The Orthodox takeover

Twenty years after the death of Ceausescu, the Romanian Orthodox church (ROC) is everywhere in Romania. From schools, hospitals and penitentiaries to almost every living room across the country, the icons of the Orthodox religion back up the statistics that cast this as the sixth most religious country in the world, and the church as the most trusted institution in Romania.

And yet, while Romanians show a desire for faith, there is what church scholar Liviu Andreescu sees as “widespread discontent” with the ROC: its pervasive corruption, ostentatious displays of wealth and growing political influence. Given that “public allegiance to the church has never been significantly probed or tested,” Andreescu says, “public support may be shallower than it seems.”

This paradox has been playing out with escalating drama in a small village east of Bucharest over the last few years. Events unfolding around a young priest named Casian Pandelic have drawn out both the anger of the locals and the ROC’s potential for violence and autocracy.

It began in 2009 with an official complaint launched by Pandelic over the church’s fundraising activities. His position as village priest involved him collecting money to a quota each month by going from door to door and requesting cash from the villagers. “If people refused to pay, we were expected to blackmail them, saying that they would not receive forgiveness from the church for their sins or that they would not be buried when they died.” They would always give the money, he said, but would never see any return. “No one ever knew what it was used for. It would be handed to the local bishop and that would be it. Gone. And this is just the first link in a chain of corruption which runs all the way through the church administration.”

Weeks after Pandelic’s complaint, he was told that he would be moving, indefinitely, to a remote monastery. When he refused, citing his family as the reason, he was promptly dismissed from his position in the church. Trained in political science as well as theology, Pandelic understood that this contravened his rights as a worker under Romanian state law, and so decided to challenge the decision in court. He was told that in normal circumstances he would have a case, but employees of the church are subject to a different law­—the legea cultelor (“law on cults”)—through which no internal charges can be made against the church.

Meanwhile, a new priest had been installed in Pandelic’s place and was collecting money from the villagers to a higher quota. Dismayed at the injustice of an unofficial tax they couldn’t afford, people started coming to Pandelic for support—at first just a few, then more and more in the following months.

Pandelic started giving services to disgruntled believers in his own home, preaching the same faith taught by the church but free from the pressures that the institution exerted upon its faithful. Quickly the congregation swelled and before long nearly all of the village’s population of 300 were attending. As many people crammed into his living room as they could, and the rest stood outside, listening in through open windows. On the other side of the village square, the church lay virtually empty.

In Romania, almost all churches belong to the state, to be loaned to whichever religious institution represents the demands of its congregation. With this in mind, Pandelic set about fulfilling the necessary legal requirements to grant his congregation official status as an autonomous religion and, with this accomplished, relocated his services to the village church.

Around the same time, Pandelic was approached by the Romanian Liberal Party (PNL) who, seeing his local popularity, asked him to stand as their representative in an upcoming election. He agreed, saying he knew that “to have any extensive impact in church affairs in Romania, you need to be involved in politics as well.”

Things moved smoothly at first, with his political position widely supported and his congregation growing as Christians traveled for miles to experience this new movement for themselves. Then, early one morning in spring, Pandelic was awoken by shouts and violent battering on the front of his house. Opening his door in a dressing gown, he found a group of Orthodox officials accompanied by military police. They had with them a presidential order that barred Pandelic and his congregation from use of the village church.

As Pandelic contested his charges from his doorway, villagers, also woken by the shouts and banging of the police, emerged from their houses and gathered in front of the church, its doors locked behind them. There were over one hundred people when the police moved in with batons, beating all those who refused to disperse and leaving two hospitalised. With the steps cleared they broke down the doors of the church and for the next two days kept it occupied, until new locks and an alarm system had been installed.

Just days later, Pandelic was dropped by the PNL. In the press, MP Cristina Pocora was quoted as saying, “If the church has dismissed Casian Pandelic for violation and disobedience of church rules, then this man is neither my colleague nor a representative of PNL.” With the church’s support vital to secure votes in rural regions, the motives for the party’s U-turn on Pandelic were likely to have been formed under pressure from the ROC.

For now, it seems Pandelic is locked in a checkmate. With all legal and political avenues blocked by the ROC and a local media that remains largely indifferent, there is no platform from which his voice, and that of the community that stands behind him, can be heard.

Yet this is the time when it is most needed. The ROC has been growing rapidly since its release from the binds of communism in 1989, and the last four years have brought an unprecedented increase in its power and social influence. As the state has been shrinking under severe EU enforced austerity measures, the ROC (already widely believed to be the richest institution in the country, though closed accounts make this impossible to confirm) has seen a dramatic rise in state funding and the introduction of a new law creating a “special partnership” in the field of social assistance, with the state providing 80 per cent of the funding for church-supplied services. With over half of the country’s schools and hospitals closed or merged in the last 18 months, the scope for ROC influence is huge. The line held by the ROC is that church and state should work closely together, with a senior representative, Bogdan Ivanov, saying, “The church is better than the state at distributing public money and offering the services our society needs.”

Given the corruption in Romanian politics, and the country’s distrust of its political leaders, it is possible Ivanov may be right. But politicians can be voted out. The church cannot, and this entrenchment of its power and reach creates an authority that represents not the whole country but a falling portion of its population. As the ROC moves outside of both democracy and the law, those who do not belong to its congregations will become increasingly marginalised.

Pandelic talks of other examples across the country, where priests have stood up against the ROC and their congregations have followed. The church, he says, “has always come down with a maximum of violence. They are very aware that discontent will spread and quickly undermine the authority of the ROC.” In a country desperate to move on from its communist legacy, this is a move in the wrong direction.

A version of this article appeared on openDemocracy