\u201cThe 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\u2026No political regime can have a long run if it doesn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nThese are the words of Nicolae Steinhardt, addressed to a friend who reported this to the Securitate regarding Steinhardt.\u00a0 (The quote is from \u2026 \u2018N. Steinhardt and the Paradox of Freedom\u2019 written by George Ardeleanu – Humanitas, 2009).\u00a0 N. Steinhardt dies in 1989, at the Rohia monastery\u2026 He became a monk years earlier after having been baptized in jail where he was held for political motives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Informers were a current reality in Communist Romania and the preferred tool of the Securitate to strictly control the population. \u00a0Informers were present in all levels of society\u2026 [There were also] informers from the church, priests who explicitly betrayed the Sacrament of Confession in order to inform.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A STAIN ON THE CHURCHES\u2019 CHEEK<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this is even more relevant in that the profile of the informer is made by an \u2018inside man\u2019 a man of the cloth\u2026 In this way Steinhardt\u2019s accusations carry a legitimacy that show up as a stain on the churches\u2019 cheek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the case of clerics collaborating with the Securitate, there is no room for excuses or for invoking extenuating circumstances.\u00a0 The Church cannot invoke the fact that it wasn\u2019t the institution, as much as some of its clerics, who collaborated with the Securitate.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The silence of BOR, it\u2019s incapacity to accept blame, its inability to make public confessions on this, and to officially say \u201cwe were wrong\u201d, disqualifies it as a moral institution\u2026 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 \u2018regime\u2019 that Steinhardt spoke of as the one which encourages \u201cthis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WHO IS TO BLAME AND WHO IS NOT?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Suspicion festers, particularly as we have no explicit and public information regarding each priest who performs a religious service.\u00a0 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 \u201cwithout character, sneaks, moles [and] informers, the ones with the least amount of character\u201d.\u00a0 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].<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\u00a0 They have other, more important problems which have to do with daily work and survival.\u00a0 And it is on this precise point that BOR is counting: on the fact that forgiveness will come from people\u2019s forgetfulness, and not from their conscience.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Public conscience thus annuls the importance of the priest in the religious service.\u00a0 What is left of the respective priest is but a function, the role of \u201cservant of the Church\u201d, and the priest inevitably loses his particular human dimension.\u00a0 Thus, the lay person\u2019s relationship with God is now possible without the human help of the intermediary [ie the priest]. \u00a0In effect, it becomes almost a direct relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ELIMINATING THE INTERMEDIARY?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s incapacity to purify its own public image.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Author: Stefan Brandusescu April 20, 2009 An unofficial translation of highlights of an article from http:\/\/www.ziare.com<\/a> THE CHURCH AND THE SECURITATE [ROMANIAN SECRET POLICE]: FORGIVENESS COMES FROM FORGETFULNESS? \u201cI abhor people without character, sneaks, moles [and] informers, the ones with the least amount of character.\u00a0 I have had important disappointments in my life, having been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":241120734,"featured_media":248,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/roeanews.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/apr-20-2009.jpg?fit=128%2C100&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfcdbO-3V","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/241120734"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1325,"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/1325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roeanews.info\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}