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Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, The Ruler and the Patriarch: The
Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church in Transition, 7 E.
Eur. Const. Rev. 85 (1998)

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 The Ruler and the Patriarch:
The Romanian Eastern
Orthodox Church in Transition
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
O
ne might imagine that the current turmoil
of Romanian politics-with continuous
disputes inside the governing coalition of
Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Social Democrats-
would suffice. But this spring a leading figure in the
Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church has managed to
add to the volatile mix, seizing the public's attention for
several weeks. Archbishop Bartolomeu Anania of Cluj
proposed that the Holy Synod (the ruling council of
the Orthodox Church) endorse the political involve-
ment of priests, not only allowing but even urging
them to become electoral advisers to the public.
Journalists, leading politicians, and leaders of opinion
were divided over the archbishop's proposal. Ordinary
people interviewed in the streets by television networks
expressed surprise and were unanimous in the opinion
that the Church should stick to religious affairs.
Conspiracy theorists-and there are many in
Romania-declared that the networks' presentation of
the issue was merely an attempt to discredit the
Church, which, according to opinion polls, is the most
popular institution in Romania.
While Anania's proposal was in the public's eye,
the State University of Bucharest witnessed the eruption
of a strange war between the Association of Christian
Students (ACS) and a group of philosophy students who
had asked the university's senate to ban religious activi-
ties from the campus and to reject the proposal to build
a new church in the garden shared by the schools of law
and philosophy. The university senate initially passed the
required resolution and then, in response to a threat that
the names of those who voted against the new church
would be revealed, reversed its decision and lifted the
ban. For a week the university was covered with posters
supporting both sides of the issue. ACS protesters pro-
claimed that communist-era religious persecution had
returned. In short, among countless political conflicts,
recurrently unstable governments, and the campaign to
join NATO and the EU, the place of the Orthodox
Church in the new political order has now surfaced as
yet another serious issue.
Archbishop Anania's proposal did not come as a
surprise, however. In the aftermath of the initial shock
of Ceausescu's overthrow-whose name, while he
SPRING 1998
Article 29
(1)Freedom of thought, opinion, and religious beliefs may not be
restricted Inany form whatsoever. No one may be compelled to
embrace an opinion or religion contrary to Is own convictions.
(2)Freedom of conscience Is guaranteed; it must be manifested hi a
spirit of tolerance and mutual respect
(3)AD relgions shah be free and organized Inaccordance with their
own statutes, under the terms laid down by law.
(4) Any forms, means, acts, or actions of religious enmity shall be
prohibited Inthe relationships among the cults.
(5)Religious cults shall be Independent from the State and shii
enjoy support from It,Including the facmtation of religious asss-
tance Inthe army, Inhospitals, prisons, homes, and orphanages.
(6)Parents or legal tutors have the right to ensure, Inaccordance
with their own convictions, the education of the minor children
whose responsibility devolves on them.
The Constitution of the Republic of Romania (1991)
ruled, had been ritually blessed at every mass-the
Church discovered that it could do even better in post-
communist than in communist times. After first
apologizing on television to the Romanian people for
his long and open support of Ceausescu, Patriarch
Teoctist retreated to a monastery, leaving a revolution-
ary body of anticommunist prelates and Orthodox
laymen to choose a successor. After a month of medi-
tation and prayer, however, and with the revelation
that he could not be deposed without his own con-
sent, according to Church law, the patriarch decided
to keep his position and return to his customary place
at the right hand of the new leader, then-president Ion
Iliescu. Like Ceausescu, Iliescu had been a Communist
Party leader, one who had had the honesty to declare
himself an atheist. This did not prevent both ruler and
patriarch from jointly blessing all of the newborn
democratic institutions-Parliament, the government,
the new Day of the Nation, the new national anthem,
and so on. State television, which was prohibited for
years from showing any religious material, also rushed
to create a new department, called "Spiritual Life" and
to charge it with producing eight hours a week of
religious-in fact, Christian Orthodox-programming
for its two channels.
RC
 This otherworldly zeal reached a political climax
when the new Parliament building was inaugurated
and consecrated during a short religious ceremony.
The building, known as the House of the People-
the second largest building in the world after the
Pentagon-had previously stood as a symbol of
Ceausescu's megalomania, until the postcommunist
leaders determined that it was fit to become a symbol
of democracy and transferred the Chamber of
Deputies from its historical site next to the Patriarchy
to this new location. In order to make room for the
House of the People, Ceausescu, in the late 1980s,
had ordered the complete demolition of the oldest
part of Bucharest, including churches surviving from
the late Middle Ages. At that time, only one priest
joined the few dissidents who had dared protest this
barbarism. After consideration was given to blowing
up this fine piece of totalitarian architecture in 1990,
it was symbolically reconstituted, with a little Church
blessing, as a symbol of the postcommunist regime's
accommodation to its communist past. Thus was
achieved again that societal continuity characteristic
of Romanian history.
The accommodation suited almost everyone. It
suited the Church, unable to purge itself of the
collaborationists who still dominate its hierarchy, and
it suited the postcommunist state, severely attacked by
anticommunists and in serious need of having the
national Church by its side in order to demonstrate
visibly the difference between the present and the
communist past. It suited the 88 percent of
Romanians who declared themselves Orthodox in a
1991 census, of whom only 8 percent attend church
services regularly, the rest having grown accustomed
to the Church being a merely nominal presence in
their lives. Only a few intellectuals, and even fewer
priests, showed any discontent. Since they were divid-
ed among themselves (Christian fundamentalists on one
side, and leftist atheists on the other), they wielded
little influence in the new dispensation after 1990.
The legal framework
Although eager to gain additional legitimacy from
their alliance with the Church, the post-1989 leader-
ship was nevertheless the product of a secular and athe-
ist communist society. When the 1991 Constitution was
ratified, the Orthodox Church was not even mentioned.
Article 29, on freedom of conscience, guarantees free-
dom of religion, insists upon tolerance and mutual
86
respect, and grants religious sects autonomy vis-a-vis
the state. It also requires the state to facilitate the pres-
ence of religion in state institutions, such as peniten-
tiaries, the army, and hospitals. But the Constitution
has changed little of the traditional subordination, via
the Ministry of Religions, of the Church to the state.
The Ministry of Religions has remained the manager
of the budget-the state budget being the main source
of priests' wages-although it did relinquish the power,
held in communist times, to appoint the patriarch, who
is now elected by the Synod.
Despite the Church's emancipation from state
appointments and review, the new constitutional
arrangements have been deplored by Orthodox
analysts. Dan Ciachir, an independent writer who pro-
duces a weekly editorial on Christian Orthodox topics
for the BBC Radio Romanian Service, complains that
the 1991 Constitution grants less importance to the
Church than the former democratic Constitution of
1923, which considered Eastern Orthodoxy the "pre-
vailing" and peculiarly "Romanian" religion, in relation
to other religions. "The draft of the Law on Cults also
does not provide a special status for the Orthodox
Church but seeks to treat it equally with other churches.
Even the use of the term 'cults' instead of religions is
inherited from communist times," he points out. Upset
by this equal treatment, the Romanian Orthodox
Church in 1994 declared itself the "National Church."
Ciachir considers this a sign of political realism on the
part of the Church: "After an initial attitude of obedi-
ence toward authorities after 1990, apparent not in the
whole Church but due to a few impure collabora-
tionists, the Church realizes it can take action on its
own. And we may speak of a real, national Church, as
the 1991 census showed-this is a reality the state either
hesitated to recognize or chose to ignore."
A philistine agenda
These few words of Ciachir say a great deal about the
two major temptations that the Romanian Church
has faced over the centuries. One is its transformation
into an adjunct of the state and the use of its spiritual
influence for political purposes. The second is what
theologian Teodor Baconsky calls "ethnocentric mes-
sianism." "In the post-Byzantine East," argues
Baconsky, now Romanian ambassador to the Vatican,
"the Mount Athos monastic republic could never
match the Vatican. No monarchs, except the Russian
czars, ever rose again to the power that the Basileus or
EAST EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW
emperor had in Constantinople. The disappearance of
the imperial idea and the dissolution of the Byzantine
hierarchy led to an overemphasis on self-determination
and leadership of the national churches. To resist
Islamization, the Churches accepted the Balkan tribal
logic, which they fostered, by identifying with the
national ideals preached by nineteenth-century
Freemason patriots." It is true that, by 1948, the
reunion of Eastern patriarchs had declared this Church
nationalism a form of "philistinism" and a "heresy,"
but this had little practical effect. Today, the two his-
toric temptations can still be identified in the public
life of the Church. As a confession with little involve-
ment in social life-historically, Eastern Christianity is
a creed for hermits, not for missionaries, and
eremitism remains a mass phenomenon in Romania
and in other Orthodox countries-the Church should
in theory be little noticed in public life. However, the
religious revival, beginning in 1990 and reinforced in
1996, when the Christian Democrats won both the
parliamentary and presidential elections, has made the
Church a constant public voice and a strong advocate
for religious solutions to various civil issues. It matters
little that a few initiates consider this to be "heresy."
The list of issues in which the Church has
involved itself is a long one indeed, and includes a
campaign to introduce compulsory religion courses in
elementary-school curricula; the refusal to return the
property of the Greek Catholic Church, seized by the
communist state and given to the Orthodox Church;
persistent opposition to any visit by Pope John Paul II to
Romania; constant criticism of European organizations
which insist that the "Romanian tradition" of criminal-
izing homosexuality be abandoned; seeking from the
state financing for a gigantic, 15,000-seat "Cathedral of
the Nation" to be built in the heart of Bucharest; a fur-
ther request to finance Orthodox churches to be placed
in purely ethnic Hungarian counties in southern
Transylvania, where there are no Orthodox communi-
ties; refusing to give up the churches won by Greek
Catholics in court, combined with public threats
against them, including a giant rally, led by Bishop
Anania, meant to show that the Church is above the
law; blocking a law intended to regulate church institu-
tions and the relations among sects because of an
unwillingness to acknowledge the equal status of other
religions or to come to an agreement with the Greek
Catholic Church, returning at least a few of the church-
es seized in 1948; and preventing the international
SPRING 1998
congress of a Protestant denomination to be held in
Romania in 1996, even though Romanian authorities
had previously granted their permission.
This agenda speaks for itself. While genuine
religious life is going on quietly and out of sight in
both the old and new congregations, many created
after 1990, which attracted hundreds of young people,
the newspapers and television show only the most vis-
ible and public face of the Church. And one must
believe that this public aspect, expressed, as it is, by the
highest prelates, is also the official part. Leftist intellec-
tuals currently denounce the Church as the main
opponent of Romania's progress toward democracy or
at least the most retrograde contributor. But while the
accusation may be too general, there is little risk in
saying that most of those in the highest echelons of the
Church hierarchy perceive true democratization-that
is, more than just formal, procedural democracy-as a
threat to their privileges and prejudices.
From Byzantine tradition to contemporary
Christian democracy
The relationship of mutual dependency between
Church and state is embodied in the history of Eastern
Christianity. The Byzantine tradition consists, in part,
in the political subordination of the patriarchs to the
rulers: the inheritors of Byzantium's empire, local
Balkan princes, who by luck and ambition kept alive the
Byzantine spirit, continued this tradition. Although sub-
servient in principle to the patriarch of Constantinople,
the Orthodox Church was in fact autonomous and sub-
ordinated only to the secular rulers-and the few
attempts at emancipation ended badly. In exchange for
the full support and submission of the Church,
Romanian princes granted protection, endowed
monasteries, and built places of worship. The Eastern
Orthodox Church never developed an internal profes-
sional bureaucracy like that of the Catholic Church.
Neither was it much involved in social life, remaining a
church dedicated to prayer and spiritual, not earthly,
ends. (See Serban Nicolae Tanasoca, "La Construction
europ~enne et le byzantinisme des pays de 'Est," in
New Europe College Yearbook [Bucharest, 1994]).
The Enlightenment and the access to power of
the revolutionary elites of 1848 changed the situation
radically. In 1863, the Masonic prince Alexandru Cuza
took title to all Church lands in the United
Principalities, which had been granted by previous
rulers over the centuries to the Patriarchy of
87
Constantinople or to the Mount Athos monasteries
and which represented a quarter of the territory's total
land. In exchange, Cuza put priests on the state's pay-
roll. Both he and the Hohenzollern dynasty, which
succeeded him, continued to appoint patriarchs and
make use of the Church whenever necessary. In need
of a prime minister to participate in his coup d'6tat of
1938, when he outlawed political parties, King Charles
II chose to name Patriarch Miron Cristea premier.
Rediscovered and cherished by the Church after 1990,
Cristea was a student of poetry with quite earthly ambi-
tions. "Today the monster with 29 electoral heads was
destroyed," he said in his inaugural speech, referring to
the 29 political parties, "which turned everyone against
everyone to the ruin of the whole country. Today every-
one's vision became clear, and we all understand that our
salvation comes from His Majesty." Cristea is little
remembered for this denunciation of political pluralism.
Rather, official theologians like Baconsky indulge them-
selves with the idea that the Romanian Church was
exempted from the political adventures that the Catholic
Church and Protestant churches faced. (See Teodor
Baconsky, "Political Orthodoxy" in Political Doctrines-
Dotrinepolitice, ed. Alna Mungiu-Pippidi [Iasi, 1998].)
The cooperative relationship between the
Church and the state continued during the communist
era. In his monograph on the East European commu-
nist parties, Ghita Ionescu correctly pointed out that
the Orthodox Church in Romania was less opposed to
communism than were other denominations. While
Greek Catholic prelates were imprisoned without
exception and their churches confiscated in a general
battle against Catholicism-also raging in the Soviet
Union at that time-the Orthodox Church graciously
accepted the confiscated estates and went along with
the ruling order. Many priests became Securitate
informants, gathering information via confessions or
by other means. In 1996, Metropolitan Nicolae of
Banat, the most liberal Romanian prelate, was also the
only Church official to confess publicly to having been
a Securitate informant. Since Securitate's files are still
sealed, waiting for a Gauck-type law, confession is the
only way to learn the truth. Bishop Anania, however,
has never confessed, although in the famous book by
Securitate defector General Ion Pacepa-The Red
Horizons-he is mentioned as occasionally engaging in
secret police work for Ceausescu in the US, where he
spent some time.
Both Anania and another well-known priest, the
American immigrant Father Calciu, are among those
who strongly oppose opening the Securitate files of
priests. As sympathizers with the Iron Guard (the
Romanian interwar fascist movement), they share a
common past with those who later collaborated with
the communists. Many priests sympathized with the
Iron Guard, whose essence lies in its Eastern Christian
fundamentalism and nationalism rather than in its
other typically fascist traits. Both Anania and Calciu
have, in this regard, similar histories of endorsing
undemocratic political movements-fascism at first,
and communism later on. Younger prelates have only
a communist, and probably Securitate, past.
Anania's demand for priestly political involvement
concerns not only the right of clergy to advise their
community how to vote in elections. It also includes
the idea of having them in Parliament again, as Charles
II in his mockery of democracy had once arranged it,
with his lifetime senators. This corporatist model is
still tempting today. Bishop Gherasim of Suceava
expressed his basic outlook when, in support of
Anania's proposal, he stated that: "The Church was
actually never separated from the state. Where the
ruler was, there the prelate was, too." The formulation
recalls a common expression of the Byzantine
tradition, reflecting the customary attitude of the
Church in automatically endorsing secular power.
Other prelates were less enamored with tradition
and more aggressive. "Many Transylvanian priests
endorsed Christian Democrats explicitly in the 1996
elections," Metropolitan Daniel of Moldova-the next
patriarch-explained. "And now they feel the present
regime does less for the Church than Iliescu did. The
Orthodox Church has come under unreasonable
attacks lately."
The "attacks" Daniel mentioned came from the
Greek Catholic Church. This institution, the Uniate
Church, was formed in the eighteenth century, in
then-Habsburg Transylvania, when Orthodox priests
were persuaded by the regime that their acceptance of
Catholicism and the authority of the Pope-while
keeping the Eastern Orthodox ceremony-would
earn them equal status with the Catholic Church and
the Hungarian and German Protestant churches.
Some of the priests and bishops considered this a good
bargain and converted. Until the nineteenth century,
Orthodox priests had had to work as serfs, together with
the rest of Romanian peasantry, and held positions infe-
rior to their counterparts in all the other faiths. Even
EAST EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW
 though the Romanian Orthodox believers constitut-
ed the majority of the Transylvanian population,
some of the priests and bishops considered conversion
a good bargain and became Uniates. The Uniate
Church then played a major role in the national
emancipation of Romanians in Transylvania and still
filled an important role in interwar Greater Romania,
since the most prominent Transylvanian politicians
were Uniates. Outlawed by the communists, the
Uniate Church survived as a clandestine church until
1990, when it resurfaced. The problem, however, was
that Romanian Uniates had turned Orthodox over
the fifty-year period during which they had no
Uniate Church to attend. In fact, they kept on going
to the same churches that had become Orthodox.
Some of them returned to the Uniate faith in 1990
but, in many instances, the older generation is the only
one to identify itself as Uniate, while the middle one is
Orthodox, and young people are nonpracticing.
In 1997, the Uniate priest and Christian Dem-
ocrat, Senator Matei Boila, proposed a law returning
to Uniates their churches in villages and towns where
there are at least two now-Orthodox, formerly
Uniate, churches and where a Uniate community still
exists. This quite reasonable proposal was met with
hostility by the Orthodox Church. A common state-
ment issued by the prelates of Transylvania threatened
civil war if the Boila bill was passed. The Minister of
Religions, Gheorghe Anghelescu (Christian Dem-
ocrat), also supported the Transylvanian prelates,
claiming that the problem had no administrative solu-
tion. He proposed instead that the state finance the
building of a few new churches for Uniates, with the
Orthodox keeping all the old ones. In two major
cities, Cluj and Satu Mare, the Uniates won back their
main cathedrals in court. This could well be the fate
of all their churches, which were seized by the com-
munists with little concern for legal formalities. But
Orthodox priests have refused to vacate these churches,
and it is easy to understand that the Orthodox
Church believes that it deserves government support,
since it supported the Christian Democrats in the
1996 elections.
The Romanian Christian Democrat Party is also
the most successful one in Europe, with both a prime
minister and a president as party members. Its
existence is another fluke of history. The historical
National Peasant Party, traditionally led by a Uniate
Transylvanian elite, endured harsh persecution under
SPRING 1998
communist rule. After years of imprisonment, in
1989, its main leader, Corneliu Coposu, thought to
add the words "Christian Democrat" to the party
name-as a way of having it accepted in the Christian
Democrat International in the hope of greater
protection from communist persecution. In 1990, the
party was admitted to the Christian Democrat
International, but for six years its identity as a political
as well as a Christian party remained undefined. Only
after the death of its leader, Coposu, and the victorious
elections of 1996 did the party become better known
in Europe, where President Emil Constantinescu and
then-prime minister Victor Ciorbea-both Orthodox
and former members of the Romanian Communist
Party-were welcomed as Christian Democrats.
Except for electoral rhetoric (in the final debate on
television Constantinescu asked then-president Iliescu,
"Do you believe in God, Mr. Iliescu?"), only the
enforcement of religious instruction in school curricula
showed the party's dedication to Christian democracy.
Religion courses, already introduced in elementary
schools in 1994, became compulsory in 1997, and
optional courses were introduced in secondary schools
as well. These classes are taught mostly by Christian
Orthodox priests. When asked how this fits in with
Romania's application to the EU, the new Liberal
Minister of Education, Andrei Marga, answered
vaguely that Romania's overwhelmingly Orthodox
population had to be considered.
Elements in civil society have also come to play
a political role and a very ambiguous and unforeseen
one at that. Christian organizations, such as ACS and
the Anastasia Foundation, pushed the often silent or
inert Church to intervene in various matters, for
example, opposing homosexuality. ACS rallies and
other pressures finally persuaded Patriarch Teoctist,
after years of silence on the matter, to ask MPs in an
address to Parliament to vote in favor of maintaining
communist-era opposition to homosexuality in the
Penal Code. The Anastasia Foundation also made
important contributions in the quest to legitimize the
nationalism and fundamentalism of former commu-
nist prelates, who were rather shy in 1990. Altogether,
civil society's initiatives, at the beginning of the new
era and motivated by the desire to help the Church
reform itself, resulted finally in the Church associating
itself tightly with conservatism.
The Christian Democrats have continued what
President Iliescu began. Prelates may be seen next to
RQ
the president on every important occasion. The
patriarch stands by the president at the Day of the
Nation celebration; the president attends all masses
important enough to be broadcast live by public tele-
vision; and, by a slip of the tongue, the Council of
National Defense, over which the president presides,
called the Orthodox Church a "state institution."
Where the ruler goes, there goes the patriarch. The
patriarch Teoctist, himself, seems to be reborn, living
a second youth. This is not surprising. After all, as
some have pointed out in disbelief, he managed the
extraordinary feat of becoming his own successor.
An identity crisis
Although the variety of religious phenomena has
grown in number and intensity since 1989, it is diffi-
cult to say whether the number of those practicing
their faith has increased significantly. However, it
would not be wise for the country's political powers
to attempt to go beyond the current, formal and not-
so formal, alliance with the Church, which survives
from one government to the next. By and large, the
people do not care much about religious issues, but
any major change could provoke a negative response.
Criticism of the Church's lack of involvement in the
serious problems of the day can occasionally be heard,
but Romanians are accustomed to a church that
exhibits only a tenuous relationship to secular social
concerns. Reform under these conditions is hard to
imagine. And meanwhile, the Church itself is most
uneasy facing the prospect of Romania's future:
European integration and NATO membership, that
is, the long-delayed union with the West.
The Orthodox Church fears the West. This fear
is complex, a mixture of historical feelings of inferior-
ity and the consequences of recent isolation. It fears
modernization (which would make the Church look
backward), the proselytism of Protestant sects, and the
growing secularization of Romanian society. And these
contemporary fears may now be endowed with suit-
able historical roots, only just discovered. In a short
pamphlet, a young theologian, Alexandru Horia, has
built a bridge connecting Romania's nationalist-
communist inclinations with the Arabic Middle East,
basing this in part on the Orthodox fundamentalists'
fear of losing their religious identity if swallowed by
secular Western culture. According to Horia, the
Catholic Church has inflicted greater damage on the
Orthodox Church and culture, and has constantly
proven itself to be a worse menace, than the suzerainty
of the Turks. Only in orienting itself toward Islamic
countries, Horia contends, will Romania find a place
of its own, thereby avoiding the fate of being engulfed
by NATO, the aggressive vanguard of the West.
The battle of the Romanian Orthodox Church
with the West emerged and intensified after the
collapse of Ceausescu's anti-Western national com-
munism and the religious revival that began in 1990.
Bishop Andrei of Alba Iulia, with the full support of
all the Transylvanian bishops, addressed a furious open
letter to the authorities opposing any visit by the Pope
unless the Uniate Church dropped all of its property
claims. The Orthodox tradition still argues that the
synthesis of the two rites in the Uniate Church-the
Byzantine and the Catholic-occurred under pressure
from the Habsburg's armies in eighteenth-century
Transylvania. But it was the Uniate priests who led
the national Romanian emancipation in Transylvania,
and a significant portion of the Romanians living
there during the unification of 1918 were Uniates.
This did not stop a famous Romanian philosopher of
pre-WW I times, Nae Ionescu, from claiming that
Uniates cannot be "Romanians" although their
historical fight for emancipation from Hungarian
domination had earned them the title "good
Romanians." Arguing sophistically, Ionescu explained
that "a Uniate can perhaps be a 'good Romanian"
because this quality can be earned; but he cannot, and
will never be, a Romanian, because being a
Romanian implies being born and baptized as an
Orthodox Christian, and this religion implies a men-
tality, a state, and a Church fundamentally different
from those of the West." Ionescu wrote that
Romanians had to relinquish the idea that they are
Europeans; they only fool themselves into thinking so
because of their Latin origin. But this origin counts for
little in their society: traditional law in the country is
probably of Thracian origin, opined Ionescu, the state
model is Byzantine, the religion purely Eastern, and
the people's nature is "contemplative"-very different
from the active nature of Catholicism. "We cannot sur-
pass ourselves without ceasing to be who we are," he
wrote. Ionescu considered institutional modernization
a series of "failed implants" and preached a return of
Romania to its purportedly autochthonous way of life.
This type of reasoning, surfacing only occasionally in
the past, is again fashionable today, although it is not
the official discourse of the Church.
EAST EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL REVIEW
 But then the question arises: How can the
Church openly oppose the state to which it is so closely
bound? The state wants, more than anything else, to
become integrated into the Western world. At the
same time it needs to strengthen the morale of a pop-
ulation tired of the suffering endured during both the
dreadful communist times and the painful transition.
The state needs to provide identity, pride, and motiva-
tion for the people to endure still more. And it clearly
needs the Church to take a hand in the process.
The postcommunist Romanian state did not
follow the example set by Boris Yeltsin, who
appointed a commission to discover what is left of-
and what should be-the identity of Russia after
communism. The "contemplative" and ironic nature
of Romanians helped them realize that such a com-
mission would produce no definitive answer. But this
does not mean that such a task would be meaningless.
Romania's collective memory has been erased by fifty
years of totalitarian propaganda, by social engineering
that was more extreme than anywhere else in Europe,
Restoring Church Property
Constitutionally
Janos Dobszay
The end of the communist era in Hungary was
preceded by a kind of religious renaissance. In
various opinion polls taken in the mid-1980s,
and again in 1990, Hungarians who regarded them-
selves as "religious according to church doctrine"
increased from 15 percent to 19 percent, whereas
those who said they were religious "in their own way"
rose from 47 percent to 62 percent. In measuring the
"degree of satisfaction with institutions," churches of
every faith and denomination consistently ranked
above all other social institutions-Parliament, the
cabinet, political parties, trade unions, the media, and
the like. In the last few years, however, the reputation
of the churches has declined somewhat, though they
still are highly respected relative to most other institu-
tions. (During this period, generally, respect for social
institutions in Hungary declined across the board.)
Whether these numerical indicators reflected a
new and genuine wave of religious feeling was ques-
tionable from the outset. After the victory of the self-
proclaimed "Christian" parties in 1990 (that is, the
SPRING 1998
and by the systematic destruction of everything that
was reminiscent of precommunist Romania. It is even
difficult for the Romanian government today to
decide which new history textbooks should be used
to teach children about their country's past. The state
needs the Orthodox Church as both a source and
sanction of cultural identity. The occasional Christian
Democrats have the distinction of at least understand-
ing this. So the old alliance seems, once again,
destined to last, even though the institutional agendas
of the two parties sometimes sharply conflict.
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is currently Director of News and
Current Affairs of Romanian Television. She holds a Ph.D.
in Social Psychology and had a Fulbright postdoctoral
fellowship to the Department of Government, Harvard
University. She is the author of Romanii dupa '89:
istoria unei meitelegeri (Bucharest 1995), a study of val-
ues and attitudes in postcommunist Romania. This work
has been translated into German under the title Die
Rumanen nach '89 (1996).
Article 60
(1) Inthe Republic of Hungary everyone has the right to freedom of
thought, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion.
(2) This right shall include the free choice or acceptance of a rell-
glen or belief, and the freedom to publicly or privately express
or decline to express, exercise and teach such religions and
beliefs by way of religious actions, rites or In any other way,
either IndivIdually or Ina group.
(3) The church and the State shall operate In separation In the
Republic of Hungapry.
The Constitution of the Republic of Hungary (1849 [amended, 1989])
Hungarian Democratic Forum [HDF], the Christian
Democratic Party [CDP], and the Independent
Smallholders' Party [ISP]), religion was in vogue as
the antithesis of communism. Members of the cabinet
often participated conspicuously in religious services,
prompting some observers to conclude, skeptically if
not cynically, that the officials in question simply
wanted to show off their newly discovered faith.
Nonetheless, it is clear that religious life was becoming