Author: Stefan Brandusescu
April 20, 2009
An unofficial translation of highlights of an article from http://www.ziare.com
THE CHURCH AND THE SECURITATE [ROMANIAN SECRET POLICE]:
FORGIVENESS COMES FROM FORGETFULNESS?
“I abhor people without character, sneaks, moles [and] informers, the ones with the least amount of character. I have had important disappointments in my life, having been informed upon and betrayed by acquaintances and friends.”
Nicolae Steinhardt
“The most sinister category of people, truly unnatural monsters, are professional betrayers, peeping twitterers [and] informers who merit only contempt, disdain and to be spat on…No political regime can have a long run if it doesn’t have a solid base, and if it props itself up on moles, denunciation, lack of character and betrayal. Trust in people needs to be cultivated and not mistrust, enthusiasm and not fear, honour and not dishonour.”
These are the words of Nicolae Steinhardt, addressed to a friend who reported this to the Securitate regarding Steinhardt. (The quote is from … ‘N. Steinhardt and the Paradox of Freedom’ written by George Ardeleanu – Humanitas, 2009). N. Steinhardt dies in 1989, at the Rohia monastery… He became a monk years earlier after having been baptized in jail where he was held for political motives.
Informers were a current reality in Communist Romania and the preferred tool of the Securitate to strictly control the population. Informers were present in all levels of society… [There were also] informers from the church, priests who explicitly betrayed the Sacrament of Confession in order to inform. Thus, the description made by Steinhardt applies not only to the informer in general, but moreso here, since we speak of priests, and we compare them to what a man of the church should be, at least theoretically.
A STAIN ON THE CHURCHES’ CHEEK
And this is even more relevant in that the profile of the informer is made by an ‘inside man’ a man of the cloth… In this way Steinhardt’s accusations carry a legitimacy that show up as a stain on the churches’ cheek.
In the case of clerics collaborating with the Securitate, there is no room for excuses or for invoking extenuating circumstances. The Church cannot invoke the fact that it wasn’t the institution, as much as some of its clerics, who collaborated with the Securitate. When BOR [the Romanian Orthodox Church] undertook the political steps in order for it to alone administer the files of clerics who collaborated, to the detriment of CNSAS [the legal body set up for this], the institution called the Church, explicitly transformed the problem of collaborators onto its own self.
The silence of BOR, it’s incapacity to accept blame, its inability to make public confessions on this, and to officially say “we were wrong”, disqualifies it as a moral institution… BOR has directly inherited the dirt of the Securitate; it protects with holiness, the treasured arhives and files which attest to the moral cancer in which many of its clerics, from the highest level on, lived in during the last half century. Because of its daily silence, the Romanian Orthodox Church is, at present, the ‘regime’ that Steinhardt spoke of as the one which encourages “this horrible category of declassed people, low- lives, cretins in general, who have no common sense, no conscience, and who, most importantly, sellout their relatives, friends and acquaintances.”
WHO IS TO BLAME AND WHO IS NOT?
Suspicion festers, particularly as we have no explicit and public information regarding each priest who performs a religious service. I am permitted to ask myself, and this every time I see an older priest, if he is not also one of that category of people “without character, sneaks, moles [and] informers, the ones with the least amount of character”. In this way, generalized suspicion, without discernment, which was the principal psychological weapon of the communist political police, is continued in the outmost and this, because of the silence of BOR [the Romanian Orthodox Church].
To be sure, people are not as suspicious as before, simply because finding out who, how and why someone collaborated with the Securitate no longer interests them as much, now, 20 years after the Revolution. They have other, more important problems which have to do with daily work and survival. And it is on this precise point that BOR is counting: on the fact that forgiveness will come from people’s forgetfulness, and not from their conscience. Things however, cannot stay like this simply because what BOR has to confess, continuously weighs heavily on the institution, and this regardless of the opinions of people. The blame for having been an instrument in the hands of the political police [Securitate] and the shame brought on by continuing in the tradition of lies cannot evaporate in forgetfulness. It will always be there in the form of bribery, struggles for power which inevitably bring on the control of those instruments of bribery, the public images full of hypocrisy, and being in the situation of not being [morally] capable of being a partner in the social dialogue of the times.
All this erodes, and will continue to erode the institution called the Church, and this in spite of the good intentions declared by the latter. And no matter how forgetful people might be, BOR cannot ignore the acute lack of credibility its clerics have in public debates and indeed, in the eyes of each lay person. In the best of cases, the faithful look beyond the priest and consider him to be a simple support mechanism in their relationship with God, thus deliberately choosing to ignore the man who officiates the divine services, and to perceive in him only the divine service which he officiates. Public conscience thus annuls the importance of the priest in the religious service. What is left of the respective priest is but a function, the role of “servant of the Church”, and the priest inevitably loses his particular human dimension. Thus, the lay person’s relationship with God is now possible without the human help of the intermediary [ie the priest]. In effect, it becomes almost a direct relationship.
ELIMINATING THE INTERMEDIARY?
By practicing the Christian faith in this way, people get used to dealing directly with God, and not because they so choose, but because of BOR’s incapacity to purify its own public image. In this way the Romanian Orthodox Church is sending its own faithful towards neo-protestant sects where the relationship with God is a direct one, every person individually, and where the religious service is minimal but where, most importantly, the pastor is usually a model for the respective community.
Therefore, the forgetfulness on which BOR is banking on, in order to cleanse its sins, is turning against the Church through its loss of faithful on a daily basis. If it continues to not change its attitude regarding the betrayal of its own mission, and if it refuses to stop harming its own institutional body by not cutting away its cancerous cells, the Romanian Orthodox Church [will become], over the long term, a dead institution.