By Robert Braun OGS
Last year, I made a return
visit to Romania, where
I had been Anglican
Chaplain through the early
years of the 1980’s.
Eastern Europe has undergone
profound changes in the fi fteen years since
the fall of Communism. Many former Communists
have come back to the Christian faith — presuming
of course they ever left it, in their own hearts.
And that includes Vladimir Putin, who is quite a
devout Orthodox believer.
In Romania, King Michael has returned to
Bucharest as a private citizen. And in Bulgaria, the
second half of my old Chaplaincy, Simeon, the
would-be King of the Bulgarians has gone back to
Sofi a as the leader of the political party in power.
In both countries, the ancient Orthodox Church
continues as the focus of faith for millions of
Eastern Christians.
The Anglican Chaplaincy responsible for
Romania and Bulgaria carries on regardless, and as
there was an inter-regnum during August, I found
myself taking the weekend services in Bucharest.
When I lived there, the place was an extreme
Stalinist dictatorship, where one man and his wife
— Nicolae & Elena Ceausescu — led a brutal
regime that ruled over the lives of 24 million
Romanians.
The Ceausescus are gone — lying at diff erent
ends of a Bucharest cemetery. Someone has
erected crosses over their graves, which is almost
like putting stakes through the hearts of a couple
of vampires! However the Romanian Communist
Party, which still exists in miniscule, has erected a
plaque over Ceausescu’s grave that says, “A tear on
your grave, from Romanian people”.
But I didn’t see any tears myself. Only a completely
changed public face — people relaxed, welldressed,
and no longer fearful of the ever-present
surveillance that was exercised by the Secret Police,
and also by more than a million ‘informers’ who
kept tabs on their neighbours, and reported to the
authorities on everything that went on.
The grey stony piazzas patrolled by gun-toting
soldiers have been transformed into public spaces
lined with gardens, where people can walk unrestricted
and unintimidated.
The third-world open-air market places, which
had only sold a few sad vegetables in my day, have
been replaced by supermarkets. Romanians look
forward to going into the European Union in just
a couple of years.
In the bookshops, Harry Potter and the Bill
Clinton biography have replaced the dusty piles of
Ceausescu speeches, that were just about the only
things that were published under Communism.
And in the newspapers, politics is debated openly
— something unheard of in the old days.
I had a chance to catch up with some of my old
friends in the Romanian Orthodox Church. There
was still some resentment against clergy who had
collaborated with the Communist authorities, to
safeguard their own positions, over the 45 years of
Communist rule.
The Patriarch (Archbishop) of the Romanian
Church is a wiley old 90 year-old, who has had
many irons in the fi re during his 50 years as a
bishop. After the people’s revolution in 1989, he
was forced into retirement in a remote monastery
for a time. However he made a comeback, and still
governs the Romanian Church in a shrewd, but
benign manner — a church to which eighty-nine
per cent of the Romanian people belong.
I spent quite some time with one priest I knew
very well in my time in Romania, twenty years
ago. In a sense he represented the vast number of
Romanian clergy who faithfully served their people
in the past under very diffi cult conditions, and
today under constrained fi nancial circumstances,
trying to keep ancient buildings in repair, and
congregations together in rapidly changing times.
Fr Nicholas had been persecuted by the
Communists for various reasons in the past, and in
recent times has been trying to restore his church
in Transylvania — geographically the very middle
of the country. I was able to give him some assistance
with that work (thanks to a kind parishioner
here in Brisbane). I intend to try and help him
complete the work in the near future. His church
has no roof and no windows at present, and the
congregation complains about the damp!
Church buildings are very important to the
Romanians. They represent most of the historic
buildings of the country, and are the repositories
for the many sacred icons they use in their devotions.
One old friend I met in the Orthodox Cathedral
said, “I come here to pray because I was married
here, forty years ago. I also go to St Demetrie’s
because it’s my family church. I also go to the
Cretelescu Church because my dearest friend was
buried from that church. And I worship in the
Anglican Church in Bucharest because I studied at
St Hugh’s College Oxford, and I like to hear the
liturgy in English from time to time”. Romanians
pop in and out of their churches all through the
week — the Bucharest churches are always a hive
of activity.
The buildings provide important sacred spaces
in people’s lives, places where their ‘rites of passage’
can be celebrated, and they can take ‘time out’
for refl ection and prayer. From what I could see,
the old, and many of the young Romanians, still
respond vigorously to the call of the Gospel, and
their ancient liturgy, which has kept them together
as a Christian people for nearly 2,000 years.
Time, and human history have challenged these
people to take a stand for the things they believe
in. When it was almost impossible for them to
proclaim their faith publicly, their liturgy did it for
them — week by week, and year by year.
The Venerable Robert Braun OGS, is Anglican Archdeacon of Brisbane, and was Chaplain to the British Embassy in Bucharest from 1982 – 1984.
Churches on the daily round