THE ROMANIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH UNDER COMMUNISM

Ágoston Berecz

Judging from the material I have had access to, the post-1989 literat-

ure on the history of the Romanian Orthodox Church under the Communist

regime seems to be doubly one-sided. On the one hand, there have been

a profusion of church-sponsored publications, apologetic in character,

which have focussed their attention to the persecution of the clergy in the

1950s and the late 1940s, and through the detailed, but methodologically

unsound discussion of its sufferings, have presented the BOR as an indis-

putable victim of the entire period.1 Maybe out of dissatisfaction with this

sort of history-writing, the scholarly output of researchers not engaged

with or even critical to the BOR has tended if not to belittle, at least to re-

main silent about the persecutions.

Second, while much has been written on the period until 1965, very

little on the Ceaușescu regime. One could explain this imbalance by the

nature of the archival sources, but the lack of research into the role of the

BOR under Ceaușescu on the basis of the accessible material nevertheless

remains a pending debt. The scholarship has referred to the religious

policies of Communist Romania as an anomalous case; a hard-line Stalinist

state, which granted more freedom to its dominant Orthodox Church than

any other country in the Soviet camp. A few facts and mostly anecdotal

evidence suggest, however, that the experience of the BOR with National

1 As a shorthand for ‛the Romanian Orthodox Church’, I am using the common abbrevi-ation of its Romanian name, Biserica Ortodoxă Română, to avoid the homonymy with the Russian Orthodox Church.

1

Communism was even more singular than its role in the preceding dec-

ades.

On the following pages, my emphasis will necessarily fall on the ‛Mus-

covite’ and the Gheorghiu-Dej eras, but I will also sum up the important

historical antecedents and at times tentatively venture into the Ceaușescu

era. Within this time framework, my discussion will proceed thematically.

Finally, in the concluding part of my paper, I will try to point out the pos-

sible reasons for the divergence of Romania’s religious policy from other

Communist countries.

Since their inception, the histories of the BOR and of the independent

and unified Romanian state had been connected to each other. The first

head of the state, Alexandru Ioan Cuza united the Wallachian and the Mol-

davian churches into one single hierarchy (the autocephaly of the new

church would be recognized in 1885), reorganised their dioceses and con-

fiscated the lands of the so-called dedicated monasteries. Later govern-

ments definitely placed the Church under state tutelage by taking over

the management of its properties, paying salaries to its priests and monit-

oring their sermons. Indirectly, the government also held sway over the

election of bishops.

In Romania, much like in Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, the Orthodox

Church was put into the service of a speedy nation building process, as

the only inherited institution with a large personnel and a deep-rooted

presence in the countryside. Orthodoxy was declared the dominant reli-

gion, and in state nationalist discourse the Orthodox Church was refash-

ioned as an age-old depository of the nation’s identity. In exchange, the

2

clergy was expected to instil civic values and loyalty to the state and to

the dynasty in the people. At the same time, the Romanian clergies took

on a still more important role as community builders and as advocates of

nationalism in the Kingdom of Hungary and in Bukovina.

In the inter-war period, references to Orthodoxy as the essence of the

Romanian ethnos became crucial to the dominant integral nationalist cur-

rents of thought, and most notoriously, to the ideology of the fascist

movement known as the Legion Saint Michael or as the Iron Guard. The

movement gained wide popularity within the Orthodox clergy, and almost

two thousand priests joined different legionary organisations. This engage-

ment of such a large share of the clergy with inter-war fascism would

linger on as a dark shadow until the end of the Communist era and would

be creatively exploited by the party to its own ends.

The Romanian Communist Party, on the other hand, was not only an il-

legal and marginal political force in inter-war Romania, but was widely re-

garded as non-Romanian, if not outright anti-Romanian. In particular, its

exposure of Romania’s territorial gains after the First World War as mach-

inations of bourgeois nationalism made it unpopular among ethnic Ro-

manians, who constituted a minority of its membership in contrast to

Jews, Hungarians, Russians and Bulgarians. Their participation in the coali-

tion government lead by the fellow-traveller Petru Groza from 1945 and

their coup d’état in 1947 were unthinkable without the presence of the

Red Army and were seen by large segments of the society as the coming

to power of Jews and Hungarians. In the early phase of its rule, the need

to bolster its nationalist credentials certainly motivated the relatively ‛lib-

3

eral’ policy of the party towards a duly intimidated and realigned Orthodox

Church.

In the spirit of symphonia, the hierarchy of the BOR showed an appar-

ent willingness to accommodate themselves to the subsequent changes in

power. After the royal coup on 23 August 1944, when the king arrested

Prime Minister Antonescu and the country switched sides to the Allies, Pat-

riarch Nicodim quickly issued a pastoral letter, in which he assured the be-

lievers and the new leaders that dictatorship in general and the Antonescu

regime in particular had been alien to the soul of the Romanian people,

foreign to the traditions of the country and forbidden by the teachings of

the Church, that democratic freedoms were the products of our Saviour’s

Gospel and that Soviet Russia was ‛our elder sister in the right faith’. A

similar declaration followed the demise of the king by the Communists in

December 1947, in which Nicodim decided that the monarchy had been a

burden to the Romanian people and called the faithful to obey the Com-

munist regime. In spite of these conciliatory manifestos, the Communists

had good reasons not to trust the old members of the Church hierarchy. A

likely majority of the clergy hoped at that time that the Soviet occupation

could not last for long and that they only had to weather a transition

period until the Americans would come and liberate the country. In order

to make the BOR their potential ally, the Communists had to replace its

leadership with their reliable henchmen.

In the first years, between 1945 and 1948, a more or less random per-

secution of the lower clergy took place, designed to inspire fear and to

destroy support networks. As in other new Socialist countries, they set up

4

a Democratic Union of Priests for the most zealous pro-Communist collab-

orators. In Romania, this organisation was lead by former members of the

legionary movement. While membership in legionary organisations be-

came sufficient ground for a sentence in prison, the co-option of promin-

ent earlier legionaries by the Communist Party and their appointment to

high positions was meant as a message for the clergy that by mending

their ways and demonstrating complete submission to the regime, they

could get by under the new circumstances. Other notable legionary priests

turned into high-ranking collaborators included the writer Gala Galaction,

vice president of the Writers’ Union and Constantin Burducea, Minister of

Cults in the Groza government.

The protégés of the Communist Party inside the BOR were partly

people blackmailed into cooperation, partly old acquaintances of Com-

munist leaders. Typically, they only took their monastic vows a few days

before they were ordained bishops. Justinian Marina, the new patriarch

from June 1948, was originally a humble parish priests who under Ant-

onescu had been hiding the new first secretary of the Communist Party,

Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. To get these people up the ladder, the new re-

gime had to first get rid of the old hierarchy. A massive wave of retire-

ments swept over the higher ranks of the BOR in 1948–9, while other bish-

ops were put under house arrest, and at least three Orthodox hierarchs –

Patriarch Nicodim, Metropolitan of Moldavia Irineu and Bishop of Huși

Grigore Leu – died under suspicious circumstances.

In 1948–9, the burgeoning totalitarian dictatorship created a new insti-

tutional framework for the BOR. In many respects, these changes were

5

similar to what happened in other new Socialist countries: censorship on

religious publications was introduced, the state took over the landed prop-

erty of the Church and closed down confessional schools. At that point,

however, they did not restrict the number of monasteries, only obliged

monastics to engage in handicrafts. Similarly, the network of religious in-

stitutions that the Romanian Communist state kept in place was relatively

large compared to other Orthodox countries in the Soviet bloc; thus the

BOR was allowed to maintain three theological institutes for secular

priests (although one of them would be closed down in 1952), two semin-

aries for nuns and one for monks, to preserve its canonical jurisdiction and

to publish three nation-wide and additional regional journals.

The highest state organ in charge of overseeing religious life in Ro-

mania retained its status as a separate Ministry of Cults until 1958, when

it was reorganised into a Department of Cults. The new constitution of

1948 declared the freedom of worship, and no longer recognized Ortho-

doxy as a dominant religion in Romania. In 1949, the Communist state

forced a new statute upon the BOR, so as to gain full command over

church life. Lay members, who made up two thirds of the Holy Synod,

were from then on mostly elected on the recommendation of the Party,

but the Party became able to impose its will on the college of bishops as

well. To ensure the selection of the most subservient from among semin-

ary graduates, the new regulations made the appointments of newly-or-

dained priests provisional for five years, during which they were expected

to attend priestly conferences and further ‛missionary courses’, mainly

consisting of pastoral theology, notions of Marxism-Leninism and the

6

timely issues of the international fight for peace. At the end of this five-

year period, young priests were re-assigned to ‛better’ or ‛worse’ parishes

according to their grades.

The Communist state continued to pay monthly salaries to priests,

with a parish priest’s salary being roughly equivalent to that of a factory

worker. From this respect, the lot of priests in Romania was clearly super-

ior to their colleagues in the Soviet Union, where priests were obliged to

make up their livelihoods from the contributions and the alms of their pa-

rishioners.

Predictably, Patriarch Justinian went much farther than his predecessor

in legitimising the new ruling ideology. In his New Year address for 1949,

he celebrated the regime as the consummation of the Gospel’s message

and wished to bridge the gap between Christianity and Marxism-Leninism

by painting the reality that the latter would bring about in bright colours:

‛Some consider materialism hostile to Christianity. We, however, judge

men according to their deeds and achievements. We judge doctrine ac-

cording to the order of society it produces. Can we not see in the present

social order the most sacred principles of the Gospel being put into prac-

tice?’2 He was an avid public speaker as well. ‛The Social Apostolate’

(Apostolatul social), the title of the multi-volume collection of the many

speeches he delivered during his long tenure in office, aptly summarises

his personal doctrine: the Church, as the servant of the people (Biserica

slujitoare), must be also subservient to the state. The state provides fa-

vourable circumstances for the Orthodox Church to work, and is therefore

2 Quoted by Deletant, 213.

7

entitled to use its authority as an ideological tool.

Romanian Communists in fact tried to harness the hold of the clergy

on the people in the service of their regime, probably much more system-

atically than their comrades in other Communist countries. They expected

village priests to explain and justify the changes in the political and social

life of the country, to appease public discontent over the requisition of

crop surpluses and to argue their flock into the agricultural cooperatives.

From April 1949, the Church became the mouthpiece of Communist propa-

ganda with its participation in the Soviet-led inter-Communist campaign

for peace and the protests against Western ‛war-mongering’.3 For some

time in the mid-1950s, priests were even forced to leave aside the spread-

ing of ‛superstitions’ and restrict their sermons at best to questions of

morality.

As it happened at the same time in the Ukraine and in Slovakia, the

Romanian state outlawed the Greek Catholic Church in 1948, and turned

the BOR an accomplice in the process, which was officially masked as a

‛return into the bosom of Orthodoxy’. In Romania, at the same time, the

same measure got an interesting twist to it, as it could easily be inter-

preted in the context of Romanian ethnicist discourse. Unlike Roman Cath-

olics, Greek Catholics in Romania were ethnic Romanians, who made up

the majority of the population in large, contiguous areas in the Northwest.

Moreover, the claim that they were in any sense ‛less genuine’ Romanians

than the Orthodox sounded very unlikely to them, since Romanian ‛na-

tional awakening’ in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centur-

3 Cf. Chumachenko, 120.

8

ies had itself originated from within the Transylvanian Uniate clergy. Inter-

war integral nationalist thinking, however, had taken up the official Ortho-

dox standpoint on Greek Catholicism and denounced it as the instrument

of the Habsburgs to drive a wedge into the ‛national unity’ of Romanians.

This prepared, Romanians from the Old Kingdom, where no Greek Catholi-

cism had existed, could regard the ‛re-uniting’ of the two churches as the

Romanian national unity restored, however this interpretation may have

seemed improbable from Transylvania.

As a symbolic gesture, the act was announced in the National Reunific-

ation Cathedral in Alba Iulia by Patriarch Justinian, with much pomp. Uni-

ate churches passed into the property of the BOR. Uniate priests could

choose whether to join the BOR (where some of them reached high posts

as ‛repenting’ Catholics) or to return to civil life. Many of them (proportion-

ately more than from the Orthodox clergy) were arrested and suffered

long sentences in prison. A significant part of the Uniate clergy refused to

join Orthodoxy, defied the threat and continued church life underground.

After the Second Vatican Council, to avoid Greek Catholic attendance of

Latin-rite services, even the celebration of the Mass in Romanian was un-

der official ban in Roman Catholic Churches until 1978. The ‛re-unification’

was accompanied with an intense anti-Vatican campaign, and one of the

tasks of the newly-appointed Orthodox priests in their formerly Uniate par-

ishes was to ‛re-educate’ their faithful. Anti-Catholic propaganda did to a

large extent substitute atheist propaganda in Romania.

The persecution against the Orthodox clergy became more targeted

after 1948. The authorities not only cracked down on priests who opposed

9

any aspect of the establishing regime, but also wanted to extirpate inde-

pendent thinking. Priests who had canvassed for ‛bourgeois’ parties before

the 1946 elections, who resisted the collectivisation of the economy and

who refused to read out a speech about the Warsaw peace congress in

1950 obviously fulfilled these criteria, as well as members of revivalist

movements. The most popular such movement within the BOR, calling for

spiritual reawakening through the intensive study of the Bible, was the

Lord’s Army (Hostea Domnului). Founded by Iosif Trifa in 1923 in Sibiu, it

had already come into conflict with the Orthodox hierarchy in the 1930s,

when Iosif Trifa was defrocked. The Communist power adopted the official

Orthodox assessment of the Lord’s Army as dangerous. With an ingenious

trick, they coaxed the leaders of the movement into filing a request for be-

ing recognised as an independent denomination. Once the authorities re-

ceived the petition signed by the local group leaders, they arrested all the

signatories.

Earlier affiliation with the legionary movement was, at the same time,

more of an excuse to try to recruit informers or imprison priests regarded

as dangerous for some other reason than a real motive for punishment.

Certainly, many or even the majority of incarcerated Orthodox priests had

been members or sympathisers of the legionary movement, and this fact

constituted a charge against them. To the extent that in retrospect, be-

cause of its aura of victimhood and anti-Communism, Legionarism pro-

voked some sympathy from former supporters of more moderate political

parties as well. Nevertheless, there were also former legionaries in the

highest ranks of the BOR, such as the later patriarch Teoctist Arăpașu, who

10

had participated in the profaning and looting of a Bucharest synagogue

during the 1941 revolt of the Iron Guard. Patriarch Justinian, who created

some sort of personal dictatorship, also had a penchant for former legion-

aries in his entourage, whom he could keep in check with the threat of re-

vealing the details of their past and putting them in jail. Orthodox theolo-

gian Nichifor Crainic, one of the foremost ideologists of the legionary

movement, edited a Communist propaganda organ aimed at the Ro-

manian emigration, after serving his time in jail. Finally, the term ‛legion-

ary’ became a slur without any real content during the Ceaușescu regime,

which used it as an accusation against diverse ‛non-conformists’, including

Baptists, while its official ideology heavily drew upon inter-war radical na-

tionalism and it allowed thoroughbred legionary ideas to be published.

According to data collected by authors close to the BOR, 1.725 Ortho-

dox priests were imprisoned, interned or sent to concentration camps to

the Danube Delta under the decades of Communist rule in Romania,

mostly during the two massive waves of persecution between 1948–52

and 1958–60. In the framework of the latter, they also expelled from the

universities three hundred fifty students identified as church goers.

The sheer dimensions of Orthodox monastic life in Romania were un-

paralleled in the Communist world. Actually, the number of monastics in-

creased during the first decade of Communist rule; from 5.564 monks and

nuns in 206 monasteries in 1950 to 6.500 in 254 monasteries in 1958.

Right in the beginning, however, they transformed all monasteries into

workshops. The state did not tolerate contemplative life. In every room,

the inscription ‛work is prayer’ exhorted the inmates, and by selling their

11

handicraft products abroad, the state benefited from the surplus they pro-

duced.

The official line hardened in 1958, when the state put restrictions on

the taking of monastic vows; from then onwards, only men above the age

of fifty-five and women above the age of fifty were allowed to enter a

monastery. This measure turned out to be mild compared to the violent

anti-monastic campaign of the next year. With the assistance of the police

and the militia, the authorities displaced around five thousand people,

that is the majority of monks and nuns from the monasteries, closing

down many of these. Former inmates were assigned forced domiciles and

remained under police surveillance. The situation would significantly im-

prove under Ceaușescu, when some monasteries were reopened, others

restored by the state and converted into tourist destinations, while many

of the active ones were allowed to receive staying guests during the Sum-

mer season. Ceaușescu officially visited one of Romania’s foremost na-

tional shrines, the Putna monastery on its five hundredth birthday in 1966.

In 1973 there were 2.068 people living monastic lives, still an impressive

number in the Communist context.

Compared to other Communist countries, the relationship between the

party leadership and Patriarch Justinian was extremely friendly. The Patri-

archate frequently invited top-notch politicians to its exclusive and luxuri-

ous parties. It seems that the idea of intermingling with archbishops (al-

though these were mainly their own creations) flattered at least some of

the low-born Communist politicians. Incidentally, they might also harbour

religious feelings, but it was not advisable to show this in public. Former

12

prime minister Petru Groza, it is true, was buried with religious rites in

1958, but he was not in any sense a member of the Communist elite.

When later, in 1972, the burial service of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s father in his

native Scornicești was conducted by a bishop and thirteen priests, and

broadcast on television, that was already part of his new public self-image

as the man of the people, and did not imply anything about his religiosity.

In 1955, the BOR suddenly received green light for canonising eight

new Romanian saints, and the secular authorities even lent their assist-

ance to organise the festivities. Such an event was quite exceptional in

the Communist camp, but it can be compared to the canonisation in of

Bulgarian proto-nationalists Paisiy Hilendarski and Sofroniy Vrachanski in

1964 by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.4 Like in the Bulgarian case, the

nationalist overtones were evident in the choice of the new saints. Five

out of the eight could be also regarded as national heroes of anti-foreign

resistance: eighteenth-century anti-Catholic martyrs Visarion Sarai, So-

fronie de la Cioara and Oprea Miclăuș and seventeenth-century

Transylvanian bishops Ilie Iorest and Sava Brancovici.

Until 1958, strong ties with the Moscow Patriarchate dominated the

foreign affairs of the BOR. Patriarch Justinian visited Moscow six times

between 1948 and 1955. For the first time since 1882, the BOR received

Holy Chrism from abroad in 1949, but in contrast to the previous occasion,

when it had been brought from Constantinople, the now it was given by

the Moscow Patriarchate. Then from the late 1950s onwards, when Com-

munist Romania deviated from the Soviet line, it began to exploit its

4 Kalkandjieva, 90.

13

seemingly liberal religious policies to boost its reputation in the Western

world as a maverick Communist country, and the same would fit even bet-

ter the early Ceaușescu era. Western visitors could not assess how much

freedom of activity the Orthodox hierarchy enjoyed, how far they gave in

and how far they resisted. At the same time, they were clearly impressed

by the high attendance of services, the apparent religiosity of the people

and the possibilities of the BOR as compared to other Orthodox churches

in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Beside being a showcase for the regime, the BOR could provide other

services on the international scene, and it was the Romanian state that

urged the BOR to enhance its diplomatic presence. From the late 1950s,

the BOR maintained friendly relations with the Church of England, tradi-

tionally interested in Orthodox Christianity. The breakthrough, however,

came in 1961, when the BOR gained membership in the World Council of

Churches. It was also a major step for the Securitate, the Romanian secret

service, as the WCC elected into its Central Committee Metropolitan

Iustin, a secret agent (and another former legionary, for that matter).

From the outset, informer networks operated both in the clergy and in

the seminaries, creating a climate of intimidation and internalised poli-

cing, and fostering a spirit of suspicion and mutual hatred. According to

former Securitate officer Roland Vasilievici, however, they only began to

co-opt rank-and-file priests as secret agents in the 1960s, at least in the

Banat.5 On his account, around eighty percent of the priests collaborated

with the Securitate in the region, who were also expected to report on the

5 Stan and Turcescu, 78–9.

14

confessions of the believers. The question of secret police infiltration in

the clergy under Communism has been shrouded in an even deeper mys-

tery than in Russia, and very few priests have come out of the closet as

former agents.

A privilege that very clearly set the BOR apart from most other Ortho-

dox churches in Communist countries was that in Romania, church build-

ings were being restored and new ones were being built without interrup-

tion, although with ebbs and flows. Receiving a permission was not easy

and might involve using clout, but in Timiș County alone, fifty-six new Or-

thodox churches were erected during Communist times. Paradoxically, the

construction of new churches was on the rise under Ceaușescu, whose

‛systematisation plans’ threatened thousands of existing churches with

demolition, and whose megalomaniac urban planning project in effect des-

troyed eighteen historical churches in down-town Bucharest after the

1977 earthquake.6 It is indeed telling of the BOR’s complete subservience

to the state that only Father Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa spoke up

against the pulling down of these churches, but his subsequent confine-

ment in a psychiatry ward and defrocking reveal the limits of free speech

as well.

The nationalist profile of the regime became more pronounced after

Ceaușescu’s rise to power, smoothly slipping into the grotesque by the

6 Some Orthodox churches were saved from demolition by being relocated. Adrian Drăgan relates such a story, documented by photographs, about the Orthodox church of Reșița Română village, which happened to lie where the main place of the future so-cialist city Reșița was to be built. Local comrades were warned (allegedly by Ceau-șescu himself) that the church could not remain there, but they probably did not want to provoke the believers. Therefore they put the church on rails, moved it eighty-two metres further and erected a ten-story high prefab building to hide it from the main square. See Drăgan’s post in Romanian on the blog ‛Banatul de Munte’: http://www.banatuldemunte.ro/2010/11.

15

1980s. Orthodoxy as a ‛protective force’ of the nation gained in signific-

ance in this context. When attending political meetings, the members of

the Church hierarchy symbolically played the role of the living past, which

gave its blessing to the Leader.7 The guarantor of national unity was, how-

ever, the only kind of public face the BOR could take on in the official

sphere, and the state culture remained strictly atheistic. While a com-

memorative postage stamp in 1971 presented the ruler Stephen the Great

as founder of the Voroneț Monastery, the state allocated no paper for pub-

lishing the Bible, when after protracted lobbying, the BOR received per-

mission to publish it.8

The years when the Communists grasped the power in Romania con-

stituted a period of relief in Soviet religious policy. At the same time, Ro-

manian Communist had their own reasons to control and not to stifle reli-

gion. In general, I think that it would be misguided to compare the situ-

ation of Romania in 1948 with the Soviet Union, and it is only legitimate to

ask why the Soviet leadership tolerated Romania’s deviation from their

policies in the 1950s. Romania had not decimated its clergy and had not

destroyed most of its churches before the war; on the contrary, Romanian

Orthodoxy had just passed through a phase of revival. Romanian Com-

munist did not have to face an influential émigré church either. If they

could not cherish high hopes to gain the sympathy of the clergy, the bish-

ops showed compliance to the new rulers, either out of habit, or well-

grounded fear. In the long run, they could not present much danger for the

7 Cf. with the the similar political exploitation of the Russian Orthodox Church under Nicholas I, Stalin and Yeltsin, according to Sergei Borisovich Filatov; Daniel, 59–61.

8 Cf. with the publication of Russian-language Bibles in the Soviet Union in 1955; Chu-machenko, 139.

16

regime, but had much to offer.

Romanians Communist could make their initial choice for secondary

reasons, but it is important here that in 1945 they were the weakest and

the most unpopular Communist party in any Soviet-occupied country, and

were unscrupulously searching for allies in the society. By the time they

took the helm of the country, they had found a bunch of loyal would-be

hierarchs who could be entrusted with the task of policing the Church. Fi-

nally, instead of trying to efface the branch of power that was arguably

the most efficient in rural areas, they chose to dominate it. They invested

much energy to intimidate the clergy, and the result was wholly satisfying;

an obedient, self-coercive Church, eager to penalize its dissenters.

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