Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Cathedral, the Restitution and the Argument About Cost

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Cathedral, the Restitution and the Argument About Cost

Two disputes define the public position of the Romanian Orthodox Church since 1990, and neither is about doctrine.

The first is restitution. When the Greek Catholic Church was abolished in 1948 its roughly seventeen hundred churches passed to the Orthodox Church, along with the adherence, on paper, of its faithful. After 1990 the Greek Catholic Church was legal again but far smaller, because two generations had been raised Orthodox. A joint commission was established to negotiate the return of buildings and has met for decades with limited result. Courts have been asked to decide cases where an Orthodox parish now worships in a building a Greek Catholic parish once owned and where the Greek Catholic community that would receive it back numbers a few dozen people. There is no clean answer, which is why the question has outlasted every government that promised to settle it.

The second is the People's Salvation Cathedral in Bucharest, consecrated in 2018 and among the largest Orthodox churches in the world. It was built with substantial funding from the state budget and from local authorities, on land near the parliament building raised by Ceausescu on the site of demolished churches. Supporters treat it as a reply to that demolition. Critics have made an argument that is essentially about priorities rather than about religion, contrasting the cost with the condition of Romanian hospitals and schools, and it has been one of the more sustained public criticisms of the church in the postcommunist period.

Both disputes show the same thing: a church with very high popular trust, operating in a state that funds it, and finding that neither of those protects it from being argued with.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.