The Romanian Orthodox Church

The Patriarchate of Romania, the only Orthodox Church whose people speak a Romance language, traces its national self-government to the 1885 tomos of autocephaly and its patriarchal rank to 1925. Numerically the second- or third-largest Orthodox body in the world, it passed through a communist century of both documented collaboration and documented suffering, and emerged after 1989 with what are widely reported to be the largest monastic and seminary populations in contemporary Orthodoxy and the largest Orthodox diaspora in Western Europe.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Latin-Speaking Orthodoxy

Romanians occupy a singular place in the Orthodox world: an island of Latinity in a Slavic and Greek ecclesiastical sea. The Romanian language descends from the Latin of Roman Dacia, and Romanian church writers from the seventeenth century onward made the Latin descent of their people a point of identity. Liturgically, however, the medieval Romanian principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) used Church Slavonic, under the cultural orbit of the South Slavic and Byzantine worlds, and only gradually adopted the vernacular: the seventeenth-century scholar-hierarchs, above all Metropolitan Dosoftei of Moldavia (who printed a versified Psalter in Romanian in 1673) and the Wallachian printer-deacon, later metropolitan, Antim Ivireanul (an ethnic Georgian who reposed in 1716), are remembered for the Romanianization of the liturgy (Mircea Păcurariu, Istoria Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, Bucharest: EIBMBOR, summarized in the Patriarchate’s official history, patriarhia.ro/en/history-of-the-romanian-orthodox-church). The result is a Church that prays in a Romance tongue while standing fully within Byzantine Orthodoxy — a combination unique among the autocephalous Churches.

Autocephaly (1885) and Patriarchate (1925)

Romanian ecclesiastical independence followed political independence. The united principalities (united in 1859 under Alexandru Ioan Cuza) declared full state independence in 1877 and became a kingdom in 1881. The Church’s self-governing impulse had already run ahead of canonical recognition — Cuza’s secularizations and Bishop Melchisedec Ștefănescu’s advocacy pressed the case — and after years of negotiation the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly by tomos on 25 April 1885, under Patriarch Joachim IV, the Romanian Holy Synod ratifying it on 1 May (Patriarchate of Romania, “History of the Romanian Orthodox Church,” patriarhia.ro; “Romanian Autocephalies and the Birth of the Modern Patriarchate of Romania,” orthodoxhistory.org, 23 June 2022, used as a locator for the tomos).

After the First World War, the Great Union of 1918 brought Transylvania, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Banat into a single Romanian state, unifying several formerly separate Orthodox jurisdictions (including the Transylvanian metropolitanate shaped by St. Andrei Șaguna, †1873). On 4 February 1925 the Holy Synod resolved to raise the Church to patriarchal rank; the law establishing the Patriarchate was promulgated 25 February 1925, and Miron Cristea was enthroned as the first Patriarch of Romania on 1 November 1925 (Patriarchate of Romania, official history; “Synodal Act of the Romanian Orthodox Church: 140 Years of Autocephaly and the Centennial of the Romanian Patriarchate,” basilica.ro and orthodoxtimes.com, 2025). Both events, the Patriarchate’s own historians note, unfolded “within a context of favourable political and social circumstances,” through close cooperation between Church and state — a pattern that would prove double-edged in the century to come.

The Communist Century: Collaboration and Resistance

After the communist takeover (consolidated 1947–48), the Church entered a relationship with the regime that historians describe as neither simple collaboration nor simple martyrdom, but both at once. The pivotal figure is Patriarch Justinian Marina (patriarch 1948–1977). Justinian sought a modus vivendi, articulating in his collected Apostolat social (“Social Apostolate”) a theology that read the Gospel’s social demands as compatible with the new order; critics then and since have called him a “communist stooge,” noting that his public pronouncements passed over the hundreds of thousands imprisoned for political reasons in silence (“Romanian Orthodox Church in Communist Romania,” Wikipedia, used as locator; Lucian Leustean, Orthodoxy and the Cold War: Religion and Political Power in Romania, 1947–65, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Yet the same Justinian sheltered monastics and clergy released from prison, and the Church remained — in the assessment of researchers working from Securitate archives — “the only officially recognised institution that had not been completely infiltrated,” retaining a measure of independence even as a large number of clergy were enrolled as informers (research summarized at cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de, “Criminals, Martyrs or Saints? Romania’s Prison Saints Debate Revisited”). Both facts are documented; neither cancels the other.

The regime also struck hard. In 1948 the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church was forcibly suppressed and absorbed; in 1958–1964 the so-called Decree 410 expelled thousands of monks and nuns from the monasteries. Romania’s most important theologian, Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993), translator of the Romanian Philokalia, was arrested in 1958 in connection with the Rugul Aprins (“Burning Bush”) spiritual circle and imprisoned for five years (fericiticeiprigoniti.net, “The Arrest and Sentencing of Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae,” used as locator). He was canonized by the Romanian Holy Synod in 2025 (see below).

The “Prison Saints” and Aiud — Handled With Care

A distinct and contested phenomenon must be named precisely. Among those who died in the communist prisons — Aiud, Gherla, Pitești, Târgu Ocna — were men remembered by a popular movement as “prison saints” (sfinții închisorilor). The difficulty, which scholarship documents and the Patriarchate has navigated cautiously, is that a number of the most venerated figures in this movement, Valeriu Gafencu above all, were members of the interwar fascist Iron Guard (Legion of the Archangel Michael). Historians have warned that the movement risks “constructing fascist hagiographies” — venerating Legionnaires as martyr-saints (Roland Clark, “Constructing Fascist Hagiographies,” Contemporary European History, Cambridge, 2021; “The Aiud ‘Prison Saints’: History, Memory and Lived Religion,” researchgate.net). The official Romanian Orthodox Church has not canonized Gafencu or the other Legionnaire detainees. When, on 4 February 2025, the Holy Synod canonized sixteen twentieth-century saints — among them St. Dumitru Stăniloae, St. Sofian (Boghiu) of Antim, St. Arsenie of Prislop, and St. Ilarion Felea — it chose confessor-priests and monks persecuted for the faith, deliberately not the politically compromised figures of the prison-saints cult (Synodal Decree, basilica.ro and orthodoxtimes.com, February 2025; for the critical reading of even these canonizations, see “Fascist Hagiographies: The Recent Canonizations,” publicorthodoxy.org, 30 July 2024). The distinction between attested confessors of the faith and a popular cult with a fascist genealogy is one this article preserves rather than collapses.

The Post-1989 Revival

The Revolution of December 1989 opened a religious revival of striking scale. Hundreds of churches were built, theological faculties and seminaries reopened, and monastic life expanded rapidly. By the figures the Church and observers report, Romania now sustains the largest monastic and seminary populations in the Orthodox world: roughly 380–400 monasteries with on the order of 8,000 monks and nuns (one widely cited 2007 figure gives 434 monasteries and sketes with 8,059 monastics; the Patriarchate’s later statistics give numbers in the same range), together with dozens of seminaries and multiple theological faculties (“Romanian Orthodox Church,” Wikipedia and orthodoxengland.org.uk/romnumbers.htm, drawing on Patriarchate statistics — used here as locators for the official data). In the 2021 census, about 73.4% of the population — roughly 14 million people — identified as Orthodox, by far the largest religious community in the country (Romanian National Institute of Statistics, 2021 census, reported via basilica.ro). On this basis Romania is regularly described as the third-largest Orthodox population in the world, after Russia and (depending on the year and the method) Ethiopia or Ukraine.

The Bessarabia Dispute With Moscow

Beyond Romania’s borders lies the unresolved jurisdictional question of Moldova / Bessarabia. Bessarabia had belonged to the Romanian Church between the World Wars; after Soviet annexation it passed to the Moscow Patriarchate, which today governs the large Orthodox Church of Moldova (Moldovan Metropolitanate) as a self-governing body under Moscow. On 14 September 1992 the Romanian Patriarchate reactivated the Metropolis of Bessarabia, headed by Bishop (later Metropolitan) Petru (Păduraru), who had left the Moscow jurisdiction. Moldova’s government withheld legal recognition until 2002, when it acted following a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia v. Moldova, 13 December 2001) (Metropolis of Bessarabia, Wikipedia, and the ECtHR judgment, used as locators; “Church–state conflict in Moldova: the Bessarabian Metropolitanate,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies). The two parallel jurisdictions — Moscow’s Moldovan Metropolitanate and Romania’s Bessarabian Metropolis — coexist uneasily. [Disputed: Romania holds that Bessarabia is the canonical continuation of its interwar metropolitanate; Moscow regards the Romanian presence as an intrusion into its canonical territory. As of 2026 the dispute is unresolved, and it has sharpened amid the wider Moscow–Constantinople rupture and Russia’s war in Ukraine, with reports of clergy in Moldova transferring from the Moscow-linked to the Bucharest-linked structure (hagueresearch.org, “The Moldovan Orthodox Church”; moldovamatters.md).]

The 2018 National Cathedral

On 25 November 2018, in the centenary year of the Great Union, the People’s Salvation Cathedral (Catedrala Mântuirii Neamului, also called the National Cathedral) in Bucharest was consecrated, its altar dedicated by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I together with Patriarch Daniel of Romania. At about 133 metres in height it is the tallest Eastern Orthodox church building in the world and among the largest by volume; its construction, funded largely from state and local budgets at a cost reported around €270 million, drew public criticism over priorities (National Cathedral of Romania, Wikipedia, used as locator; “Heavy Price Tag Overshadows Romanian Cathedral’s Ceremonial Opening,” balkaninsight.com, 23 November 2018; smithsonianmag.com, “The World’s Largest Christian Orthodox Church Is Now Open in Romania”).

The Diaspora: The Largest in Western Europe

Romania’s mass emigration since 2000 has produced the largest Orthodox diaspora in Western Europe. Italy alone is reported to host on the order of one million Romanians and the largest single body of Orthodox faithful of any traditionally Catholic country (figures of around 2.2 million Orthodox total in Italy, the great majority Romanian, are cited by the Romanian Church, with several hundred Romanian parishes in the country), with further large communities in Spain, Germany, and elsewhere (basilica.ro, “Most of the Orthodox in the West Are Romanian”; Marco Guglielmi, The Romanian Orthodox Diaspora in Italy: Eastern Orthodoxy in a Western European Country, Cham: Springer, 2022). The Romanian Patriarchate has organized this diaspora into metropolitanates and dioceses across Western and Southern Europe, the Americas, and Australia — by the end of 2022 reporting well over a thousand parishes outside Romania (Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Great Britain, roarch.org.uk; orthodoxtimes.com, “Romanian Diaspora in Figures”). Romania thus enters the third Christian millennium as a Church both deeply rooted in its land and unusually present across the Western European map.

See Also

References

  • Patriarchate of Romania. “History of the Romanian Orthodox Church” and “The Patriarchs of Romania: Patriarch Justinian Marina.” patriarhia.ro/en. (Official chronology: autocephaly 25 April 1885; patriarchate established 1925; Miron Cristea enthroned 1 November 1925.)
  • Păcurariu, Mircea. Istoria Bisericii Ortodoxe Române (History of the Romanian Orthodox Church). Bucharest: Editura Institutului Biblic și de Misiune al BOR. (Standard national church history; cited via the Patriarchate’s summaries.)
  • Leustean, Lucian N. Orthodoxy and the Cold War: Religion and Political Power in Romania, 1947–65. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
  • Clark, Roland. “Constructing Fascist Hagiographies: The Genealogy of the Prison Saints Movement in Contemporary Romania.” Contemporary European History, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
  • “The Aiud ‘Prison Saints’: History, Memory and Lived Religion.” researchgate.net (publication 283805526). (Used to locate the scholarship on the Aiud phenomenon.)
  • “Criminals, Martyrs or Saints? Romania’s Prison Saints Debate Revisited.” Cultures of History Forum, cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de.
  • “Fascist Hagiographies: The Recent Canonizations of Fascist Saints in the Romanian Orthodox Church.” publicorthodoxy.org, 30 July 2024.
  • Synodal Decree of the Romanian Orthodox Church for the Canonization of 20th-Century Saints (4 February 2025). basilica.ro and orthodoxtimes.com. (Sixteen confessors and spiritual fathers, including St. Dumitru Stăniloae.)
  • “National Cathedral of Romania.” Wikipedia (used as locator); “Heavy Price Tag Overshadows Romanian Cathedral’s Ceremonial Opening,” balkaninsight.com, 23 November 2018; “The World’s Largest Christian Orthodox Church Is Now Open in Romania,” smithsonianmag.com. (Consecration 25 November 2018; ~133 m; ~€270 million.)
  • “Metropolis of Bessarabia.” Wikipedia (locator); Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia and Others v. Moldova, European Court of Human Rights, judgment of 13 December 2001; “Church–state conflict in Moldova: the Bessarabian Metropolitanate,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies.
  • Guglielmi, Marco. The Romanian Orthodox Diaspora in Italy: Eastern Orthodoxy in a Western European Country. Religion and Global Migrations. Cham: Springer, 2022.
  • “Most of the Orthodox in the West Are Romanian” and related diaspora statistics. basilica.ro; orthodoxtimes.com; roarch.org.uk. (Used as locators for Patriarchate data.)
  • Romanian National Institute of Statistics, 2021 Census (religious affiliation: ~73.4% Orthodox), reported via basilica.ro.
  • Monastic and seminary statistics: “Romanian Orthodox Church,” Wikipedia, and orthodoxengland.org.uk/romnumbers.htm (used as locators for Patriarchate figures: ~380–434 monasteries/sketes; ~8,000 monastics; 2007 figure 8,059).