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Romania's churches to honor Christians who died under Communism
Episcopal News Service
Issue:
Section:
2003-096-5
Posted: Monday, May 05, 2003
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Romania's church leaders are drawing up a list of martyrs who died for the Christian faith under Communist rule, and aim to publish it next year.
'All the mainstream churches suffered during the communist period here, so this is a significant ecumenical development,' said Costel Stoica, spokesman for the Romanian Orthodox church's Bucharest patriarchate. 'It's supremely important that the history of our churches is properly known, and that today's young generation is made aware of the strong moral stand which many people adopted,' Stoica noted in an interview with ENI.
'We began collecting data in 1990, and have already published material on Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians who suffered for their faith. We've now established precise criteria for acknowledging acts of martyrdom,' Stoica said.
The criteria include meeting a violent death, death from lack of food and water or prison torture because of ''hatred of faith and church,' representatives of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches said after a meeting about the project earlier this year. They said the list would include 120 Orthodox, 50 Latin (Roman) Catholics and 20 Protestants, as well as 150 martyrs from Romania's Greek Catholic church, which combines the eastern rite with loyalty to Rome, and was outlawed in 1948.
A Communist government took control of Romania in the years following the Second World War. In 1989, the country's then Communist ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, was overthrown and killed. Archbishop Ioan Robu, president of Romania's Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference, said he believed a joint list of martyrs was an 'important area for inter-church cooperation,' but regretted the initiative was only now being taken, 14 years after the collapse of Communist rule. ''It's promising that we now can do this in an ecumenical way,' the archbishop said.
In a March 2002 census, almost 87 per cent of Romania's population of 21.7 million said they belonged to the Romanian Orthodox church, compared to about 6 per cent describing themselves as Latin or Greek Catholics, and 1 per cent citing membership of Protestant denominations.
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