History of Christianity in Romania
In the territories east and south of the Carpathian Mountains, two metropolitan sees subordinate to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople were set up after the foundation of two principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia in the 14th century.
The growth of monasticism in Moldavia provided a historical link between the 14th-century Hesychast revival and the modern development of the monastic tradition in Eastern Europe.
In these territories, transformed into the Principality of Transylvania in the 16th century, four "received religions" – Catholicism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Unitarianism – were granted a privileged status.
In the territories east and south of the Carpathian Mountains, two metropolitan sees subordinate to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople were set up after the foundation of two principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia in the 14th century.
The growth of monasticism in Moldavia provided a historical link between the 14th-century Hesychast revival and the modern development of the monastic tradition in Eastern Europe.
[16] For example, words like duh ("soul, spirit"), iad ("hell"), rai ("paradise"), grijanie ("Holy Communion"), popă ("priest"), slujbă ("church service") and taină ("mystery, sacrament") are of South Slavic origin.
[34] According to a concurring scholarly theory, the Romanians' ancestors turned to Christianity in the provinces to the south of the Danube (in present-day Bulgaria and Serbia) after it was legalized throughout the Roman Empire in 313.
[37][38][39] According to an oral history first recorded by Hippolytus of Rome in the early 3rd century, Jesus Christ's teachings were first propagated in "Scythia" by Saint Andrew.
[38][39][42] Vessels with the sign of the cross, fish, grape stalks, and other Christian symbols were discovered in Ulpia Traiana, Porolissum, Potaissa, Apulum, Romula, and Gherla, among other settlements.
[51][52] John Cassian (360–435), Dionysius Exiguus (470–574) and Joannes Maxentius (leader of the so-called Scythian Monks) lived in Scythia Minor and contributed to its Christianization.
[74] In "Novella XI", the foundation act of the Justiniana Prima Archbishopric, from 535, in the arguments that motivate the establishment of this prefecture, it is affirmed that Empire has expanded to such an extent that Roman towns are situated on both banks of the Danube.
[94][95] The Metropolitan See of Moesia was reestablished in Dristra (now Silistra, Bulgaria) in the 1040s when a mission of mass evangelization was dispatched among the Pechenegs who had settled in the Byzantine Empire.
[100] However, the brothers Peter and Asen built a church in order to gather Bulgarian and Vlach prophets to announce that St Demetrius of Thessaloniki had abandoned their enemies, while arranging their rebellion against the Byzantine Empire.
[107][108] A letter written by Pope Gregory IX revealed that many of the inhabitants of this diocese were Orthodox Romanians, who also converted Hungarian and Saxon colonists to their faith.
For disregarding the Roman Church, they receive all the sacraments not from our venerable brother, the Cuman bishop, who is the diocesan of that territory, but from some pseudo-bishops of the Greek rite.Christian objects disappeared in Transylvania after the 7th century.
[142] In 1356, Pope Innocent VI strengthened a previous bull addressed to the prior of the Dominican Order of Hungary, where he was instructed to preach the crusade “against all the inhabitants of Transylvania, Bosnia and Slavonia, which are heretics” (contra omnes Transilvanos, Bosnenses et Sclavonie, qui heretici fuerint).
[156] For instance, Basarab I (c. 1310–1352), the Romanian ruler who achieved the independence of Wallachia in the territories between the Carpathians and the Lower Danube, was mentioned as "schismatic" by a royal diploma of 1332, referring to the Orthodox Church.
[161][163] A second principality, Moldavia, achieved its independence in the territories to the east of the Carpathians under Bogdan I (1359 – c. 1365), but it still remained under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox hierarch of Halych (Ukraine).
[176][177] Wallachia in particular became a leading center of the Orthodox world, which was demonstrated by the consecration of the cathedral of Curtea de Argeș in 1517 in the presence of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Protos of Mount Athos.
[189] In the 14th and 15th centuries new Catholic dioceses were established in the territories to the east and south of the Carpathians, mainly due to the presence of Hungarian and Saxon colonists.
[210] The Diet recognized the existence of two distinct Protestant churches in 1564 after the Saxon and Hungarian clergy had failed to agree on the contested points of theology, such as the nature of communion services.
[241][244] In order to solemnize Romania's independence, in 1882 the Orthodox hierarchy performed the ceremony of blessing the holy oil, a privilege that had thereto been reserved for the ecumenical patriarchs.
[222][249] Local Orthodox believers remained without their own religious leader after the integration of Transylvania into the Habsburg Empire, when a synod led by the metropolitan declared the union with Rome in 1698.
[258] For the Romanians, the Church Union proposed by the imperial court nurtured the hope that the central government would assist them in their conflicts with local authorities.
[259] The union of the local Romanian Orthodox Church with Rome was declared in Alba Iulia, after years of negotiations, in 1698 by Metropolitan Atanasie Anghel and thirty-eight archpriests.
[279] The Principality of Transylvania, following its integration into the Habsburg Empire, was administered according to the principles established by the Leopoldine Diploma of 1690, which confirmed the privileged status of the four "received religions".
[301] The 1948 Law on Religious Denominations formally upheld freedom of religion, but ambiguous stipulations obliged both priests and believers to conform to the constitution, national security, public order, and accepted morality.
[307] For instance, the Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa spent sixteen years in prison for involvement with the fascist Iron Guard[308] and was later condemned to ten more because of his sermons on the relationship of atheism, faith, and Marxism.
[307] The crisis that led to the regime's fall in 1989 also started with the staunch resistance of the Reformed pastor László Tőkés, whom the authorities wanted to silence.
[316] The four Roman Catholic dioceses in Transylvania, composed primarily of Hungarian-speaking inhabitants, hoped to be united into a distinct ecclesiastical province, but only Alba Iulia was raised to an archbishopric and placed directly under the jurisdiction of the Holy See in 1992.
