A Latin Church in an Orthodox World

Romanian Orthodoxy occupies an unusual place among the Eastern Orthodox churches: it is the only major Orthodox church whose liturgical and everyday language is a Romance language descended from Latin rather than Greek or Church Slavonic. Christianity reached the Latin-speaking population of Roman Dacia in the centuries following the Roman conquest, and despite the Roman legions' third century withdrawal from the province, a Latin-derived population and language persisted through subsequent centuries of migration and rule by Goths, Huns, Avars, Slavs and others, carrying Christian practice forward within a linguistic identity that remained distinctly Latin even as the surrounding Orthodox world spoke Greek and Slavonic.

By the medieval period this Christian population was organized into the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, whose rulers built and endowed monasteries that became centers of Romanian religious and cultural life and, from the Ottoman conquest of the region in the following centuries, some of the few institutions permitted meaningful autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty. Church Slavonic served as the church's formal liturgical language for a long period despite the vernacular being Romanian, a gap gradually closed as Romanian replaced Slavonic in worship from the seventeenth century onward, well before Romanian political unification.