Byzantine ecclesiology in a new member state of the European Union: The Romanian case.

AuthorGuran, Petre

Among the few volumes with collected studies on the broad and vague topic of Church, Society and State in Romania that have been edited during the last years none would call for a critical review. Taken together, they express the need for a thorough discussion of issues regarding the role of religion in post-communist Romanian society, but they contain not much more than that. Most of these volumes are the result of workshops and summer schools, participation to which seems to have been dictated more by political/religious considerations than scholarly interests. My invited contribution will consist in a short overview of these publications, in the course of which I will privilege discussion by topic, rather than by volume, and will refer to the various contributions contained therein according to the degree to which I considered them representative of the dominant tendencies in Romanian society.

The question formulated immediately after 1989 was how to organize religious freedom in a society that had just shaken off a regime of militant atheism, the main goal of which was to root out religion. The main players in the field of religion considered that the first step should be to abolish the very restrictive act of 1948, which regulated the activities of religious institutions in communist Romania. In spite of the genuine interest in producing a new regulation, it took more than 17 years to replace the framework established by the communist regime. A provisional framework based on the principle of individual freedom was provided by the Romanian Constitution of 1991 and by reference to the Marzescu law of 1924 regarding the general regime of associations and foundations in Romania (updated by the Government Ordinance 26/2000). After several failed attempts to create a consensus among political parties, religious institutions and social constituents regarding the conditions of religious freedom in Romania, only in 2005 did the Romanian parliament achieve to thoroughly debate a substantial law on religious freedom and the general regime of religions. At the moment of this review (October, 2006) this law passed in the Senate and awaits debate by the Chamber of deputies. As author Radu Carp observed, whatever legislation from the prewar period the Romanian State might have applied to regulate religious freedom, or whatever new legal forms were produced in the post-communist period, the Romanian legal conditions for the exercise of religious freedom can, compared with those in most European states, be characterized as liberal. A number of issues delayed the promulgation of a new law detailing the principle of religious freedom stipulated in the Constitution of 1991. Among them...

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