The Orthodox Church and the Minority Cults in Inter-War Romania (1918-1940)

Author(s): Ioan Vasile Leb
Keywords: Romania, Orthodox Church, tolerance, Romanian provinces, minorities, Catholic Church, Calvinist Church, Lutheran Church, state, legislation
Journal: Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies
Year: 2002
Full text: http://www.jsri.ro/old/html%20version/index/no_3/ioan_vasile_leb-articol.htm
Publisher: Seminar for the Interdisciplinary Research of Reli
Abstract: In the context of the Union of Greater Romania, a problem specific to the development of the Romanian society and of the re-united national state was the regulation of the status or the varied religious cults. It is well known that under the Older Romanian Kingdom, the Orthodoxy was a state religion. The other cults - Lutheran, Catholic, Mosaic, and Moslem - represented small numbers of believers and had not been regulated under the law; they were tolerated. Following the Union of 1918, the Romanian State came to accommodate not just one, but several denominations. Consequently, it had to clarify its relations with the cults in the Romanian provinces of Bucovina, Basarabia, Banat, and Transylvania. These cults which had not existed in the Older Kingdom functioned according to the legislative systems they had belonged to before 1918. Thus came the necessity of establishing the unitary status for the minority cults, which, given the diversity of their religious doctrines, rituals and interests, posed new problems to be settled for the government policy. This also should be the focus of the debates surrounding the forthcoming law of the cults in Romania.