţac, “Pastorul
lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer martir al rezistenței antinaziste în Germania lui
Hitler”, Și cerul s-a umplut de sfinți …: martiriul în antichitate și în secolul XX:
actele Colocviului Internațional “Martiriul în Antichitatea creștină și în secolul
XX: teme, dezbateri personaje”: Sighet, 2-5 June 2011, organized by Academia
Civică from Romania, Asociația Culturală Oglindanet; (eds.) Cristian Bădiliță,
Emanuel Conţac (București: Curtea Veche Publishing, 2012), p. 495.
16
“Everywhere from the Elbe to the Vistula and the Danube, taking power
and the destruction of the old world was done through terror and violence,
under the direct protection of the occupation troops and under the helpless eye
of western observatory”, Vlad Georgescu, Istoria românilor de la origini până
în zilele noastre, Ediția a III-a (București: Humanitas, 1992), p. 243.
17
Religion was considered a private matter that had nothing to do with
public life. Due to this reason the school was separated from the church and
religion was taken out of school subjects. Another state action aimed the
transition in its property of the health and educational institutions belonging to
cults. By removing religion from the school curriculum, the prohibition of
religious assistance in the army, schools, hospitals and other public institutions,
the state has assumed the role of training a new generation that would no longer
have anything to do with religion or the Church. Controlling the schools aimed
to remove the Christian faith from the minds of youth and inoculate new,
atheistic ideas. Developing and explaining these issues were done within the
framework of the present material.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 111
denies God, denies the holy and clean life, promoting other
principles....”18 To understand these issues, we will present the general
characteristics of secularization, specific aspects of this process, as well
as its consequences particularly in Evangelical and Neoprotestant church
life, by analyzing the legislative framework. The importance of the legal
framework derives from the fact that it regulates the relationship
between the secular and the religious, and between state and Churches.
The subject of this article fits into a broader research theme related to the
dynamics of the relationship between the state and the Christian Baptist
Churches of Romania, between 1948 and 1965.19
The organizational particularity of each of the religious
confessions that were given the legal right to work in Romania
(including the Roman Catholic Church) led to a different response to the
actions of state laicization of society,20 to which we shall refer to as the
legislative framework. For a clearer understanding of the implications of
state actions employed in the sphere of secularization, we need a
definition of this term, in fact a concept with poly-semantic meaning.
DEX defines the verb “to secularize” with reference to “take out goods
from the property or composition of the church, areas of activity or
cultural values,21 passing them into state ownership”.22 According to the
18
Mihai Huşanu, interview taken by Denisa Bodeanu in Denisa Bodeanu
(ed.), Neoprotestanții din Transilvania în timpul regimului comunist: studiu de
caz: baptiștii din județul Cluj: mărturii și documente (Cluj-Napoca: Argonaut,
2007), p. 193.
19
The research deals with matters of legislative regulations, personnel,
means and methods of state control, the methods and responsive forms of
individual or institutional households of the state, during its persistent
interferences in the Baptist churches of Romania and its believers.
20
Laicization is understood in this context as an extreme form of
secularization, René Rémond, Religie și secularizare în Europa. Secularizarea
în secolele al XIX-lea și XX 1780-2000 (Iași: Polirom, 2003), pp.160-161.
21
Through Decision no. 202 of 31 January 1948 published in the Official
Gazette of 3 February 1948: “Ministerial Committee for Economic Recovery
and Monetary Stabilization, created by Law No. 248, published in the Official
Gazette nr.159 of July 15, 1947, issued a Decision with law power ordering that
all the goods of all kinds of institutions be passed immediately to the state –
that is, to be seized – in the conditions set out in that Decision”. Tudor R.
Popescu, Salvarea bisericilor de orice rit din România sub ocupația militară
sovietică, Ediția a II-a, edition by Rodica Burduşel (Iași: Lumen, 2009), p. 37.
In Article 1 of Decision 202/1948 were referred hospitals, educational and
ecclesiastical supplies, which were to enter into state ownership. Point c of
Article 1 expressly referred that churches and hermitages would go into the
ownership of Ministry of Religious Affairs. The danger lies in the expression of
article 2 which stated that, “for the assigning of goods which were not covered
by article 1, or on which there are doubts, will be formed a Committee”, Ibidem,
112 Marius Silveşan
p. 38. Through this ambiguous wording, the lawman comprehends within the
law framework “property of religious institutions, which were to be confiscated,
without discrimination”. Ibidem, p. 39.
22
DEX online term seculariza, http://dexonline.ro/definitie/seculariza,
accessed on 03.03.2011.
23
“The term secularism was first used to refer to the Peace of Westphalia
(1648), which resulted in a transfer of church properties into the hands of the
Prince”. Dănuț Mănăstireanu, “Religie și secularizare în modernitatea târzie”
http://agorachristi.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/religie-si-secularizare-in-
modernitatea-tarzie/, accesed on 20.02.2011.
24
D.K. McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 1996), p. 253 quoted in Mănăstireanu, op. cit.)
25
J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 211, apud, Mănăstireanu, “Religie și
secularizare în modernitatea târzie”.
26
Mănăstireanu, “Religie și secularizare în modernitatea târzie”.
27
Paula Podoabă, under the theme of “Secularization and its forms”,
http://dreptcanonic.amforum.net, accesed on 03.03.2011.
28
Rémond, Religie și secularizare în Europa. Secularizarea în secolele al
XIX-lea și XX 1780-2000, p. 177.
29
“Separation of Church and state – behold the claim that the socialist
proletariat presents to contemporary state and contemporary church”, V. I.
Lenin, “Socialismul și religia”, in V I. Lenin, Despre religie (București: Editura
de Stat pentru Literatura Politică, 1956), p. 9. This attitude is understandable
given that Lenin declared that religion is opium for the people, and one of the
forms of spiritual oppression. Ibidem, pp. 7-8.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 113
30
Since 1948, “dark clouds settled down on religious freedom” in
Romania, in Memorialul Durerii, producer Lucia Hossu Longin, Ep.13, Drama
Bisericii Greco-catolice (00:43″).
31
The Greek Catholic priest, Matei Boilă, makes a competent analysis of
the objectives of the communist regime to control the minds and souls of men,
and the opposition of the Church and the Christian faith to modeling the
communist doctrine in the souls of men. “The characteristic of communism was
a dictatorship not by its special cruelty, because throughout history may have
been enough extraordinary cruel dictatorships, maybe not like them but they
were. Totalitarian character was based on the fact that they not only wanted to
impose laws, control on people, but also the concept of life. This was the
essential thing in the communist regime. Communism tried to rule the world,
possessing souls, and that the greatest enemy was the Church and the Christian
faith who oppose this true communisation of the human soul by an atheistic
Marxist conception”. Priest Matei Boilă in Ibidem (03:58″).
32
Denis Deletant, România sub regimul Comunist (București: Fundația
Academia Civică, 2010), p. 93.
33
According to Marx, religion and its institutionalized form, the Church,
were instruments of the oppressor state, of a system based on exploitation, Karl
Marx, Friedrich Engels, Despre religie (București: Editura Politică, 1960),
p.134. Lenin wrote the following when referring to the relationship of Church –
state: “We ask that religion will be a private matter to state, but in any case we
cannot consider religion a private matter to our own party. The state shouldn’t
have anything to do with religion; religious associations must not be linked to
state power”. Vladimir Ilich Lenin, “Socialismul și religia” in V.I Lenin, Opere,
vol. 10 (București: Editura de Stat pentru Literatură Politică, 1956), p. 70.
34
Codul Penal. Text oficial cu modificările până la data de 1 decembrie
1960 urmat de o anexă de legi penale speciale (The official text as amended up
to December 1, 1960, followed by an appendix of special penal law) (București:
Editura Științifică, 1960).
35
For more details, see Ioan Bunaciu, Bisericile Creștine Baptiste din
România între 1944-1990 (Bucureşti: Editura Universității din București, 2002),
114 Marius Silveşan
39
“Actions against certain religions were determined by state interests.
According to these, some religions were abolished, while others were allowed to
work, trying to use them to promote certain geopolitical interests”. George
Enache, “Lupta împotriva religiei în U.R.S.S. și promovarea valorilor ateiste.
Fundamente doctrinare și forme de acțiune” Arhivele Securității, vol. 4
(București: Editura Enciclopedică, 2008), p. 132.
40
In Yugoslavia, the new regime’s intention was to limit the activity of
churches to religious service. It sought, among other things, to restrict the
influence of the Church in society to the point where it no longer poses anything
else than “vestiges of past civilizations”, Stevan K. Pavlowitch, The improbable
survivor. Yugoslavia and its problems 1918-1988 (London: C. Hurst & Company,
1988), p. 102.
41
Cioroianu, Pe umerii lui Marx, p. 273.
42
“A more aggressive behavior of the communists towards the Catholic
Church explains itself through its centralized structure, its powerful subordination
to Rome and the solidarity between the various Catholic countries around the
world”, Soulet, Istoria comparată a statelor comuniste, p. 45.
43
The aspects mentioned are identified by Liviu Ţârău in a study on the
American perception of the religious situation in Soviet-controlled area in the
latter part of the 40's. Although the Soviet leadership position in relation to the
Russian Orthodox Church has undergone a change in the context of Russia's
involvement in the Second World War, they maintained a conservative stance
towards Catholicism. The attitude towards Catholicism found its aversion in the
“Bolshevistic attitude to religion in general, but it is especially due to the fact that
the spiritual center of Catholicism, the Vatican state entity itself – and Catholic
churches in different states could not be checked or enrolled in the desired
direction of Kremlin policy”. Liviu Ţârău, “Percepții americane privind situația
religioasă din România 1944-1946” Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai, Theologia
Catholica, Anul XLV, Nr. 2, 2000, Cluj-Napoca, p. 6. Another determining factor
was anti-communist attitude adopted by the Vatican at the end of the 19th century,
cf. Ibidem.
44
Cioroianu, Pe umerii lui Marx, p. 273.
116 Marius Silveşan
authorities sought to take the Catholic and Greek Catholic churches from
under the authority of the Vatican and transform them into churches
subjected to national authorities. Although it failed to bring the Roman
Catholic Church under communist rule, and the rules of operation that
were proposed to the Government were not approved, it was allowed to
operate throughout the communist period semi-clandestinely with a
decimated elite. Regarding the diplomatic relations with the Vatican,
“the communists believed that Nunciatures are more like diplomatic
espionage dens, so the Nunciatures were forced to close in the East-
European countries”.45
The Concordat denunciation had an effect also on the Greek
Catholic believers, which the regime wanted to terminate as Stalin did in
the Ukraine. Bishop Ioan Suciu46 transmitted the following exhortation
to encourage believers: “It is the hour in which Jesus Christ gives us the
opportunity to share the sufferings for the Church. Do not be deceived
by words, committees, news and lies. Stay strong, steadfast in the faith
for which our parents and ancestors gave their blood….”47 This
exhortation of Bishop Ioan Suciu was true also for the United Church’s
elite when, during 27-29 of October 1948, all Greek Catholic Bishops
were arrested.48 After the arrest of the Greek Catholic elite, through
Decree 358/194849 on December 2, 1948, the communist state ordered
the abolition of the Greek Catholic cult, and joined the Romanian
Church United with Rome with the Romanian Orthodox Church as
revealed in the document text.
45
Vasile, Între Vatican și Kremlin, p. 35.
46
Ioan Suciu, also known as the youth's Bishop, was consecrated as
auxiliary bishop of Toronto in the summer of 1940, choosing to remain with his
believers to serve even after the cession of Northern Transylvania to Hungary in
the autumn. Even if he survived an attempted execution of the Hungarian army,
the Greek Catholic Bishop did not accept totalitarian regimes breaches,
criticizing the pro-Soviet regime in Romania, from the position of an apostolic
administrator of the Greek Catholic Archdiocese of Alba Iulia and Făgăraş.
47
Memorialul Durerii, Ep.13, Drama Bisericii Greco-catolice (02:28″).
48
Vasile, Între Vatican și Kremlin, p. 50.
49
Decretul 358 din 2 decembrie 1948 (Decretul 358/1948) privind stabilirea
situației de drept a fostului cult greco-catolic publicat in Monitorul Oficial 281 din
2 decembrie 1948 (Monitorul Oficial 281/1948). [Decree No. 358 of 2 December
1948 (Decree 358/1948) concerning the situation of the former Greek Catholic
cult was published in the Official Gazette on 2 December 1948, 281 (Monitorul
Oficial 281/1948)]. Referring to this point, the priest Matei Boilă, a former
political prisoner and senator, mentions the following: “This aggression against
the Greek Catholic Church was the culmination of Soviet occupation”,
Memorialul Durerii, Ep.13, Drama Bisericii Greco-catolice (01:38″).
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 117
50
Decree No. 358 of 2 December 1948, published in Monitorul Oficial
281/1948. Available online at http://www.legex.ro/Decret-358-02.12.1948-
127.aspx (accessed 6 June 2011).
51
Cioroianu, Pe umerii lui Marx, p. 271.
52
Nicoleta Ionescu-Gură, Stalinizarea României: Republica Populară
Română 1948-1950: transformări instituționale (București: BIC ALL, 2005), p.
363.
118 Marius Silveşan
53
Ibidem, p. 367.
54
A.N.I.C., fond P.C.M., Transcripts, 1947, file 2, f. 55, apud Nicoleta
Ionescu-Gură, Stalinizarea României, p. 364.
55
Measure introduced by the Constitution R.P.R. in 1948 and later by
Decree 175/1948 on education reform. Reference to theological education.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 119
56
Deletant, România sub regimul Comunist, p. 93. In a public declaration of
22 February 1948, Gheorghiu-Dej identified the Roman Catholic Church as “one
of the few institutional obstacles that may stand in front of the communization [of
the country]”, Pedro Ramet, Cross and Commissar. The Politics of Religion in
Eastern Europe and the USSR (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1987), p. 29.
57
For a discussion about the constitutional framework see Nicoleta Ionescu-
Gură, Stalinizarea României pp.121-127, 375-382, and also Angela Banciu,
Istoria constituţională a României: deziderate naţionale şi realităţi sociale
(Bucureşti: Editura Lumina Lex, 2001), passim. Nicoleta Ionescu-Gură stated,
taking some ideas from Jean-François Soulet, Comparative History of Communist
States, the fact that the country's fundamental laws, constitutions, have been used
by communist regimes as a means of strengthening their authority and enhancing
their own political systems (regimes).
120 Marius Silveşan
of religion were included, but these were not as significant for the
concrete realities of the daily life for Baptist believers.
1948’s Constitution. One of the objectives of the new political
regime was to provide a legal framework.58 Thus, after 23 August 1944
is put in force the 1923’s Constitution. In respect of the freedoms
enjoyed by citizens, the fundamental act, adopted in 1923, stipulate in
article 5 that “Romanians, irrespective of ethnic origin, language or
religion, enjoy the freedom of conscience, freedom of education,
freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of associations and
of all freedoms and rights laid down by law”.59 This article demonstrates
that political and social rights were secured for all citizens. Political
rights and freedoms were presented in a similar way in the 1938’s
Constitution:
58
Through the constitutions, the Communist Party sought to gain the
legitimacy that it lacked in the Romanian society.
59
Constituția din 1923 (1923’s Constitution), http://www.rogoveanu.ro/con
stitutia/const1923.htm (accesed 03.05.2011).
60
Constituția din 1938 (1938’s Constitution), http://www.rogoveanu.ro/con
stitutia/const1938.htm (accesed 03.05.2011).
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 121
61
Bogdan Emanuel Răduţ, Statul și biserica în România comunistă (1949-
1965) – Între demnitate și compromis (Craiova: Sitech, 2010), p. 47. Bogdan
Emanuel Răduţ’s statement is confirmed by records of Diplomatic Archives of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs comprising a great number of memoirs and
interventions by international Baptist bodies regarding religious freedom in
Romania. From all of these, we mention: “The Memoir addressed by the BWA to
the Council of Ministers on the repressive measures taken against the Baptists in
Romania. Response note (27 July 1921 – 22 October 1921)”, “Expulsion from
Romania of the Baptist missionary Hurlez” (telegr. 13 January 1925, February
1925, etc.) in The Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Directorate of personnel and education. Central Fund M.A.E., Problem 16
(Schools and Churches in Romania) 1875-1950, vol. 11 unpaged; “J.
Rushbrooke’s Memoir, the BWA’s Secretary, on the Romanian Baptist
Association’s regime. Romanian Government response”, “The Secret Order of the
General staff which forbade sectarian meeting (also Baptists) – 1927” in Ibidem,
vol.12 unpaged.
122 Marius Silveşan
brutal only after abandoning the Constitution of 1923 and the King's
departure from the country.62
After the forced abdication of the king and the establishment of
the republic, work was started on a new constitution that could
legitimize the changes. Thus, the first of the three communist
Constitutions, adopted on 13 April 1948, stipulated in article 27, the
state’s guarantee of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion and
the right to organize and operate freely.
62
Banciu, Istoria vieții constituționale, pp. 182-183.
63
González Aldea, Helsinki 1975, p. 173.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 123
It now appears for the first time in the text of the Constitution that
school is separated from the Church. Although it states that there is
religious freedom to organize and operate freely, the end of Article 84 of
the Constitution introduces limitations in the way of expression and
manifestation. These limitations are placed on the provision that “the
organization and functioning of religious denominations are regulated by
law”.65
1965’s Constitution. Legislative provisions on religious cults are
filled with the RSR’s Constitution since 1965. Article 17 stated:
64
“Constituția Republicii Populare Române” (“Romanian People’s
Republic’s Constitution 1952)”, article 84, in Ioan Muraru, Constituțiile Române
(Culegere) (București: Universitatea din București, Facultatea de Drept, 1980), p.
82.
65
Ibidem, 1952’ Constitution, article 84.
66
Constituția R.S.R. din 1965 (R.S.R.’s Constitution from 1965), article 30,
http://www.infopolitic.ro/imagini/documente/1133864495_Constitutia%20RSR%
201965.pdf, pdf, p. 3 (accesed 11 November 2009).
124 Marius Silveşan
Decree no. 177 for the general regime of religious cults, known as
the Denominations Law and promulgated on August 4, 1948, brings
further notice on the status of religious denominations. Article 1 of that
law specifies the following: “Anyone may belong to any religion or
embrace any religious belief if the exercise is not contrary to the
Constitution, security and public order or morals property”.
This article is complemented by article 6 which stipulates:
“Religious denominations are free to organize and operate freely if their
ritual practices and are not contrary to the Constitution, security or
public order and morality”.69
Article 1 and article 6 presents similarities by introducing
limitations with regard to the right of the citizen to belong to a religion,
or religious organizations to hold reunions because those freedoms are
allowed only if these are not contrary to the Constitution, security or
public order and morality.70 Through such vague formulations are
advanced limitations in legislation, in regard to the exercise of religious
beliefs or of the operation of a religious cult. External relations could not
67
Legislative form of expression because in legal practice that right was not
guaranteed.
68
R.S.R.’s Constitution from 1965, pdf, p. 5,
69
Decretul nr. 177 pentru regimul general al cultelor religioase, publicat în
Monitorul Oficial (Partea I-a), Anul CXVI, nr.178, 1948 (Decree no. 177 for
religious denominations’ general regime, published in Official Monitor (Part I),
Year CXVI, no.178, 1948), p. 6392.
70
Legea Cultelor, Decretul 177/1948 (Denominations Law, Decree
177/1948), articles 1 & 6.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 125
71
ASSC, Fond Direcția Studii și Documentare, “Prevederile legislației din
1928 și 1948 referitoare la relația cultelor cu străinătatea”, pp. 1-2.
72
Ibidem, p. 2.
126 Marius Silveşan
73
“Decretul 178 pentru organizarea Ministerului Cultelor” in Monitorul
Oficial (Partea I A), Anul CXVI, Nr.178 din 14 august 1948, pp. 6396-6399 (pp.
7-9).
74
Ibidem, p. 6396 (6A).
75
Ibidem, p. 6397 (7). Within the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Directorate I
was for the Orthodox Church, and Directorate II was for the other denominations.
76
During communist times, the ministers of religious denominations (from
1957 the Ministry was transformed in Department) were: Priest Constantin
Burducea (6.03.1945-30.11.1946), Radu Roşculeţ (1.12.1946-29.12.1947),
Stanciu Stoian (30.12.1947-23.04.1951), Vasile Pogăceanu (23.04.1951-
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 127
stated in a speech that “the Romanian state has nothing to do with any
denomination as long as it does not dispute the new social order”.77 As
this term allowed multiple interpretations, we had a difference between
what the Minister said and the actions of the institution they represent.
80
Alexa Popovici, Istoria baptiștilor din România:1856-1989, Ed. a 2-a rev.
(Oradea: Editura Universității Emanuel din Oradea, Editura Făclia), 2007, p. 734.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 129
81
“Instrucțiuni pentru funcționarea corpului de împuterniciți ai Ministerului
Cultelor”, Art. 3 în ASSC, Dosar Legislaţie 1953-1987 (“Instructions for the
functioning of the authorized body of the Ministry of Religious Affairs”, in
ASSC, Legislation Folder 1953-1987).
82
Ioan Bunaciu, Bisericile Creștine Baptiste din România, p. 32.
130 Marius Silveşan
out by the Ministry of Religious Affairs through the central organs and
regional commissioners for religious denominations.83
83
“Hotărârea Nr.[2412/1953] privind înființarea funcțiunii de împuterniciți
pentru culte în cadrul Sfaturilor Populare raionale și în cadrul unor Sfaturi
Populare orășenești”, ASSC, Dosar Legislaţie 1953-1987. Împuterniciţii de culte,
Departamentul Cultelor, Inspectorii teritoriali, nepaginat (“Decision No..
[2412/1953] on the establishment of the function of commissioners for
denominations in the frame of People's Council in district and People's Council in
cities”, ASSC, Legislation Folder 1953-1987. Denominations Commissioners,
The Department of Religious Affairs, Territorial Inspectors, unpaged).
84
“Ministerul Cultelor. Direcțiunea Împuterniciților. Adresa Nr. 125 din
11.III.1953”, în ASSC, Dosar Legislaţie 1953-1987 (“The Ministry of Religious
Affairs. Commissioners Direction. Address No. 125 from 11.III.1953”, in ASSC,
Legislation Folder 1953-1987).
85
“Atribuțiile împuterniciților”, în ASSC, Dosar Legislaţie 1953-1987
(“Commissioners’ attributes”, in ASSC, Legislation Folder 1953-1987).
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 131
86
“Hotărârea Nr.286/din 5 martie 1958 pentru organizarea și funcționarea
Departamentului Cultelor” în Daniel Mitrofan, Pași: Cultul Creștin Baptist în
perioada comunistă, Centrul de istorie și apologetică,
http://carteapasi.wordpress.com (accesat 16 octombrie 2010) pp. 246-247
(“Decision No.286/March 5, 1958, organization and functioning of the
Department of Religious Affairs” in Mitrofan, Pași: Cultul Creștin Baptist în
perioada comunistă, pp. 246-247).
132 Marius Silveşan
provision relating to religion, it was clear that the state was to limit the
transition from one denomination to another.
87
ACNSAS, Fond documentar (Documentary Fond), file 6902, vol. 3, f.
143.
88
Vasilică Croitor, Răscumpărarea memoriei: cultul penticostal în perioada
comunistă (Medgidia: Succed Publishing), 2010, p. 50.
89
Iosif Ţon, Confruntări, Ed. a 3-a (Oradea: Cartea Creştină, 2009), p. 64.
134 Marius Silveşan
Decree Law no. 212, for the amendment of the Penal Code,
published in the Official Bulletin, no. 8 of June 17, 1960, at
art. 1, section 44 was added to art. 256 of the old Penal
Code, paragraph 3 as follows: ‘The punishment referred to
in paragraph 1 shall apply to persons who meet the clerical
and administrative functions without admission of
Department of Religious Affairs as well as those who,
disregarding their duties allow performing such functions
without this recognition’.94
90
. Penal Code was amended by Decree Law Nr.212/1960 and published in
the Official Bulletin no. 8 of June 17, 1960.
91
The most common cultic practice was carried out without the consent of
Department of Religious Affairs in the 50s and 60s making clandestine baptisms.
92
Gheorghe Modoran-Pantelimon, Biserica prin pustiul roșu: rezistență și
compromis în adventismul din România în perioada comunistă (1944-1965),
vol. I (București: Editura Viață și Sănătate, 2013), p. 55.
93
The issue is also discussed in Marius Silveşan, Bisericile Creștine
Baptiste din România între persecuție, acomodare și rezistență 1948-1965
(Târgoviște: Cetatea de Scaun, 2012), p. 163 (Marius Silveșan, Christian
Baptist Churches of Romania between persecution, accommodation and
resistance 1948-1965, Cetatea de Scaun: Targoviște, 2012, p. 163)
94
ASSC, fond Studies Division, 1960, file 103, f.3. The passage referred to
in the document sent by the Baptist Union, to the Department of Religious Affairs
appears in the Penal Code published in December 1960, in Article 256, which is
located in Section IV of Chapter II. For details see Codul Penal. Text oficial cu
modificările până la data de 1 decembrie 1960 urmat de o anexă de legi penale
speciale (București: Editura Științifică, 1960), p. 157.
Secularization under Communism: Romanian Legislative Measures 135
CONCLUSIONS
95
For details see Hungarian Open Society Archives (HU-OSA) 300-60-1
Box 518, file 2800 (7) Art. state secret.
96
“Nostalgie a controlului comunist asupra cultelor?” in Călăuza Ortodoxă,
Revista Arhiepiscopiei Dunării de Jos, Octomber 1, 2010,
http://www.calauza.edj.ro/?p=1185 (accessed 25.05.2011) (Nostalgia communist
control over religious affairs? in Călăuza Ortodoxă)
136 Marius Silveşan
BIBLIOGRAPHY
watches from a distance (if not with hostility) his same decisive attitude
against the leftward drift of Latin American theology.
In a word, the Eastern countries’ resurrection of faith in the public
space seems to ruffle the secular perceptiveness of the westerner. He can
understand it either as a “breakthrough of a hang-up” (because of the
interdiction of public manifestations of religiosity during the Communist
regime), or as a picturesque element of certain societies that – seen from
Paris or from London – have always belonged to another world that had
not really entered modernity. For the Easterners – and particularly for
the Romanians, for whom freedom from Communism overlaps with the
winter holidays – the public expression of faith is associated firstly with
the feeling of rebirth (as a way out from dictatorship), with that of
freedom (of conscience and expression) and, at least in those days, with
that of solidarity and mutual generosity. The “Our Father” would still
resonate in the summer of 1990 in the University Square, only to be
choked not so much by the police assaults and the miner crowds brought
in Bucharest at the expense of the new government, as by the noise of
the political life and by the “Occident temptation” manifested firstly at
the level of consumerism frenzy and the ascent of the “new class”.
After two decades from the Revolution, Romania seems to be a
society as secularized as Occidental societies. It is true that all the
surveys affirm the trust that apparently the population has – at
exaggerated rates – in the Church; but, on the other hand, neither
theological knowledge, nor attending religious services could be
expected to give the measure of this trust. The impression left by these
numbers is that people excessively overrate the value of the Church,
while actually drawing away from it. In order to understand the way in
which the Romanians relate to the Church – particularly to the majority
one: the Orthodox Church – we need briefly to consider the history of its
relationship with the State during Communist times and during the
following two decades. We will also attempt to reveal a panoramic view
of the evolution of Romanian society during the last century and to see
the impact that the consecutive social mutations have had on religiosity
and its public manifestations. In short, we will ponder the forms that
secularization has taken in contemporary Romania. During this journey
our perspective will be a social one, in which anthropology, sociology
and religious psychology (and particularly Orthodox theology) will help
us outline an image of faith in today’s life. We will not enter any
dogmatic debates, as we have no competence in this area.
*****
even been made a gift: the recess of the Greek Catholic Church. The
Orthodox believers have always claimed that the Greek Catholic system
had been the product of political pressure; a symmetrical political
pressure was asked to balance the scale. Only all the “gifts” of
Communism were poisoned. The recess of the Greek Catholic Church
(accompanied by spoliation of patrimony and the physical annihilation
of its hierarchs) did not unite the churches, but rather created between
them a deeper gap of resentment and distrust. Peace and national values,
no matter how much they sustained the spirit of the Church, have not
been sincerely expressed, but imposed and – implicitly –fake. It is hard
to believe that the hierarchy of the Church remained unaware and
saddening to see that they chose to accept it.
The price was not only the survival of the Church (as its defenders
claim), but – most of all – its marginalization: in those 45 years, the
Orthodox Church has never been a public voice. Moreover, its public
incidence, its role in shaping the times (whether the ‘60s or the ‘80s) and
its involvement in drawing a future for Romania was “quasi-nulle”. The
price paid for its survival was its being removed from history (with the
ultimate expression – and humiliation – represented by the demolition of
the churches in the historical center of Bucharest). Its inoffensive a-
temporality has been tolerated: there have been published (in strictly
overseen editions) “The Fathers of the Church”, courses of theology and
magazines for internal circulation. All these have been accessible only
for priests (who, in their large majority, were not guilty of any
intellectual excess) and during those years failed to have any public
relevance. No one from the ecclesiastical sphere dared to open any
debate (no matter how discreet or well covered in intellectual argument)
against the “classics” (in fact, famous anonymous thinkers) Petru Berar
and Octavian Cheţan. No one within the Church advocated the work of
the publishers of classical philosophy or historians of medieval art.
The Church accepted the boundaries of its enclosure in which it
has been locked and was content with what was left: the freedom of cult
and of instructing religious personnel. In one way, that is more than
nothing; in another way it is less than nothing: the a-temporality attested
to in the desertion of faith. That was the most perverse effect of the
cohabitation of the Orthodox Church with the Communist state:
depriving the faith of its active and public dimension and transforming it
into a refuge with relevance to the currents of history. Obviously, the
same remark can be made about almost any other form of culture that
“survived” Communism.
After ’89, the Church has seen itself suddenly thrown on the
forestage of public life first by the public, afterwards by the new State in
search of legitimacy. Retrospectively, the discourse of the Church has
been antique. In the new world born of the fall of Communism and the
The Impossible Secularization 143
pathetic faith of the poet Ioan Alexandru cohabits with the spiritualized
faith of the philosopher Andrei Pleşu and together with the jovial rigor
of the “starets” Cleopa, as well as with the hard to define faith of the ex-
security corpus who, most often on the nationalist course, found
something to fill their inner void generated by the fall of the “noble
ideals” of Communism.
What should we apprehend from all this? The arrival of
fundamental works of theological thinking – especially the
contemporary one – in the Romanian language and the public
affirmation of a new generation of theologians (Theodor Bakonski, Ioan
I. Ică, Mihail Neamţu) that, taken as a whole, create a new dynamics and
give Orthodoxy a new language (even when reinvesting the old one).
The institutional Church is subjected as well to the tremors of transition
and, with all its miracles, after the apogee moments of the beginnings,
loses field in front of the new technologies and the consumerism that
becomes the ideology of the moment. The enthusiasm for jobs
diminishes, the Orthodox Students League becomes an urban subculture
(together with many others), The Cathedral of the Romanian People’s
Redemption does not go beyond the planning stage, and the clergy
accept the criteria of the present world, with a hierarchy of ones with
properties. In one word the Church becomes (without its consent) a
business agent in the market that today tends to become more and more
the metaphor of our life. It is being rescued from anonymity either by a
seduction scandal (filmed on the mobile phone or recorded in certain
CNSAS files), or the two central events that marked the evolution after
’89: the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1999 and the change of the
Patriarch in 2007. Invested with high hopes, it is hard to say what this
latter could bring. At the moment, Patriarch Daniel does not seem to
give a fresh spirit to the Church whose head he is. On the other hand, he
is only at the beginning of a long patriarchate, during which the Church
needs to solve weighty issues which – at least until today – it has failed
to solve. But maybe it won’t take so long: the absence of the Church
from the actual debate over the problems we are being challenged with
could have as an effect the meeting (and the coalition) of the militant
anticlericalism of the “nostalgic” generation, with the parody prone and
disappointed anticlericalism of the new generations. If the Church wants
her voice to be heard, it has to do something before the world in which it
lives turns into a desert.
However, it could be that, in spite of its magnitude, the message
of the Church has a lesser impact than the one expected. And this,
because since the first decades of Communism and until the European
integration, the Romanian world suffered radical mutations. If in 1945
we were – from many points of view – a “traditional society”, in 2012
Romania is, at most chapters (including the religious one), a European
The Impossible Secularization 145
country but with no stridence (even if, from the economical point of
view it remains a poor country, and from the institutional point of view a
country with many dysfunctions).
According to the Romanian Encyclopedia (its first volume
published in 1938 – but using the census data from 1930) 78, 2% of the
citizens were, at that time, engaged in agricultural activities1, and the
figure of the rural population is predominantly composed of the
Romanian ethnic group, while the cities – especially in Transylvania
(united with Romania in 1918) – group large communities of allogeneic
peoples (Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Greeks etc.). For this
population illiteracy reaches the huge rate of 54,3%2, the highest in
Europe, and of the literate population 85,1% (93,0% from the rural
inhabitants and 66,3% from the urban)3 had only a primary school
education, which in those times consisted of 7 grades. We are, though,
subjected to the laws of education given by Spiru Haret (at the end of the
19th century), who founded “schools for adults” as well, and meant to
reduce illiteracy. If we consider the numbers provided by Roger
Chartier, Dominique Julia and Marie-Madeleine Compère4, education in
Romania during the ‘30s of the 20th century was inferior to that in
France two centuries ago. We mentioned these numbers not to
emphasize the difference between Eastern European agricultural
societies and the Western industrial societies at the close of the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th century, but in order to reveal the
significant characteristics of religiosity of the Romanian population
during those times.
Widely illiterate, this population remains foreign to rationalization
and the progressive introspection of faith that happens in the Occident
on the move of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Romanian
religiosity is, in its essence, a Pre-Modern one, traditional, based on the
oral transmission and the lack of distinction between faith and faiths. We
need to bear in mind, whenever we analyze this form of popular
religiosity that it is not only (and maybe not as much) a faith based on
1
Sabin Manuilă (ed.), Enciclopedia României (Romanian Encyclopedia),
vol. I (Bucureşti: Imprimeria Naţională, 1938), p. 155.
2
Gheorghe Dobre (ed.), Economia României în context european
(Romanian Economy in European context) (Bucureşti: Editura Fundaţiei
Ştiinţifice «Memoria Oeconomica», 1996), p. 277.
3
Sabin Mănuilă (ed.), Enciclopedia României (Romanian Encyclopedia),
p. 164. After presenting these numbers, the same Sabin Manuilă adds, honestly:
“detached by the number of the graduated grades”. It is supposed that, in the
rural area, it was merely the first four grades.
4
See L’Education en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société
d’Edition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1976), (particularly in the first chapter:
L’ecole au village).
146 Mihai Maci
5
George Em. Marica, Curs de sociologie rurală (Rural sociology course)
(Cluj: Uniunea Naţională a Studenţilor din România, 1948), pp. 148-149.
The Impossible Secularization 147
The Union in 1918 also made possible the union of two different
images of the Orthodox Church; on the one hand that of a national
Church predominant in the Transylvanian imaginary, on the other hand
that of a traditional Church that had asserted itself in the old kingdom.
The Habsburg Empire (and then the Austro-Hungarian one) as an
inheritor of the medieval rules used by the Transylvanian Province,
defined the nation in terms of faith. Thus, Romanians were assimilated
to the Orthodox “schismatics” or, at most, to the tolerated Greek
Catholics. The bishop of the latter – Inochentie Micu-Klein – was the
first Romanian ethnic in the Transylvanian Diet.
After the failure of Revolution in 1948, the bishop, and then the
Orthodox metropolitan bishop Andrei Şaguna becomes the main
spokesman of the Romanian majority in Transylvania. Due to this fusion
between nationality and faith, the two dimensions end up by overlapping
and becoming interchangeable. It is true that, in the Transylvanian case
there was a certain liberation between the Orthodox and the Greek
Catholics, visible in the participation of the two bishops (Miron Cristea
şi Iuliu Hossu) at the Assembly in Alba Iulia and in the delegation who
brought the papers of the Assembly to Bucharest. Appointing Miron
Cristea as a primate Metropolitan Bishop (in 1919) and, then, as the
Romanian Patriarch (in 1925) wiped out the ambiguity – visible in 1918
– in favor of what was to become more and more “the religion of the
nation”. The old kingdom, being long under Greek-Phanariot
domination, with bishops and metropolitan bishops often of foreign
origin, couldn’t claim this assimilation of the representatives of the high
clergy with the basic nation. But, after 1860 – when, in the time of
Alexandru Ioan Cuza’s reign, there occurs the confiscation of monastic
properties – it could establish itself as the defender of a tradition
threatened by the aggressive modernization imposed by the
Occidentalized elite.
Paradoxically, secularization is, in fact, a nationalization of the
“sacred” lands in the two historical provinces6. Nevertheless, the
national image of this radical measure will not impose itself here, but
rather the violence applied by the new state to the “ancestral faith” and
its actual representatives. Both a national Church and a victim of the
modern state, the Orthodox Church becomes – in the years 1930 – 1940
– a sort of national alternative to the drifts of a modernity seen as being
foreign to the Romanian customs. Thus we can explain its pathetic
exaltation by such intellectuals as Nae Ionescu and Nichifor Crainic, the
6
The best representation of the debates over secularization of the abbey’s
owns can be found in Paul Brusanowski, Stat şi Biserică în vechea Românie
între 1821-1925 (State and Church in old Romania between 1821-1925) (Cluj:
Presa Universitara Clujeană, 2010).
148 Mihai Maci
7
See Daniel Chirot, Social Change in a Peripheral Society (New York:
Academic Press, 1976).
The Impossible Secularization 149
for a world in which science is held to explain even what has nothing to
do with science. Willing or not the official propaganda tolerated a
certain space of impreciseness (considering – probably – that its interest
is more or less reducible to science): sea monsters and yeti, UFOs and
un-elucidated enigmas (from Easter Islands to Kennedy’s assassination)
are among the few things that drew attention and constituted the subject
of talk among people. The idea that, in the immensity of the sidereal
space, there are civilizations that are more advanced than ours or that we
have not finished to exploit the Earth are not – a priori – opposed to the
official scientific ideology. Yet, the majority of people will not read
them from the perspective of an asymptote of knowledge that will fully
be resolved in the future, but rather from doubts that regard the present:
But what if we have not been told the whole truth? What if there are
things (or pieces of information) that constitute an appendage of ruling
(self-proclaimed) elite? Seconded by the exposures made by the
Occidental radio broadcasts (Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC etc.)
about the history of Communism – especially together with the glasnost
process in the USSR – these things in the mentality of the population
constitute a level of suspicion and a temptation to conspiracy that all the
forms of manipulation (especially television) will draw upon after the
‘90s. Without the temptation of the theory of conspiracy, neither the
potpourri of the interpretations of the December Revolution nor the mass
psychosis induced by scandal TVs after 2000 would be possible. On the
other hand, at the cogent level of things, there is a significant connection
– and somehow surprisingly – to the religious research in the Occidental
world. This was due to the translation in the Romanian language of a
part of Mircea Eliade’s scientific work (viewed as a value mainly as a
recuperation – with valence of national pride – of the great figures of
Romanian exile). Mircea Eliade benefited in the époque by a double
prestige: first of all he was not only fully integrated in the Occidental
culture (as a University teacher overseas), but one of the peaks in his
field; author of monographic works and marked treaties for the
specialists and, especially creator of a methodology and a school. More
than any scientist (George Palade or Nicholas Georgescu – Roegen, for
example) Mircea Eliade embodied the model of the intellectual
Romanian as well as the worldwide success. On the other hand, Eliade’s
prestige was due to his own area of research: “the history of faith and
religious ideas”. The pretence of a scientific approach that the dialectic
materialism had manifested itself not only as an openness towards
science, but, at the same time, as an obstinate rejection of any forms of
religiosity, pejoratively catalogued as “mystical and obscurantist”. In
fact the last wave of violent repression of the inter-war intellectuals at
the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘60s synchronized with
Hruşciov’s great antireligious campaign, that all the states of the Eastern
The Impossible Secularization 153
block took over and remained in the memory of those who were students
in those years. Largely due to the authority of the name of Eliade, the
discourse regarding religion (even if predominantly in the area of
anthropology and ethno-linguistics) returned to the cultural space at the
end of the ‘80s. In a certain way, from a distance, Mircea Eliade
supported the less ideologized form of research in the field of socio-
humanistic science in Communist Romania. More interesting as access
to its sources was prohibited, Eliade becomes a true fashion among the
young intellectuals.
So that, around December 1989 the mentality of the common
people in Romania far from having the unity (that could produce action)
that the official power desired, looked rather like a patchwork in which
there was a juxtaposition – often without really meeting – of faith
confused with personal hopes and wishes, remnants of rural practices
and faiths, scientific thinking most often assimilated on the surface,
vague tendencies towards mysteries and esoterisms, a few references to
the history of religion (in Eliade’s style) and a constant temptation
towards conspiracy. The absence of religion on the public space,
especially at the level of reflections on the theology foundations, as well
as the absence of an intellectual discourse of the people of faith able to
challenge the horizons of the people who had already been urbanized
and schooled had something to say. And it will be said in the years to
come.
The miracle of Revolution – that the prayer we referred to at the
beginning of this text – meant, among other things, that the Church, as
well, played no role in the outburst of the street movements against
Ceauşescu. The spontaneous association between the fall of the
dictatorship and the Christmas holiday, the outburst in the public space
(and on the screen) of the representatives of the clergy created the
impression of a Church that was in the avant-garde of the events. The
urban constructivism and the institutionalized services of opening,
inauguration and celebration perpetuated this image for a while. But,
very soon it was obvious that the Church was taken by surprise. Its
discourse was parochial and reactive; beyond seeking their own career,
the majority of the priests could scarcely understand modernity, and they
awkwardly disguised their inadequacy by repeating some formula meant
to suggest eternity. The public passion for the Church lowered as well:
finally in the urban context few were inclined to follow strictly the
canons kept by an institution anchored in a mythic-poetic Byzantine
imagery. For the most of the people, the Church was an occasional
reference, for Celebrations and the fundamental moments of life. The
Church did not open up to a catechesis for the adults and, with rare
exceptions, neither did the clergy come out into society in any other
form than a synod. Confused by its public appearance the Church as a
154 Mihai Maci
majority did not realize from the very beginning that the whole spiritual
market was liberalized and, in a short time, would find itself in
competition with more tempting offers for the new urban generations:
from the new-protestant fervor, to the intellectual rigor of Catholicism
and from the luxury of the Oriental mysticism to the mercantile gnosis
of motivational literature. The official discourse of the priests, grave and
wry, was lost in the hysterical noise of the new world. What really
mattered after 1989 was that people’s desires and hopes found other
safety valves: for some political career, for others getting rich, for many
the chance to start a new life in another country; for some education, for
others devotion to a social cause. So the Church emptied again,
remaining the retreat for those who are beyond the temptations of this
world – the first generation of seniors in the cities. The thing that
mattered the most from the Communist inheritance was the subjectivity
of faith: if it is the ultimate refuge of each person, then everybody places
it where it seems relevant, after house, job, family, and everything that
needs to be solved. Ultimately, faith has become a sort of objective
fetish – the cross in the necklace or in the tattoo, the one hung on the car
mirror or the one placed (with the actual synod) in different places and
junctions – a sign meant to point towards a distance in which no one
sees anything. Occasionally, in the trial moments of life, we remember
this something else of which we are reminded by the cross, then we lose
it again under the avalanche of “the something else” about which
contemporary marketing is specialized. But we never lose it totally; as
with Christmas it comes back all the time, as the shadow of a childhood
that we have never lived and by missing it our maturity has been
compromised as well.
*****
Is today’s society a secularized one? It is hard to say. If we
consider the exterior forms of life, then the Romanian world does not
differ substantially from any of the western societies. Though
(apparently) it looks just like these, however Romanian society does not
have its history (and, as a result, neither its problematic horizon, nor the
answers that – in time – have been given to these problems). Probably if
we judge secularization according to the occidental criteria, things
become much more visible: for example we do not have – in Romania –
the militant anticlericalism of the Enlightenment or of the 19th century.
On the contrary – and this could be a cause for perplexity – the
representatives of the Enlightenment in the Romanian Provinces
(especially in Transylvania) are clergymen! In a very unstable history –
as that of Romanians – one of the guides was represented by the
institution and the person of the Metropolitan Bishop (who functioned
over a period of time as superior to the Prince), and in Transylvania the
The Impossible Secularization 155
8
Ioan Petru Culianu, Eros şi magie în Renaştere (Eros and magic in the
Renaissance) (Bucureşti: Editura Nemira, 1994), pp. 351-352.
The Impossible Secularization 157
9
Ilie Manole, “Servind cauza naţională” (“Serving the national cause”), in
Viaţa militară (Military Life), Bucureşti, no. 5/ 1989.
158 Mihai Maci
Church with the eternal one and that, implicitly, each of them has its
own vocabulary that could not be translated in the language of the other.
Could we appeal to any laic value having, clearly, a genealogy in the
orthodox faith? Humanness seems to be rather a function of sociability
and hospitality proper to any traditional culture. Patriotism is recent and,
almost certainly, from a laic context. But still one fundamental religious
value has absolutely failed to integrate itself – at all – into the Romanian
laic mentality. It is about the solicitude towards your neighbor who, in
the laic context gives his attention and availability towards the other. Or,
in a laic context, this function blazes through absence in the Romanians’
daily behavior: at any level of life and of society, the other’s attention
seeks for payment. The bribe – that any foreigner denounces as being a
hydra of the Romanian world (or, more widely, of the Balkans) – does
not regard the payment of a thing or an activity, but rather buying the
attention of the one asked for the thing or service in question. Only after
the interested one has assured in this way the benevolence of the other
they can get to the real action. As much as we would invoke the
Ottoman and Greek-Phanariote practices (connected to the fluctuant
tribute and the compulsory “gifts” towards the Ottoman Power), it is as
well the effect of a non-assimilation of faith in its fundamental
dimension of openness towards the other. Our world – archaic until the
beginning of the 20th century – has only valued the homely or tribal
solidarity that constituted the only guarantee against external
aggressions. This type of solidarity constitutes a second face of
corruption, so much reproached to our world. Our Church – for centuries
a rural Church – has never seen more than the relatives gathering in the
small stoop of the wooden churches. The neutral image of the one close-
by that the city is in favor of (with its population moves) is foreign to the
imagery of “place and blood” perpetuated by the small rural
communities. On the other hand, we need to say this, as well, there are
no religious radicalisms (of the fanatic genre) that are laic to the
Romanian remained world, despite all, a world in which the Church is
present all the time, but – at least until the post-revolutionary
constructivism – never aggressive, always giving advice, but very little
involved and always meditative, but never tempted with trenchant
verdicts.
Besides all these, there is also the crucial problem of a society
with guides on the move and things that in other parts seem to be firm,
while in the Romanian world they are very volatile. For instance, it is
not clear how much a movement of the right wing – as the Legionary
was exclusively right (on a traditional angle) or it had a left component
as well (concerning the improvement of the rural problems, and even a
form of urban collectivism) or, symmetrically, a left wing movement,
remained only in the left area (with the celebration of socialism and
The Impossible Secularization 159
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Priestly Spirituality/Esistenza sacerdotale
(Brescia: Queriniana, 2010), p. 59.
2
See Wilhelm Dancă, Pentru iubirea lui Cristos. Dialoguri despre preoție,
biserică și credință [For the Love of Christ. Dialogues about Priesthood,
Church and Faith] (Jassy: Sapientia, 2011), pp. 21-32.
3
See Mircea Eliade, Tratat de istorie a religiilor [A History of Religious
Ideas], transl. Mariana Noica (Bucharest: Humanitas, 20054), p. 26.
162 Wilhelm Dancă
4
Dieceza de Iași [Diocese of Jassy], Cartea sinodală. Biserica, noul popor
al lui Dumnezeu, este trimisă în misiune la oamenii de astăzi [The Synodal
Book. The Church, God’s New People, Is Sent on Mission to the People of
Today (Jassy: Sapientia, 2005).
The Priest’s Temptations and the People’s Escape from Church 163
All throughout his life, the Catholic priest struggles against many
temptations. Some of them are older, others are more recent. Of the old
ones, one seems to have “apostolic roots” and resides in the tendency,
rooted in the priest, to confiscate ministry for the purpose of satisfying
his own interests. Once they reach their highest form, these tendencies
serve the thirst for power or everything is circumscribed to the cult of
personality. When it comes to the priest, serving his own interests takes
on different forms and levels of intensity, but the effect is the same: the
partial or total neglect of the spiritual well-being of the faithful. Jesus’
first disciples were themselves confronted with this temptation.
Jesus clearly saw that the temptation of power was gaining ground
in the disciples’ minds and hearts, and therefore he corrected them by
telling them that any form of authority must always be exercised in the
spirit of ministry and with selfless commitment to the good of the flock,
following his example, who gave his life for the good of the sheep (Jn
10:11). By making reference to the washing of the disciples’ feet shortly
before his glorious passion, Jesus told them: “I have given you a model
to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do” (Jn 13:15).
Yet, despite Jesus’ warnings, the temptation of ministering for the
sake of one’s own interests is also encountered by the members of the
communities at the beginnings of the Church. Here is what St. Peter
writes in his first letter:
5
Pope Francis, A Church That Lacks Prophecy Becomes Filled with
Clericalism, Vatican Radio, 16th of December 2013.
166 Wilhelm Dancă
The Catholic priests of Romania are also the sons of their time
and, as such, they are influenced by the present globalized culture
which, though offering many advantages and new possibilities, can also
limit, condition or even harm them. In this context, several temptations
tend to darken the horizon of their pastoral activity.
The first of these is the relativisation of priestly identity under the
influence of the mass-media culture and that of certain secularizing
intellectual circles that systematically cultivate mistrust in the Church
and its ministers9. For instance, within the span of just a few years, the
trust of the Romanians in the Romanian Orthodox Church has
6
Congregation for the Clergy, Directory on the Ministry and Life of
Priests (Vatican City, 1994), no. 44.
7
See Congregation for the Clergy, Directory, no. 17.
8
See Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” (Vatican
City, 2013), nos. 78-109.
9
See Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 79-87.
The Priest’s Temptations and the People’s Escape from Church 167
diminished from 90% to 63%. The situation is pretty much the same
when it comes to the trust towards the Catholic Church in Romania
which, until recently, has been assimilated with a nest of spies working
for the Vatican, Hungarian revisionists, pedophiles and collaborators of
the former Secret Services, even if the media was never able to supply
concrete and convincing examples of priests being spies, pedophiles or
informers of the Communist Secret Services. Most of the denigrating
information about Catholic priests was taken from news about the
Catholic Church of Western Europe or North America. In the context of
this culture of mistrust in the priest’s mission and identity, a number of
our priests fostered a feeling of resignation and defeat that made them
look wearied, pessimistic and dark-faced dissatisfied ones in the eyes of
the public. In this context, Pope Francis invites us to become, for these
priests who have fallen into the net of barren pessimism, “living sources
of water from which others can drink”10 the water of trusting themselves
and their call. “At times this becomes a heavy cross, but it was from the
cross, from his pierced side, that our Lord gave himself to us as a source
of living water”.11
The second universal temptation stands under the influence of the
same media culture and can be called isolationism12. It is true that the
means and networks of communication nowadays promote a “mystique
of living together”13, which boldly invite us to meet one another, to live
as many experiences of fraternity as possible, to randomly mingle with
the sacred pilgrims of the caravan of solidarity without frontiers.
Normally, “greater possibilities of communication turn into greater
possibilities for encounter and solidarity for everyone”.14 Yet, it is often
not the case. Many people remain at the level of inter-personal relations
mediated by machines and systems that can be turned on and off on
demand. Having such a wide range of means of communication at his
disposal, the priest also risks isolating himself in some kind of
autonomy, an immanence that excludes God and leads to a form of
spiritual consumerism smelling of individualism. In answering people’s
thirst for God, the priest must point them not only to the spiritual Christ,
without body and without cross, but to the Son of God born of Virgin
Mary, who, through his physical presence, through his joys, pains and
sufferings, challenges us, influences us and brings us to solidary
communion with him and our fellow human beings. When facing the
various forms of a spirituality of well-being without a community, the
10
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 86.
11
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 86.
12
See Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 87-89.
13
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 87.
14
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 86.
168 Wilhelm Dancă
15
See Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 93-97.
The Priest’s Temptations and the People’s Escape from Church 169
Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it;
for their wickedness has come before me. But Jonah made
ready to flee to Tarshish, away from the Lord (Jon 1:2-3).
When God saw by their actions how they turned from their
evil way, he repented of the evil he had threatened to do to
them; he did not carry it out. But this greatly displeased
Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “O
Lord, is this not what I said while I was still in my own
country? This is why I fled at first toward Tarshish” (Jon
3:10 – 4:1-2).
from a God that they do not know what to expect from.16 We can give
many examples here, from the most inner experiences of a surprising
God in the life of a priest, to the gestures and convictions of those priests
who embody, before the altar or in everyday life in the parish, the
saying: “to be more Catholic than the Pope”. But what is of interest to us
here are the causes of the escape from the mission that the priest
received from God.17
The first cause is related to the fact that priestly ministry has a
repetitive character. Indeed, in the case of younger priests, one may
notice that after their first or second year of priesthood their joy of being
priests is on the wane. Life takes on shades of grey and becomes
unbearable. A monotonous life becomes wearisome, isn’t it? The escape
is expressed here by the inner rejection of self-giving, by tiredness,
boredom when the minimal gestures of priestly ministry have to be
fulfilled. It seems to me that many priests have gone through such an
experience of losing the joy and getting tired of being priests.
Another cause is related to the great number of priests in the
Romanian-speaking Catholic dioceses. Indeed, unlike many other local
Churches in Central and Western Europe, the Catholic Church in our
country has a numerous and young clergy. If I am not mistaken, the
average age of the Catholic clergy here is under 35. In the archdiocese of
Bucharest a priest ministers to approximately 250 faithful, which is a
luxury from a pastoral point of view, both in comparison with the
situation of the archdiocese of Bucharest in the past, as well as with the
present situation in other dioceses of the world. Vocations to priesthood
have diminished in recent years, yet not at an alarming, dramatic rate. In
the past, around 15 to 20 priests have been ordained each year in both
dioceses, and the young candidates who enter the Seminary are about 20
16
For instance, while he was a simple catechumen and the people, both
Catholics and Arians, agreed to elect him bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose tried to
get out of the city riding a she-ass. St Augustine hesitated at first, then intended
to run away from the Christians of Hippo who decided that he be ordained a
priest, so that in this way, he could succeed the old bishop Valerius; after having
been elected patriarch of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom was in no hurry
to leave his native Antioch. That is why the emperor ordered that he be
forcefully brought to the imperial capital city, which indeed happened.
Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, was obliged to consecrate him bishop on
26th of February 398. Due to criticism and various kinds of humiliations, the
priest Jean Marie Vianney tried to run away from Ars on at least three different
occasions: in 1840, in 1847 and in 1853, with the intention to find true
happiness by withdrawing from the world. Nevertheless, every time he came
back to the mission entrusted to him.
17
See Carlo Maria Martini, Prove e consolazioni del prete. Meditazioni
con opere di Francesco Radaelli (Milan: Editrice Ancora, 2010), pp. 18-25.
The Priest’s Temptations and the People’s Escape from Church 171
18
St. Athanasius fled Alexandria five times between 335 and 365, because
of the Arians. St. John Chrysostom was forced to leave the community of
Constantinople twice, between 403 and 404, ending his earthly life in exile at
Cormana, on the Black Sea shore, in 407. While keeping the proportions in
mind, I add here a personal experience. On one cold December night in 1989, I
was talking to my parish priest about the limits of the parochial vicar’s right to
listen to confessions. By arguing that I am entitled to listen to the confession of
any person who asks for it, and that I can give him/her absolution in accordance
with the norms of canon law, I invoked both the documents of Vatican Council
II, and the Code of Canon Law adopted in 1983. The parish priest was not
aware of these documents, as he had completed his theological studies during
the works of the Council. But his answer to my objections was so violent and
humiliating, that I could not cope with the situation and so I went out of the
parish house at around 10 o’clock in the evening. We finally made up two hours
later, when he came in his car looking for me in the neighboring village where I
had walked to on foot. Ever since then we have never had any other fight and
we have stayed good friends.
172 Wilhelm Dancă
who are too much of administrators are easily discouraged and nourish a
kind of spiritual sickness or moral and doctrinal laxity, first in their own
lives, then in that of the faithful.
In the priest running away from the people we also notice
something else, namely his lack of concern for the great, fundamental
questions of the society and the present time. This priest accepts no
uncertainty, assumes no risk in front of the fragility and confusion
brought forth by liminal questions. I refer here to the anthropological
questions, too little discussed in our Church, but debated with a lot of
interest in other parts of the Catholic Church, such as the place of the
woman in the Church, ecumenical relations, bio-ethics, theology based
on virtual communication etc. This kind of escape nourishes certain
gestures of fundamentalism and integralism, a rigidity that leads to
rejecting dialogue with the world, with other religions and Christian
denominations. What hides in fact behind this escape is ignoring or
failing to accept the contemporary theology propounded by Vatican
Council II.
Finally, the third local temptation is searching to help politicians.
We refer here to the priests who pursue controversial financial interests
with politicians or the local authorities. Certainly, the question of the
priest’s economic dependence on benefactors outside the Church is an
important matter for the Catholic priest living in Romania. Only the one
having experienced the failure to finish some urgent pastoral projects
and financial deficiencies is able to tell how comfortable life is when
you feel you have a safe ground under your feet. Nevertheless, this
search for financial stability and predictability exposes the Romanian
priest to various political and administrative pressures that lead to the
negative consequence of turning the altar into an electoral tribune. In the
experience of organizing democratic elections in Romania from 1989
onwards, one could see that the religious factor played each time a
decisive role. The politicians learnt the lesson and have always
cultivated relations of financial support towards the Church, especially
towards the Orthodox one, at the time of the approaching elections.
However, in this context, we can see that a clean, poor priest has a
greater number of faithful coming to church.
passed by in front of the door and, seeing him, said: “You, old man,
what are you doing here? The priest listening to confession is Catholic!”
The old man replied: “Leave me alone, woman! It is God I am looking
for, not the Catholic priest!”
In the background of this recollection, I bring into discussion the
most powerful temptation the Catholic priest is exposed to, namely
neglecting the relationship with God, neglecting to take care of his own
spiritual life. Indeed, of the main causes leading to the rupture between
the Church and the people, the most serious one is related to the priests
who are not perceived as “men of God”. A man of God has a spiritual
life, and spiritual life is spiritual, as St. Pachomius was saying. Without
it, the priest runs the risk of becoming a bureaucrat, a clerk, a technician
of the sacred. He thinks it is enough for him to convey information and
theories about God and Christian morality, but his celebrations and
homilies do not touch people’s souls.
Due to the lack of bearers of the sacred and experts in things
divine, the world we live in tends to become, from a religious point of
view, more indifferent, on the one hand, and on the other, more
fundamentalist. The spreading of religious indifference seems to
question the traditional anthropological tenet according to which man is
naturally open to God, looks for Him and longs for Him19. Religious
indifference makes contemporary man believe that the question
regarding the existence of God is useless or meaningless. According to
statistics, the number of the religiously indifferent has increased in the
last ten years in Romania. Thus, if in 2002 the non-religious were about
12,825, in 2011 their number reached 18,917 (meaning, an increase from
0.06% to 0.10% from the total population of the country of 20,121,641).
Among other causes of the increase of religious indifference and
atheism in Romania we must mention here those politicians, historians,
journalists and so on, who prefer to speak more about the God of the
Romanians, rather than about God, Father and Creator of all people, or
more about the God of the people or nation, rather than about God, as
revealed by the Holy Scripture. By adulterating the image of God
revealed in Jesus Christ, all these people embolden the Romanian
fundamentalists, who serve the ethnic and nationalistic propaganda, thus
doing a great disservice to Christianity.
19
St. Augustine, Confessions I, 1: “our heart is restless, until it reposes in
Thee”. Mircea Eliade: the sacred “is an element in the structure of
consciousness, not a stage in the history of consciousness. (…) Experience of
the sacred is inherent in man’s mode of being in the world”, Ordeal by
Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet, transl. Derek Coltman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 154.
174 Wilhelm Dancă
20
The history and phenomenology of religions distinguishes between
theophanies, epiphanies, hierophanies and kratophanies.
21
See Giovanni Ferretti, Essere prete oggi (Torino: Editrice Elledici,
2009), pp. 15-23.
176 Wilhelm Dancă
22
See Paul Ricoeur, “Dio è amore”, D. Iervolino (ed.), Ricoeur. L’amore
difficile (Rome: Studium, 1995), pp. 178-195, apud Giovanni Ferretti, Essere
prete oggi, p. 17.
23
Pope Benedict XVI et al., Dio salvi la ragione (Sienna: Cantagalli,
2006), pp. 9-29.
The Priest’s Temptations and the People’s Escape from Church 177
of inner life and brings out from there bread, light, guidance. In Greek,
the monks were called pneumatikoi, that is, spiritual. This designation
was kept to refer to several priests who received the mission of spiritual
guidance in seminaries or in monasteries, but the title or the adjective
has disappeared almost completely from the priests doing pastoral work.
Some monks ordained priests are also called spiritual fathers, but only
rarely. The absence of the Spirit or of the Holy Spirit from a spiritually
failed person can help us understand what the true presence of the
Spirit’s power in a priest can mean. A priest who is spiritually
ineffective is ignorant, sly, active and invasive, wants to be listened to
all the time and is a sort of a propagandist. This class of priests settles as
a hoar frost on the field of contemporary Church, both in our country
and abroad. Only adversities and obligations remind these spiritual
persons that they have to pray. Meanwhile, let us pray for them, says
Hans Urs von Balthasar in an article about the image of the priest we
expect in our Churches.24
24
See Balthasar, Esistenza sacerdotale, pp. 69-71.
178 Wilhelm Dancă
through love, because love is, after all, always credible. Even if not
everything can always be understood, love is always possible. Love is a
way of healing the fracture of significance that bewilders the
contemporary society. Love is a deeper knowledge, which is never
wrong, because it imitates God, the One who knows and loves.
In order to overcome all present-day temptations, the priest must
look not only at Jonah’s image, but more at that of the just Job, who for
a long time negotiated with God the limits of understanding the divine
plan. Jonah ran away from the face of the Lord, but Job, after having
revolted himself against God, came to peace with Him, accepting the
rules of the divine game. Which means that, instead of fighting God and
losing in the end, one had better surrender, and the sooner, the better!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Braun, 15, 16
Brubaker, 92, 97
abbot, 31 Bruce, 71, 93
Abruzzese, 36, 39 Bruni, 36
Adventist, 6, 44, 99 Brusanowski, 84, 86-87, 97, 139,
Alba Iulia, 35, 108, 139 151
Aldea, 106, 114, 128 Buddhist, 166
Alexandru, 22, 72-79, 136, 139 Bulgaria, 60, 63
Alkula, 9-10, 16 Bunaciu, 106, 121, 127
Andreescu, 22 Burducea, 118
Andrei, 41, 84, 136 Burduşel, 103
Andrew, 75
Anghelescu, 118, 130 C
Argatu, 33
Arguello, 33 Calciu, 32, 39
Armenia 137 Carp, 22, 39
Aron, 35, 101, 127 Casanova, 1, 104
Artificial Intelligence, 131 Catholic Church, 11, 34-35, 44, 88,
Augustine, 162, 165, 170 108, 134, 157, 159, 164
Catholics, 1-4, 14-15, 30, 35-36,
B 41-42, 44, 47-48, 50, 54, 103,
107, 111, 113, 139, 147, 162
Baconsky, 22 chaplaincy, 28
Balan, 31, 39 Charismatic Renewal, 36
Băltăceanu, 11, 16 Chartier, 137, 151
Balthasar, 153, 169, 170 Chirot, 140, 152
Banciu, 106, 111, 114, 127 Christian, 1-3, 6-8, 10-15, 33-34,
Baptist, 6, 44, 49-51, 54, 72, 99, 44-45, 48, 50, 52-56, 61, 75-76,
102-103, 111-113, 117-118, 95-99, 101-106, 112, 117-118,
120-129 126, 129, 135, 138, 148, 153,
Barbu, 3, 21, 23, 30, 39, 78-79, 97 164-168
Barker, 5, 72, 93-97 Church, passim
Bassaraboff, 30 Ciofliceni, 47
Benedict XVI, 168, 170 Cioroianu, 106-109, 128, 130
Berger, 25, 39, 71 Ciubotea, 29
Besançon, 101, 127 civil, 4, 24-25, 60, 62, 66-67, 82,
Bibó, 20, 39 88, 97, 110, 112, 114, 124
Bigu, 4 Clément, 5, 78, 91
Blaga, 41, 148 Cleopa, 31-32, 39, 136
Boca, 32 clergy, 2-5, 14, 26-28, 30, 38, 54-
Bockmuehl, 101 55, 72, 82, 101, 109-110, 112,
Bodeanu, 103, 127 122, 124, 133, 136, 139-140,
Boia, 100-101, 127 145, 147, 157, 162
Boilă, 105, 108 Cluj Napoca, 47, 72
180 Index
I Manole, 149
Manuilă, 137, 152
Ică, 22, 78, 98, 136 Marani, 22, 78, 98
identity, 4, 7, 17, 19-20, 32, 48, 50, Marica, 138, 152
53, 57, 63, 92-97, 154, 157-158, Martin, 3, 19, 24, 40, 71, 170
166 Martini, 162, 170
ideology, 72, 74-75, 78, 88, 91, 95, Marx, 44, 91, 99, 105-109, 128
100-101, 121, 135-136, 142-143 McKim, 104
Iliescu, 41 metropolitan, 82, 84, 86, 139, 147
immigrant, 166 Mitrofan, 123, 128
Ionesco, 32 modernity, 3, 5, 21, 24-25, 32-33,
Ionescu, 75, 139, 149 38, 73-75, 78, 93-96, 98, 132,
Ionescu-Gură, 109-111, 128 135, 139, 145, 147-148, 151,
Ioniţă, 118, 130 169
Iorga, 3-5, 14, 16 Modoran-Pantelimon, 126, 128
isolationism, 159 Moldavia, 21, 82, 94
Moltmann, 29
J morality, 29, 31, 62, 72, 80-82,
114, 116, 139, 165
Jacquemain, 73, 98 Muraru, 115, 129
Job, 7, 170
John Paul II, 13, 32-33, 38, 131, N
136
Jonah, 7, 161, 170 national identity, 5, 52, 75, 78, 87,
Jurgensmeyer, 91-92, 98 92-97, 133
nationalism, 5, 72, 78-79, 91-98
K Neagoe, 118, 129
Neamţu, 100, 129, 136
Kamen, 24 Negruţ, 101, 129
Kligman, 24 Nicoară, 72-73, 98
Kubler, 41 Nicolae, 3, 27, 32, 41, 50
Noica, 22, 153, 170
L
O
Latvia, 61
Léger, 34 Old Kingdom, 5, 83-86
Legislative, 5, 81, 99, 115 Oradea, 3, 5, 47, 49, 101, 120-121,
Lenin, 104-105, 128 125, 129-130
Lithuania, 61, 76-77, 98 organization, 44, 105, 111
liturgy, 3, 6, 10, 12, 154, 160 Orthodox, passim
Lottes, 9-10, 16 Ottoman, 21, 52, 94, 150
love, 12, 153, 166-168, 170
Lubich, 33, 35 P
Patriarchy, 28-29, 43, 79, 81, 86, sacraments, 13, 24, 55, 78, 155,
91, 95 160
Pavlowitch, 107, 129 Safran, 96, 98
Pentecostal, 6, 44-45, 48, 51, 54, Şaguna, 139
99 Sâmbata de Sus Monastery, 46
Pepin, 60, 68 secularization, 4-6, 19, 21, 27, 29,
Pharisee, 54 39-40, 69, 71-72, 76, 91-92, 96,
Podoabă, 104 98-99, 102, 104
Pogăceanu, 118 separation, 26, 34, 71-73, 84, 87-
Poland, 19, 23, 36, 61, 94, 95 88, 90, 124, 131, 167
political, 3-5, 7, 9, 17, 22-23, 26- Serbia, 19, 91
28, 30, 32-34, 37, 39, 42, 51-52, Silveşan, 5, 99, 126, 129
55, 57, 71-74, 80, 82-86, 88, 90- Slovakia, 61
91, 97, 100-101, 105-118, 127, Smith, 50, 91
132-133, 146, 153-154, 160, Soulet, 106-107, 111, 129
164, 167 Stan, 60, 65, 68, 89, 90, 98
Pollis, 96 Stăniloae, 75, 135, 149
Popescu, 103, 129 Stănoiu, 147
Popovici, 119-120, 129 Stefănescu, 75
Pospielovsky, 96 Stoeckl, 38
Preistland, 100-101, 129 Stoian, 118-119
public education, 27, 63, 68, 109 Stoica, 66, 119
Puscas, 18, 40 Suciu, 108
Synodalism, 84
R
T
Răduţ, 113, 129
Ramet, 47, 96, 98, 111, 129 Târău, 107, 129
relativisation, 7, 158 Tauwinkl, 41
religion, 3, 18-20, 23-26, 36, 38- Taylor, 1, 3, 5, 20, 40, 71-73, 76,
40, 49, 52, 60, 63-68, 74-76, 91- 98
92, 95-98, 102, 105, 111, 124, Theophilus, 162
129, 135 Ton, 125, 130
religious education, 4, 59, 66, 68 Transylvania, 5, 21, 24, 35, 64, 83-
Rémond, 23, 26, 73, 98, 103-104, 86, 89, 93-94, 108, 137, 139,
129 146
Ricci, 36 Turcescu, 60, 65, 68
Ricoeur, 167-168, 170
Robbers, 63, 68 U
Rosa-Rosso, 73, 98
Roşculeţ, 118 Urquhart, 34, 40
Roşianu, 118
Runia, 25 V
S Valerius, 162
Vasile, 18, 106, 108, 118, 130
Sabău, 5, 75, 95, 97-98 Vasilescu, 79, 80, 82, 98
Index 183
W Yataganas, 23, 40
PURPOSE
Today there is urgent need to attend to the nature and dignity of the
person, to the quality of human life, to the purpose and goal of the physical
transformation of our environment, and to the relation of all this to the
development of social and political life. This, in turn, requires philosophic
clarification of the base upon which freedom is exercised, that is, of the
values which provide stability and guidance to one’s decisions.
Such studies must be able to reach deeply into one’s culture and that
of other parts of the world as mutually reinforcing and enriching in order to
uncover the roots of the dignity of persons and of their societies. They must
be able to identify the conceptual forms in terms of which modern industrial
and technological developments are structured and how these impact upon
human self-understanding. Above all, they must be able to bring these ele-
ments together in the creative understanding essential for setting our goals
and determining our modes of interaction. In the present complex global
circumstances this is a condition for growing together with trust and justice,
honest dedication and mutual concern.
The Council for Studies in Values and Philosophy (RVP) unites
scholars who share these concerns and are interested in the application
thereto of existing capabilities in the field of philosophy and other dis-
ciplines. Its work is to identify areas in which study is needed, the intellec-
tual resources which can be brought to bear thereupon, and the means for
publication and interchange of the work from the various regions of the
world. In bringing these together its goal is scientific discovery and publica-
tion which contributes to the present promotion of humankind.
In sum, our times present both the need and the opportunity for deep-
er and ever more progressive understanding of the person and of the foun-
dations of social life. The development of such understanding is the goal of
the RVP.
PROJECTS
*************************************************************
I.3 Reading Philosophy for the XXIst Century. George F. McLean, ed.
ISBN 0819174157 (paper); 0819174149 (cloth).
I.4 Relations between Cultures. John A. Kromkowski, ed. ISBN
1565180089 (paper); 1565180097 (cloth).
I.5 Urbanization and Values. John A. Kromkowski, ed. ISBN 1565180100
(paper); 1565180119 (cloth).
I.6 The Place of the Person in Social Life. Paul Peachey and John A. Krom-
kowski, eds. ISBN 1565180127 (paper); 156518013-5 (cloth).
I.7 Abrahamic Faiths, Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflicts. Paul Peachey, George
F. McLean and John A. Kromkowski, eds. ISBN 1565181042
(paper).
I.8 Ancient Western Philosophy: The Hellenic Emergence. George F.
McLean and Patrick J. Aspell, eds. ISBN 156518100X (paper).
I.9 Medieval Western Philosophy: The European Emergence. Patrick J.
Aspell, ed. ISBN 1565180941 (paper).
I.10 The Ethical Implications of Unity and the Divine in Nicholas of Cusa.
David L. De Leonardis. ISBN 1565181123 (paper).
I.11 Ethics at the Crossroads: 1.Normative Ethics and Objective Reason.
George F. McLean, ed. ISBN 1565180224 (paper).
I.12 Ethics at the Crossroads: 2. Personalist Ethics and Human
Subjectivity. George F. McLean, ed. ISBN 1565180240 (paper).
I.13 The Emancipative Theory of Jürgen Habermas and Metaphysics.
Robert Badillo. ISBN 1565180429 (paper); 1565180437 (cloth).
I.14 The Deficient Cause of Moral Evil According to Thomas Aquinas.
Edward Cook. ISBN 1565180704 (paper).
I.15 Human Love: Its Meaning and Scope, a Phenomenology of Gift and
Encounter. Alfonso Lopez Quintas. ISBN 1565180747 (paper).
I.16 Civil Society and Social Reconstruction. George F. McLean, ed. ISBN
1565180860 (paper).
I.17 Ways to God, Personal and Social at the Turn of Millennia: The Iqbal
Lecture, Lahore. George F. McLean. ISBN 1565181239 (paper).
I.18 The Role of the Sublime in Kant’s Moral Metaphysics. John R.
Goodreau. ISBN 1565181247 (paper).
I.19 Philosophical Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization. Oliva
Blanchette, Tomonobu Imamichi and George F. McLean, eds. ISBN
1565181298 (paper).
I.20 Faith, Reason and Philosophy: Lectures at The al-Azhar, Qom,
Tehran, Lahore and Beijing; Appendix: The Encyclical Letter: Fides
et Ratio. George F. McLean. ISBN 156518130 (paper).
I.21 Religion and the Relation between Civilizations: Lectures on
Cooperation between Islamic and Christian Cultures in a Global
Horizon. George F. McLean. ISBN 1565181522 (paper).
I.22 Freedom, Cultural Traditions and Progress: Philosophy in Civil
Society and Nation Building, Tashkent Lectures, 1999. George F.
McLean. ISBN 1565181514 (paper).
188 Publications
IIA.1 Islam and the Political Order. Muhammad Saïd al-Ashmawy. ISBN
ISBN 156518047X (paper); 156518046-1 (cloth).
IIA.2 Al-Ghazali Deliverance from Error and Mystical Union with the
Almighty: Al-munqidh Min al-Dadāl. Critical Arabic edition and
English translation by Muhammad Abulaylah and Nurshif Abdul-
Rahim Rifat; Introduction and notes by George F. McLean. ISBN
1565181530 (Arabic-English edition, paper), ISBN 1565180828
(Arabic edition, paper), ISBN 156518081X (English edition, paper)
IIA.3 Philosophy in Pakistan. Naeem Ahmad, ed. ISBN 1565181085
(paper).
IIA.4 The Authenticity of the Text in Hermeneutics. Seyed Musa Dibadj.
ISBN 1565181174 (paper).
IIA.5 Interpretation and the Problem of the Intention of the Author: H.-G.
Gadamer vs E.D. Hirsch. Burhanettin Tatar. ISBN 156518121
(paper).
IIA.6 Ways to God, Personal and Social at the Turn of Millennia: The Iqbal
Lectures, Lahore. George F. McLean. ISBN 1565181239 (paper).
IIA.7 Faith, Reason and Philosophy: Lectures at Al-Azhar University,
Qom, Tehran, Lahore and Beijing; Appendix: The Encyclical Letter:
Fides et Ratio. George F. McLean. ISBN 1565181301 (paper).
IIA.8 Islamic and Christian Cultures: Conflict or Dialogue: Bulgarian
Philosophical Studies, III. Plament Makariev, ed. ISBN 156518162X
(paper).
IIA.9 Values of Islamic Culture and the Experience of History, Russian
Philosophical Studies, I. Nur Kirabaev, Yuriy Pochta, eds. ISBN
1565181336 (paper).
IIA.10 Christian-Islamic Preambles of Faith. Joseph Kenny. ISBN
1565181387 (paper).
IIA.11 The Historicity of Understanding and the Problem of Relativism in
Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics. Osman Bilen. ISBN
1565181670 (paper).
IIA.12 Religion and the Relation between Civilizations: Lectures on
Cooperation between Islamic and Christian Cultures in a Global
Horizon. George F. McLean. ISBN 1565181522 (paper).
Council for Research in Values and Philosophy 191
III.1 Man and Nature: Chinese Philosophical Studies, I. Tang Yi-jie and Li
Zhen, eds. ISBN 0819174130 (paper); 0819174122 (cloth).
III.2 Chinese Foundations for Moral Education and Character Develop-
ment: Chinese Philosophical Studies, II. Tran van Doan, ed. ISBN
1565180321 (paper); 156518033X (cloth).
III.3 Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Chinese Culture:
Chinese Philosophical Studies, III. Tang Yijie. ISBN 1565180348
(paper); 156518035-6 (cloth).
III.4 Morality, Metaphysics and Chinese Culture (Metaphysics, Culture and
Morality, I). Vincent Shen and Tran van Doan, eds. ISBN
1565180275 (paper); 156518026-7 (cloth).
III.5 Tradition, Harmony and Transcendence. George F. McLean. ISBN
1565180313 (paper); 156518030-5 (cloth).
III.6 Psychology, Phenomenology and Chinese Philosophy: Chinese
Philosophical Studies, VI. Vincent Shen, Richard Knowles and Tran
Van Doan, eds. ISBN 1565180453 (paper); 1565180445 (cloth).
III.7 Values in Philippine Culture and Education: Philippine Philosophical
Studies, I. Manuel B. Dy, Jr., ed. ISBN 1565180412 (paper);
156518040-2 (cloth).
III.7A The Human Person and Society: Chinese Philosophical Studies,
VIIA. Zhu Dasheng, Jin Xiping and George F. McLean, eds. ISBN
1565180887.
III.8 The Filipino Mind: Philippine Philosophical Studies II. Leonardo N.
Mercado. ISBN 156518064X (paper); 156518063-1 (cloth).
192 Publications
IV.1 Italy in Transition: The Long Road from the First to the Second
Republic: The Edmund D. Pellegrino Lectures. Paolo Janni, ed.
ISBN 1565181204 (paper).
IV.2 Italy and the European Monetary Union: The Edmund D. Pellegrino
Lectures. Paolo Janni, ed. ISBN 156518128X (paper).
IV.3 Italy at the Millennium: Economy, Politics, Literature and Journalism:
The Edmund D. Pellegrino Lectures. Paolo Janni, ed. ISBN
1565181581 (paper).
IV.4 Speaking of God. Carlo Huber. ISBN 1565181697 (paper).
Council for Research in Values and Philosophy 195
IV.5 The Essence of Italian Culture and the Challenge of a Global Age.
Paulo Janni and George F. McLean, eds. ISBB 1565181778 (paper).
IV.6 Italic Identity in Pluralistic Contexts: Toward the Development of
Intercultural Competencies. Piero Bassetti and Paolo Janni, eds.
ISBN 1565181441 (paper).
I.7 Phenomenon of Affectivity: Phenomenological-Anthropological
Perspectives. Ghislaine Florival. ISBN 9781565182899 (paper).
ISM.1 Person and Nature. George F. McLean and Hugo Meynell, eds.
ISBN 0819170267 (paper); 0819170259 (cloth).
ISM.2 Person and Society. George F. McLean and Hugo Meynell, eds.
ISBN 0819169250 (paper); 0819169242 (cloth).
ISM.3 Person and God. George F. McLean and Hugo Meynell, eds. ISBN
0819169382 (paper); 0819169374 (cloth).
ISM.4 The Nature of Metaphysical Knowledge. George F. McLean and
Hugo Meynell, eds. ISBN 0819169277 (paper); 0819169269 (cloth).
202 Publications
The series is published by: The Council for Research in Values and
Philosophy, Gibbons Hall B-20, 620 Michigan Avenue, NE, Washington,
D.C. 20064; Telephone and Fax: 202/319-6089; e-mail: [email protected];
website: http://www.crvp.org. All titles are available in paper except as
noted.
The series is distributed by: The Council for Research on Values
and Philosophy – OST, 285 Oblate Drive, San Antonio, T.X., 78216;
Telephone: (210)341-1366 x205; Email: [email protected].