Fascists, Communists, Bishops, and Spies: Romanian Orthodox Churches during the Cold War (original) (raw)

The Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of North America (created in 1929) had a fate similar to other diaspora Orthodox churches from countries where Communist regimes took over, such as those in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, and Albania; that is, it was split into two. The Communists in the home countries contributed to the division of the churches in the diaspora in an attempt to bring the diaspora communities under their control. The Romanian episcopate's first bishop, Policarp Morușcă (1935-1939), was prevented from returning to his post after a visit to Romania as WWII broke out, and even more so after Communism arrived in Romania with the Soviet tanks in 1944. His place was taken by Andrei Moldovan (1950-1963), when a group of priests who decided to remain faithful to the patriarchate in Bucharest designated him as their bishop and created a parallel structure that came to be eventually known as the Romanian Orthodos Metropolia of America (ROMA). In response to these developments, the initial episcopate (ROEA) congress decided to choose its own bishop in the person of the controversial Valerian Trifa (1950-1984), who was one of the leaders of the fascist Legionary Movement in interwar Romania, instigated the Legionary rebellion of January 1941, and profited from the Cold War to make his way to the United States as a refugee. Trifa was later succeeded by Nathaniel Popp (1984-present), and Moldovan by Victorin Ursache (1966-2001) and then by two bishops, Nicolae Condrea (2002-present) and Ioan Casian Tunaru (2017-present). At the height of the confrontation between the ROMA and the ROEA, the Communist authorities sent out controversial Archimandrite Valeriu Anania, a former Legionary Movement member who later became a Communist agent, to undermine Trifa. Trifa surrendered his American citizenship after Ceaușescu's Securitate got involved in the uncovering of Trifa's fascist past to the American authorities in the late 1970s. Post-Communist efforts at the reunification of the two dioceses have managed to reestablish sacramental communion but not reunification, with the ROMA remaining an autonomous diocese under the jurisdiction of the Romanian Orthodox Church, while the ROEA is part of the Orthodox Church in America. While the ROMA's Metropolitan Nicolae Condrea and Bishop Ioan Casian Tunaru are uncompromised, educated in the West, and willing to see some form of unity between the two Romanian dioceses, the ROEA's bishop Nathaniel bears with him the burden of the past and may not be too open to reconciliation. The split between the two ecclesiastical units is no longer justified, and hopefully the future will make it possible for them to be one.