Romania

Romania is an anomaly twice over: an Orthodox country whose language is Romance, and the most observant society in Europe by most survey measures at a time when observance elsewhere on the continent has collapsed. The two facts are connected. Romanian identity was constructed in the nineteenth century around Latin descent, and the Orthodox Church, rather than resisting that framing, absorbed it, so that being Romanian and being Orthodox came to imply one another in a way that survived both the monarchy and the communist state.

The monuments are the painted monasteries of Bucovina, where the exterior walls carry complete fresco cycles across their outside faces, and the wooden churches of Maramures with their disproportionately tall shingled spires. Both are inscribed by UNESCO, and both are working churches rather than museums.

The communist period produced a compromised inheritance. The church was neither destroyed as in Albania nor left alone. It was tolerated, funded, penetrated by the Securitate and expected to cooperate, while individual monks and priests went to prison. The Romanian Greek Catholic Church, which had accepted communion with Rome in 1700 while keeping the Byzantine rite, was abolished outright in 1948 and its buildings transferred to the Orthodox Church; it was legalised again in 1990 and the restitution of those buildings is still unresolved decades later, litigated parish by parish.

The state today pays part of the clergy salaries of eighteen recognised denominations, a system that funds religious plurality while entrenching the existing hierarchy of size.

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.