Spiritual Hunger in Romania

AN Associated Press report from Brasov, Romania, said that about 90 percent of Romania’s 23 million people are members of the Orthodox Church, which was permitted to operate under Communist rule. However, the Canon City, Colorado, U.S.A., Daily Record noted that many now find the church wanting. It carried the headline: “Romanians Find Orthodox Church Lacking in Relevance.”

“Alexandru Paleologu, a writer and philosopher,” the paper reported last October, “cited a lack of trust in church authorities, and said the style and substance of the religion have gotten mixed up. People cross themselves and fast on the right days, for instance. But abortion, which the church regards as a sin, is widespread.”

The Daily Record observed that many have become Jehovah’s Witnesses, citing the effect that the Bible teaching program of the Witnesses had on one family: “Florentina Petrisor’s husband used to drink heavily and beat her, she says. But since the couple became Jehovah’s Witnesses, her family life is a picture of harmony.”

Florentina, a 38-year-old sewing-machine operator, reportedly “left the Orthodox church because of its lack of pastoral teaching and her local priest’s materialism.” The paper explained: “When her father-in-law died, Petrisor said the family had to pay and feed the priest to ensure a nice service before she could feed her children. ‘I thought it wasn’t right,’ she said.”

Regarding the church campaign of spreading misinformation about the Witnesses, the Daily Record observed: “In Romania, the Orthodox church, which has regained influence, helped maneuver the government into moving a mass gathering of Jehovah’s Witnesses this summer from the capital Bucharest to the Transylvanian cities of Brasov and Cluj.”

The February 22, 1997, Awake! told of the church campaign to influence the government to cancel the international convention scheduled for Bucharest in July 1996. You can read in that magazine how alternative conventions were quickly arranged in Cluj-Napoca and Brasov and how a total of 34,866 attended them. The resulting world publicity was remarkable. “What the Romanian Orthodox Church thought would hinder us,” one Witness representative noted, “actually turned out to be for the advancement of the good news.”

[Picture on page 31]

Delegates singing at the Brasov convention