Religion, Politics and Sexuality in Romania [613803]

Religion, Politics and Sexuality in Romania
LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN
SINCE THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM religion has played an increasingly important
role in Romanian political and social life. The Orthodox church, which commands theloyalty of some 86% of the population, remains the country’s most important religiousdenomination, exerting a considerable sway on local politics. Beside the Orthodox,who follow the new Gregorian calendar, there are around 4.7% Roman Catholics,
3.2% Reformed Christians and some 0.9% Greek Catholics, all of whom are present
primarily in the western regions of the country. A total of 16 denominations areofficially registered in Romania, but a plethora of other religious groups and new
religious movements are active, subject to discrimination from the state and
considerable pressure from the Orthodox church, which considers itself the ‘nationalchurch’ entitled to a privileged position relative to other religions.
The country’s major religious denominations have actively sought to shape
democracy, mentalities and lifestyle in Romania. Sexuality is one area where thechurches have worked together with, and often against, the post-communist state toimpose their views and define acceptable and unacceptable sexual behaviour forsociety, their followers and members of the clergy. In Romania sexual behaviour and
practices have been a contested territory for church and state throughout the last
century. In a traditional society like Romania mores and mentalities have remained
close to the conservative villages, which rejected homosexuality, scorned prostitutes,while tacitly accepting adulterous husbands, and denounced abortion, while
developing an impressive knowledge of medicinal plants able to induce it. The
communist authorities increased jail sentences for homosexual behaviour, seen as afactor undermining the creation of the ‘new socialist man’, and imposed a
comprehensive pro-natal programme that ultimately failed to protect the country
against population loss. Homosexuality was used as an accusation against dissenters
too.
1
After 1989 the topics of homosexuality, abortion and prostitution deeply divided
Romanian society and sparked heated public debates involving the political class,
religious leaders, the local academic community, mass media and the public at large.Discussions generally revolved around the adoption of new laws that would allowRomania to conform to European Union standards and solve the country’s mostdelicate social problems. A combination of internal factors like shifts in accepted
mores and external factors including the pressure of the European communityEUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 57, No. 2, March 2005, 291 – 310
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/05/020291-20 #2005 University of Glasgow
DOI: 10.1080/09668130500051924

determined the success or failure of adopting legislation liberalising these three areas
of sexuality. The ban on homosexuality was lifted at the insistence of the Council ofEurope, which threatened to restart monitoring Romania’s human rights record.
While the international community played a decisive role in ending discrimination
against gays and lesbians, it remained silent on Romania’s position vis-a `-vis abortion
and prostitution, mostly because the European Union member states do not embrace a
common position on these issues.
This article considers homosexuality, abortion, contraception, family planning and
prostitution, several broad areas in which the Romanian churches gave pronounce-
ments with regard to acceptable behaviour for the larger society. The article ends witha brief discussion of the Orthodox struggles to regulate additional aspects of the sexual
life of its clergy and their families. While the views of the Romanian Orthodox Church
on homosexuality and abortion were presented before, this article is the first to reporton Romanian churches’ position on prostitution and Orthodox priests’ divorce.
2
Lifting the ban on homosexuality
When Romania formally applied for membership of the European structures in the
early 1990s Article 200 of its Criminal Code, punishing sexual relationships amongsame-sex persons with prison terms of up to five years, came under heavy criticism for
not meeting the standards of tolerance, recognition and non-discrimination of
minority groups. Three years after becoming the country’s supreme leader in 1965
Nicolae Ceausescu introduced Article 200, which, together with an earlier sweeping
pro-natal programme, was part of a larger campaign to increase the available
workforce, regulate sexual behaviour, create the new socialist man and woman and ridthe country of what he considered unacceptable behaviour. For decades gays and
lesbians in Romania had to keep their sexual orientation secret for fear of prosecution,
and many endured long prison terms for the slightest trespassing of the communistmoral code. After the collapse of the communist regime gay and lesbian groups started
to lobby for lifting the ban on homosexual behaviour, but their demands met with
fierce resistance from the public, the political class and the country’s religious
denominations. A 1993 opinion poll showed that four out of five Romanians believed
homosexual acts were never justified, and the complete eradication of homosexuality
served a legitimate national interest. Eight years later another poll found that 86% ofRomanians would not want a gay or lesbian person as their neighbour.
3
The denominations first voiced their position on homosexuality in 1995, when the
Constitutional Court asked them to comment on Article 200. That year the court of
the Transylvanian town of Sibiu asked the Constitutional Court to rule on the article’s
constitutionality and state whether behaviour condemned by the Christian churches
should be prosecuted for endangering the ‘normal evolution of social relationships’.
To develop a response, the Court asked legislators, recognised religious denomina-tions, the academic community, local administrative bodies and civil society
representatives to discuss the ban on homosexuality. Summarising these responses
in its final ruling, Decision no. 81 of 15 July 1995, the Constitutional Court listed thedenominations that answered its request, naming the Orthodox, Greek Catholic andOld Calendar churches, alongside representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Adventist292 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

and Pentecostal communities. The Court remarked that all denominations without
exception condemned homosexuality and upheld the ban, the Senate rejected chargesthat Article 200 ran counter to the 1991 Romanian Constitution and the European
Human Rights Convention, while the academic community asked for more time to
study the issue. Only the civil society groups asked for the ban to be scrapped. In itsruling the Court noted that Article 200, which banned any kind of homosexual
behaviour, ran counter to important pieces of international legislation the country had
adopted during the post-communist period. To reconcile the Romanian CriminalCode with European legislation, the Court ruled that Article 200 was unconstitutional‘to the extent that it refers to consensual sexual relations between adults of the samesex, not taking place in public and not producing public scandal’. The Court’s boldmove paved the way for decriminalising homosexuality.
4
Under international pressure, the Social Democrat government of Premier Nicolae
Vacaroiu initiated procedures to modify the code in accordance with European
standards, but only after years of bitter arguments did changes partially liberalising
homosexual activities come into effect by Law no. 140 of 14 November 1996. Under
the new version of Article 200 homosexual activities were punishable with prison termsif they were carried out in public or if they caused public scandal. The article punished
those ‘inciting or encouraging a person to the practice of sexual relations between
persons of the same sex’, as well as ‘propaganda or association or any other act ofproselytism committed with the same purpose’. While apparently more lenient than its
predecessor, the new formulation did not specify what exactly constituted a public
scandal and where the fine line between private and public behaviour should fall. Some
politicians believed that any homosexual act was potentially public because ‘what is
damaging and immoral on the streets cannot be permissible and moral in intimacy’,
while others justified their hesitation to decriminalise homosexuality fully by pointingto opinion polls showing that Romanians regarded homosexual relations as
abnormal.
5
It took four more years to erase Article 200 from the Criminal Code. In May 1998
the Christian Democrat government of Premier Radu Vasile adopted amendments to
the Code decriminalising homosexual behaviour, while punishing coerced sexual
relations and relations with children younger than 14 years of age with jail sentences of
up to seven years. Addressing journalists, then Minister of Justice and Liberal leader
Vasile Stoica stressed that the changes were meant not to change the de facto situation,
since apparently ‘homosexuality ceased to be prosecuted in 1996’, but the de jure
position of homosexuality and to eliminate the Council of Europe’s ‘suspicions’
toward Romania. To shift the blame away from itself and pre-empt criticism comingfrom conservative segments of Romanian society, the government pointed out that
Article 200 had been scrapped as part of a larger drive to harmonise Romanian and
European Union legislation which included lifting jail sanctions for calumny and
decriminalising the insult of public authorities.
6While the senators supported the
changes the government proposed, the deputies were much less willing to jeopardise
their popular support and risk losing the impending general election of late 2000 byvoting for an unpopular bill. At the end of a fierce debate in which only DemocraticParty representative George Stancov dared to praise the amendments, the rulingChristian Democrat and the opposition Social Democrat and Greater Romania PartyRELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 293

deputies joined hands to reject the changes. One deputy who voted against the
proposal defended his position stating, ‘We want to enter Europe, not Sodom andGomorrah’.
Premier Vasile’s proposed changes again took centre stage after Romania started
accession talks with the European Union in March 2000, at a time when addressingthe problem of discrimination against minority groups became a formal commitment
for Romania to enter Europe. On 28 June that year deputies voted to decriminalise
homosexuality, in accordance with resolution 1123 of the Council of Europe, whichdeemed the Romanian Article 200 discriminatory. Once the lower legislative chamberapproved them, the changes were sent to the upper chamber for examination. Toquash the amendments, the Orthodox church’s Holy Synod met ahead of the debate inthe Senate, with spokesman Archbishop Nifon Ploiesteanu announcing that the Synodhad decided to ask Christian Democrat President Emil Constantinescu not to sign thechanges into law, should the Senate also vote for decriminalising homosexuality. Local
gay activists set up a lobby in the Parliament and petitioned Patriarch Teoctist in a bid
to temper the Orthodox clerics’ wrath.
7Ultimately, the international factor decided
the fate of Article 200. When it became clear that the Romanian political class wasready to postpone eliminating Article 200 in the electoral year 2000, the Council of
Europe threatened on 9 September 2000 to restart monitoring Romania’s human
rights record. Hours before the deadline the Romanian Parliament passed the
amendments.
Though the law marks a groundbreaking step for the rights of homosexuals in
Romania, it does not necessarily broach the problem of discrimination. The changes
still regard as illegal ‘abnormal sexual practices, including oral and anal sex, ifperformed in public’. In the minds of legislators, these practices seem to be associated
exclusively with homosexuals. Article 152 of the Criminal Code defines the phrase ‘inpublic’ as applying to situations when the act is committed in public; in a place that by
its nature or destination is always accessible to the public, even though no person is
there when the act occurs; in any other place accessible to the public, if two or more
persons are present; in any place not accessible to the public, if there is the intention
for the act to be heard or seen; in a multi-person reunion, except for family reunions;
and by any means making the persons involved realise the act might be brought topublic knowledge. This last provision is the most controversial, as it could render thechanges to Article 200 meaningless, since any homosexual act might be defined as ‘in
public’ purely because there is a possibility for it to be made public. Since 2000 the
interpretation of the law has been in the hands of the courts, which were reluctant toimpose jail sentences for homosexual behaviour. As a result, there have been no
reported cases of gays and lesbians being jailed for their sexual activity.
8
A joint Human Rights Watch and International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights
Commission report published in late 1998 singled out the Orthodox church as one of
the most formidable opponents of decriminalising homosexuality. True, the over-
whelming majority of Romanian religious denominations came out in favour of theban, but the Orthodox church was far more vocal than others. Orthodox canon lawcondemns homosexuality in the harshest terms, a view consonant with the position ofthe overwhelming majority of Romanian Orthodox theologians and married clergy.
9
In his influential Jurnalul Fericirii the respected monk Nicolae Steinhardt articulated294 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

his position against homosexuality by declaring it a disease in need of urgent
treatment. Commenting on the US practice of building separate churches forhomosexuals, Steinhardt provided two arguments against such segregation and
indirectly against homosexuality. ‘First’, he wrote, ‘Christ accepts all those coming to
Him, even the homosexuals, not for them to justify and confirm their sin but to give itup. Christ neither rejected whores and thieves nor blessed their position. It is wrong to
believe that homosexuals are entitled to the special treatment of being accepted before
cleansing themselves of sin. The Lord, merciful and good, listens to each prayer notcalling for strengthening the sin’. Steinhardt continued that ‘second, Christianity has auniversal vocation and is hostile to segregation. Christ is not calling us to build achurch for whites and another for blacks, a church for women and another for men, achurch for the rich and another for the poor, a church for homosexuals and anotherfor heterosexuals, a church for intellectuals and another for the illiterate’. ForSteinhardt, it would be ‘unchristian and ridiculous’ to build churches for victims of
diseases like ‘heart stroke, hepatitis, kidney stones. . . it is enough that we pray to God
in different languages and we divide ourselves into nationalities and religions’.
10
Various Orthodox leaders took a stand against homosexuality and used their
political clout to block amendments to Article 200. Patriarch Teoctist repeatedly cameout against ‘the acceptance of the degradingly abnormal and unnatural lifestyle as
normal and legal’, and tried to influence the outcome of the parliamentary vote on
lifting the ban. Days before deputies were to vote on decriminalising homosexuality,the Patriarch wrote to Parliament voicing opposition to striking down Article 200,
which he praised for banning ‘unnatural behaviour’. Claiming to represent Romanian
Christian moral and spiritual consciousness, Teoctist argued that Romanians alwaysrespected the traditional family and were able to distinguish ‘sin from virtue, natural
from unnatural, normal from abnormal, right from wrong’. While further stating that‘the church condemns sinful love in order to protect sacred love, rejects the tyranny of
egotistic passions unable to bear fruit to protect the freedom to live in virtue, rejects
the unnatural to protect the dignity of the human being’, the Patriarch reminded
legislators that ‘the church works for the salvation of all, even the spiritually and
physically sick’, and ‘appeals to its believers in the Parliament to defend human
dignity, the moral health of the people, the stability of the family and the spiritual
rebirth of Romanian society’. Torn between the desire to enjoy the benefits ofEuropean Union membership and the harsh criticism coming from the powerful and
insistent Orthodox church, the deputies chose to support the changes to Article 200,
with 180 votes for, 14 against and 40 abstentions.
A number of Christian organisations helped sustain the momentum for an anti-
homosexuality crusade within the church’s higher echelons. After denouncing
homosexuality as ‘propaganda for human degenerates’, the outspoken Association
of Christian Orthodox Students persuaded Teoctist to ask legislators to maintain the
ban on homosexuality, and mounted a tireless intimidation campaign against those
members of the Parliament willing to decriminalise such behaviour, accusing them ofatheism and immorality.
11In its fight the church used state television to criticise the
proposed changes to Article 200 vehemently. In a number of religious programmesOrthodox theologians, priests and monks extolled the virtue of the traditional positionvis-a`-vis sexual relations and rejected any ‘Westernisation’ of Romanian mores. TheRELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 295

Synod secretary Teofan Sinaitul attacked liberalisation as fostering confusion between
‘normal and abnormal, good and evil’, and deplored the fact that ‘homosexualpractices received the status of normal behaviour’. He further declared that Christian
churches condemned the sin, not the sinner, contended that the state should not allow
homosexuals to voice their position publicly in journals and newspapers, clubs, massmedia or street demonstrations, and argued that renunciation of Article 200 was the
first step toward ‘recognising same-sex marriages and the right of homosexual couples
to adopt children and to enjoy the privileges of the normal family’.
12Bishop Vicentiu
Ploiesteanu added that ‘we need healthy young people in mind and body, like any
civilised country, and we must try to protect them from contamination by such serioussinners’.
13Parish priest Sandu Medinti deplored liberalisation as ‘the devil’s work’,
signaling the country’s renunciation of its century-old Christian ethics, and Bishop of
Alba Iulia Andrei Andreicut accused politicians of ‘encouraging societal aberra-
tions’.14The most outspoken Orthodox leader was Archbishop of Vad, Feleac and
Cluj Bartolomeu Anania, who remarked that ‘Europe asks us to accept sex,
homosexuality, vices, drugs, abortions and genetic engineering, including cloning’,
and attacked the ‘impoverished Europe . . . built exclusively on politics and economics,lacking any trace of spirituality, culture or religion’ Romania was to enter.
15
Even after the parliament had eliminated Article 200 the Orthodox church tried to
pressure it to reverse its decision. In September 2000, in a last attempt to intimidate the
government and parliament, the church threatened to call for a national referendum,
since by decriminalising homosexuality ‘the political class placed itself in opposition to
the overwhelming majority of the electorate, a fact ultimately amounting to a coup
against our democracy’. The push for the referendum came from Archbishop Anania,
who has led the Metropolitanate of Transylvania since Metropolitan AntoniePlamadeala fell sick in the mid-1990s. The call for a referendum drew support from
neither the government nor the opposition. Before the Senate discussed the
amendments decriminalising homosexuality again the Liberal Party, to which Ministerof Justice Stoica belonged, declared its opposition to the referendum, and Social
Democrat representatives said that ‘even if the Orthodox church is against [the
changes], what one does under one’s blanket is one’s business’.
16More importantly,
the referendum call received no response from the Presidency. Under Article 90 of the
1991 Constitution only the Romanian President can call a referendum on matters of
national importance, but decriminalising homosexuality was dismissed as a matter oflittle importance for the country. The timing was not the best either. Romanians were
preoccupied with the general election of late 2000, the mounting corruption and falling
living standards, and could hardly turn their attention to other issues.
As a response to the referendum call, human rights activist Gabriel Andreescu
accused the Orthodox church of endangering the country’s national interest by not
allowing the legislators to comply with the Council of Europe requirements. ‘Bypressuring the Senate’, Andreescu declared, ‘the church interferes with the activity of
the Romanian state. In fact, we are not talking about legalising homosexuality but
about eliminating discrimination. It refers to a person’s right to private life, nothingelse. At stake is the very future of Romanian society, which [by eliminating the ban]adheres to modern, democratic values needed for entry into the European Union. Byits position, the Orthodox church opposes Romania’s global interests’. Not a296 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

homosexual himself, but a non-practising Orthodox, Andreescu asked for the ties of
Holy Synod members to the communist-era secret political police, the Securitate, to bedisclosed publicly. The activist, who insisted that he had concrete proof of certain
Synod members’ involvement with the Securitate, was thus trying to demonstrate that
the moral principles the church invoked in its fight against homosexuals were nothingbut a fac ¸ade covering long-term immoral collaboration with the self-avowed atheistic
communist authorities. In turn, the Patriarchate condemned Andreescu’s position as
‘an inadmissible act of blackmail and intimidation of the church leadership for its firmposition against repealing Article 200’.
17Days later the Synod met to discuss
homosexuality and again urged politicians not to amend Article 200. ‘Everybodyshould know that homosexuality is a sin against religious, family and social values,
which are at the core of our church’, Archbishop of Dunarea de Jos Casian said afterthe meeting, adding: ‘I do not believe that European Union integration hinges on the[homosexuality] issue’. Only Metropolitan of Banat Nicolae Corneanu had a different
attitude. In 1998 he declared: ‘I cannot understand the condemnation of homosexuals
. . . with the help of the Criminal Code. I see the need to explain to the faithful whyhomosexuality cannot be accepted or why it is in fact a disease. But this physical and
spiritual disease cannot be treated with imprisonment’.
18
In its fight against homosexuality the church managed to win the support of some
political formations. The extremist Party of Romanian National Unity and the
nationalist Greater Romania Party, which look upon Orthodoxy and moral
cleanliness as quintessential for ‘Romanianism’, proclaimed that Article 200 was too
lenient and toleration of homosexuality affected national pride. The Greater Romania
Party was among the very few to oppose decriminalisation of homosexuality until the
very end, with its representative Dumitru Balaet claiming that the annulment ofArticle 200 would mean that ‘homosexuals will wander on the streets, not only in the
woods’.
19The National Christian Democrat and Peasant Party felt compelled to
justify its Christian Democratic commitment by adopting a strictly traditional view on
the subject. Its leader, respected politician and Greek Catholic believer Corneliu
Coposu, categorically opposed ‘sexual aberrations’, arguing that the party’s Christian
moral foundation led it ‘to combat every deviation from the law of nature and from
the moral principles of a future balanced society’. He further claimed it to be
imperative for ‘liberty of some to be blocked by the liberty of others when thecollective sentiment of a group or a tradition is injured by some initiative pretending to
be ‘progressive’ and modern’.
20Christian Democrat deputy Emil Popescu took this
view to an extreme when he suggested that ‘incest is preferable to homosexuality sinceat least the former preserved the chance of procreation’.
21
The Orthodox church has continued to voice opposition against granting
homosexuals some of the same rights as heterosexuals. Speaking in late 2001 at a
congress on the family organised by the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches,
Patriarch Teoctist protested against child adoption by homosexual couples, on the
grounds that ‘without the love and affection only the [traditional] family can provide,the child would become a being lacking goodness, mercy, faith and love and incapable
of distinguishing right from wrong’.
22Note, however, that the Orthodox church was
not the only denomination to oppose legalisation of homosexual behaviour. In 2000Vlasie Mogirzan, Metropolitan of the Old Calendar Orthodox church, which followsRELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 297

the Russian-style Julian calendar and claims the allegiance of some 40,000 Romanians,
declared that ‘as an Orthodox people, we cannot agree with decriminalisinghomosexuality’.
23Many members of the National Christian Democrat Peasant Party,
which mounted the fiercest parliamentary opposition to legalising homosexual
behaviour, were devout Greek Catholics. Because of this campaign Romania was
among the last Eastern European countries to decriminalise homosexuality. While
recognising that the new legislative framework was an important step forward because
‘finally the state is out of [people’s] bed’, Adrian Coman, director of the only gay rightsgroup recognised in the country, admitted that ‘the fact that the law was repealed doesnot necessarily show that people in this country became more tolerant towards gaysand lesbians in Romania’.
24Attitudes against homosexual behaviour remain
intransigent, and homosexuals continue to be derided.
Abortion, contraception and family planning
For many Romanian observers the reason for the churches’ opposition to
decriminalising homosexuality was the fact that public sentiment favouring the
liberalisation of abortion after more than two decades of communist pro-natal policies
had rendered abortion a highly sensitive issue. Abortion was prohibited in October1966 by the unpopular Decree no. 770 in order to achieve demographic targets andfulfil Ceausescu’s megalomaniac ambition of ruling over a populous nation. The
prohibition of abortion resulted in an almost doubled birthrate in 1969 (the largest
generation ever recorded in Romania), but the gains were not sustained in the long
run, with most of them being lost by the late 1980s. Lack of alternative family
planning programmes, condoms and pills, sharply deteriorating living conditions, andthe state’s unwillingness to recognise the existence of family and medical problems
(abandon, abuse, physical disability, mental afflictions) forced Romanian women to
undergo illegal abortions, even at the risk of losing their lives, giving birth tomalformed children or going to jail if the interrupted pregnancy was discovered.
25
The post-communist leaders abrogated the anti-abortion decree days after the
December 1989 uprising, and the sudden liberalisation gave Romania the highest
abortion rate in Europe. Estimates vary widely, from over 1.2 million abortions
conducted yearly in a population of around 23 million to half that rate.26According to
official figures, there were 1,009 abortions for 1,000 live births in 2003, compared with3,100 abortions for 1,000 live births in 1990 – 91.
27Pro-life Romanian doctors
contended that 70% of all conjugal and extramarital conceptions were terminatedbefore term, often in the third trimester, while a further 20% of women became sterile
owing to complications. By comparison, in Britain outside London only 19% of
conceptions were ended before term. On average, Romanian women have five
abortions during their sexually active years. Legalisation of abortion did not curb
illegal abortion, which continues to be the method of choice for teenagers and womenfrom disadvantaged, large families, who cannot afford the cost of abortion, the pill or
condoms. The female mortality rate due to botched terminations is up to six times
higher than in Central Europe, though it might well be below communist-era rates.
28
As a result, those worried for the ‘endangered nation’ and the dramatic loss in
population launched a massive pro-life campaign in which religious denominations298 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

joined forces, with the Orthodox and the Greek Catholic representatives being the
most vocal. Because abortion became legal through a decree of the provisionalrevolutionary government, many politicians and feminist groups felt the need for a law
to recognise women’s right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. A pro-abortion
legislative proposal introduced in the parliament during the 1992 – 96 legislaturegarnered the support of the Senate, but the Chamber of Deputies quashed it. In
January 1994, when the proposal moved from the upper chamber to the lower one, on
behalf of the Orthodox church Christian Democrat senator Ioan Alexandrucondemned the law on abortion as ‘a disaster for our people, which ranks first inEurope in the killing of babies’. During the same session Alexandru complained thatlegislators had legalised abortion too soon, since Romania’s population was rapidlydecreasing in number, but voiced his hope ‘to stop the bill in the Chamber of Deputiesand discuss the issue again’. A well-known poet who defied the communist authoritiesby teaching the Bible in an attic at the University of Bucharest in the 1980s, Alexandru
was known for his close ties to the Orthodox Patriarchate, whose views he championed
in the Parliament.
29Days later the Orthodox leaders drafted an open letter urging the
state to take legal action to curb the explosive increase in abortions.30
The only legislative initiative banning abortion was introduced by the Christian
Democrat senator and Greek Catholic priest Ioan Moisin in December 1997 (PL646). According to parliamentary procedure, the Senate asked two permanent
committees to discuss the proposal before the full chamber voted on it. In March
1998 the committee on human rights announced that it rejected the proposal, while
the committee on health care decided to support it. The two opposing resolutions
reflected the two major positions with regard to abortion. On one hand,Romanians recognised the inadequacy of the existing legal framework, under
which, unless complemented by programmes in social work and sexual education,abortion risked raising more medical and social problems than it solved, especially
in a country facing deep economic recession. On the other hand, the emotivevocabulary of pro-life activists — who spoke of mass murders of foetuses and ‘the
maiming of Romanian womanhood’
31— brought forth arguments echoing the
draconian communist anti-abortion policies, whose revival many Romanian women
strongly opposed. The ruling Christian Democrats refused to support Moisin’s
proposal for fear of alienating the female electorate. After lingering in the Senate
for two years without real chances of adoption, the proposal was abandoned at theend of the 1996 – 2000 legislature.
After 2000 the Social Democrat government of Premier Adrian Nastase refused to
reintroduce the proposal, contending that no additional law should reconfirm the pro-abortion decree, but did support a new law that could deny some social categories
access to the medical procedure in public hospitals. Following legislation introduced in
June 2003 women must undergo a psychological check-up before having an abortion.Obstetricians may not perform abortions without notes from psychologists attesting to
the mental fitness of the pregnant woman. According to doctors in the southeastern
county of Constanta, the psychological check-up is meant to convince women to carrythe pregnancy to term. Women interviewed by local journalists reported that thepsychologist could do nothing to change their mind, and that the check-up wasanother method of raising money from a cash-strapped population.
32RELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 299

Given the sensitivity of the issue, the Orthodox church has avoided formulating an
official position toward abortion and contraception. Unofficial as it is, the church’sposition can be gauged from a number of statements in which various clergymen have
condemned both practices, and from a pamphlet distributed by the Orthodox
leadership to Orthodox priests in 1997.
33Prepared by Father Ilie Moldovan, a moral
theology professor at the Sibiu Faculty of Theology and the Orthodox church’s
leading authority on the subject, the pamphlet virulently condemned abortion. For
Moldovan, the main goal of both marriage and sexual intercourse is procreation; amarriage whose main goal is eluded is ‘nothing but a legal form of prostitution’, andall family planning methods dissociating sexuality from procreation are to be highlycondemned. The future child is a person immediately after the egg and the sperm cometogether, thus any attempt to destroy the impregnated egg imperils ‘a total human,body and soul’, and runs counter to the divine commandment not to kill. Moldovanalso contended that abortion remained unjustified and morally sinful even when the
pregnancy endangered the mother’s life or health. He went as far as to reject the Ogino
calendar-based planning, the only contraception method accepted by the Roman
Catholic Church, and that church’s argument that ‘for just reasons, spouses may wishto space the births of their children’ and that ‘the use of infertile periods is in
conformity with the objective criteria of morality’.
34Moldovan’s stance relied as much
on religious as on ethno-national considerations. For him, abortion was a threat to the
very survival of the Romanian nation, amounting to genocide. The author advised his
fellow Orthodox priests to refuse to give communion to the woman involved in such
an enterprise for seven years, and if the woman died as a result of abortion to refuse to
bury her.
Moldovan’s recommendation for a seven-year ban appeared to be a lenient version
of the punishment prescribed by the Orthodox canon law. Following canon 91 of the
Council in Trullo (Quinisext, 692 C.E.), ‘those who give drugs for procuring abortion
and those who receive poisons to kill the foetus are subject to the penalty for murder’,while following canon 21 of the Council in Ancyra (314 C.E.) ‘concerning women who
commit fornication, and destroy that which they have conceived, or who are employed
in making drugs for abortion, a former decree excluded them [from receiving
communion] until the hour of death, and to this some have assented. Nevertheless,
being desirous to use somewhat greater lenity, we have ordained that they fulfil tenyears [of penance], according to the prescribed degrees’.
35While few of the married
Orthodox priests observe the traditional canons, the charismatic, highly popular andcelibate monks of Romanian monasteries generally hand down harsher punishment
for abortion.
More recently Social Democrat senator and Orthodox priest Ioan Aurel Rus
pointed out that not only the woman but also her partner is guilty for abortion,
since ‘women cannot conceive with trees’.
36Not all the Orthodox leaders agree
with such radical views. Father Justin Marchis, one of the church’s pro-reformist
voices who favours the Ogino contraceptive method, attacked the pamphlet ontheological grounds, criticised Moldovan for arguing that abortion was the gravestsin, a contention not sustained by Orthodox doctrine, and deplored thewidespread distribution that only Moldovan’s text received.
37Other priests have
maintained that the Orthodox church’s traditional non-interference in spouses’300 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

intimate relations means that the calendar is tacitly accepted as a contraceptive
method, with all other methods being strongly rejected.38Metropolitan Corneanu
was among the few leaders who made clear their opposition to any criminalisation
of homosexuality and abortion, and publicly stated that women, not some
institution, had the right to decide whether to stall a pregnancy. In 1998Corneanu stated that he could not understand the ‘terrible anti-abortion
campaign. Of course, I cannot accept murder, but this is such an intimate
problem of the woman that to support condemnation or even punishment is notnormal’, and added that ‘it is the right of the prospective mother to decide,together with her husband, if she is married’.
39
On 25 September 2001 the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches joined forces to
organise a congress on ‘Family and Life at the Beginning of a New Christian
Millennium’ meant to find ways to protect the family, ‘the nucleus of society’. The
congress provided the two churches with a platform for denouncing abortion and
homosexuality. In his speech special guest and head of the Pontifical Family Council
Alfonso Lopez Cardinal Trujillo called for a ban on abortions and for upholdingtraditional family values in marriages between a man and a woman, asked for the
eradication of ‘recently adopted alternative forms of family’ available for homo-
sexuals, and condemned child adoption by homosexual couples as a social danger.Speaking on abortion, Cardinal Trujillo contended that current views on the issueoveremphasised the woman’s right to dispose of her body and overlooked the right to
life of the unborn child, a person since conception. Patriarch Teoctist echoed these
views, condemned ‘moral deviations weakening the Creation’, and declared that the
huge number of abortions represented a ‘real national tragedy’ with disastrous
consequences for the Romanian nation.
40
After the congress the Orthodox church realised the need to draft an informed
Orthodox response to recent scientific advances, and at the proposal of ArchbishopAnania set up the Commission on Bio-Ethics to study issues such as abortion,
contraceptives, eugenics, euthanasia, in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood,
transplant of human and animal organs and genetic engineering. While not all
these procedures were available at the time in Romania, the church felt it could
benefit from a head start. The commission had chapters in the university centres ofCluj, Bucharest, Iasi, Timisoara and Craiova, each including five theologians, fivescientists, a sociologist and a law graduate, in an effort to bridge the gap between
the view of the church and the position of the scientists and legal experts. In a
televised interview granted in November 2001, when the commission first met at thepatriarchal palace, Anania commented that ‘several scientific areas, including
genetic engineering, raise important moral questions. We are often asked about the
position of the church, but for now we cannot answer, because the church is
unfamiliar with the issues’. According to commission member Gheorghe Scripcaru
of the Iasi Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, ‘[the commission members] seek toconnect science and religion so that new [scientific] discoveries do not contradictlife and spirituality’.
41The first draft the commission submitted to the Holy Synod
came with considerable delay and dealt with a topic (organ transplant) which theOrthodox church did not oppose. The commission is yet to make pronouncementson the controversial issue of abortion.RELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 301

The legalisation of prostitution
Democracy has brought Romania not only freedom but also a booming sex industry
involving male and female prostitutes from all age groups and catering to a diverse
local and foreign clientele. The local mass media have repeatedly reported on the
growing number of Bucharest apartments rented by the hour or the day to high-end
prostitutes and their pimps, and the scores of young women offering their services
during the night along the poorly lit roads of Romania. According to local journalists,
there is a steady clientele of foreign citizens visiting the Bucharest sex market on ayearly basis, often luring unsuspicious Romanian teenagers and young women
dreaming of a good job in Western countries into rings of illegal prostitution active
throughout Europe, from Zagreb and Tirana to Paris and Rome. The most desperatecases involve large families from the poor rural areas of Moldova that sell their sons
and daughters into sexual bondage for as little as a television set or the equivalent of a
monthly wage.
The social and medical problems associated with the unprecedented expansion of
the sex industry convinced some politicians and a segment of the Romanian electoratethat the country would be better off legalising prostitution. For proponents of thisview, legalisation would control the industry’s supply side, limit the spreading of
sexually transmitted diseases by monitoring sex workers’ health, protect sex workers
from abuse by their employers and clients, reduce the number of cases of sex workersbeing denied the right to opt out of the industry, and bring revenue to the national
budget through tax collection. Rather surprisingly, this position was championed in
the parliament by a woman, Democrat Party deputy Mariana Valeria Stoica, head of
the Chamber of Deputies European integration commission, who announced in
January 1998 that the chamber was studying the possibility of legalising prostitutionto protect both women and men engaged in prostitution, and of recognising
prostitution as a profession. Stoica revealed similarities between the new post-
communist law and its pre-communist predecessor, both giving sex workers a socialstatus and access to a pension plan in an effort to address the situation of prostitutes
reduced to penniless ‘human wrecks’ after years of being treated as consumption
objects by their clients and pimps.
42
Public reaction to Stoica’s declaration was mixed. Respected journalist Cornel
Nistorescu of the Bucharest-based Evenimentul Zilei daily lamented the fact that the
Romanian ‘national bashfulness is a curtain behind which the sex industry flourishes,our periphery becomes a shambles, and our health decays. For fear of the church and
public scandal, Romania avoids discussing sex. [The political class] uses euphemisms
to tackle the issue covertly, for fear of blushing or losing electoral votes. Sexual
education made no progress since the shameful silence the socialists kept on the
subject. . .. Until now, only its legalisation brought prostitution under a sort of legal,financial and medical control’. He warned his readers that Romanians ‘might avoid
the question [of legalising prostitution] for years, while meanwhile Romanian towns
become illegal markets for East European sex. Bucharest’s downtown and touristdistricts are places of seedy deals, paying no taxes, attracting minors and tacitlycontaminating. Who benefits? Only the pimps and the police officers protecting them.This is a national farce, a cheap operetta masking a dangerous misery’, and he added302 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

that in the 1996 – 2000 legislature Stoica’s attempts to launch debates in the parliament
on this delicate subject ‘were met by a wall of silence, discreet smiles, and the protestsof her elderly [colleagues]’.
43
Indeed, Stoica’s wish for a draft law on prostitution to reach the house before the
end of her mandate remained unfulfilled. It was only in mid-2003 that eight Social
Democrat Party, Greater Romania Party, Humanist Party and Democratic Alliance of
Magyars in Romania senators, including two women, introduced a draft bill on
prostitution (PL 259). Aimed at eliminating sexually transmitted diseases, the billdefined prostitution as paid sexual activity and gave sexual workers access to pensionand health care plans (Articles 2 – 3). Prostitutes are independent adult workers ingood health, offering services either at their residence or in specially designated places,and registered with the mayor’s and the revenue offices (Articles 4 – 5). Set up bypersons at least 35 years old, of honourable standing and without a criminal record,sex establishments must be officially registered on the basis of the identity card,
ownership deed or rental agreement for the building where sex services are to be
offered, criminal record, local health department permit and an ‘honourability’
certificate issued by the local police (Articles 9 – 10). Sex establishments may not be setup near schools and universities, places of worship, public institutions, stadiums,
military units and foundations.
Sex workers have the rights to security, dignity and pension and health care plans,
and the rights to choose clients, refuse to render specific services, receive the promised
payment, opt out of prostitution and unilaterally cease contracts with sex establish-
ments, and the obligation to observe prearranged schedules, undergo periodic medical
check-ups, present their medical file to clients upon request, notify sex establishment
managers of health changes, and not divulge clients’ identity (Article 16). Establish-
ment managers set prices and collect fees, dismiss sex workers medically prohibitedfrom working, and reject clients. They must keep the establishment clean, offer clients
anonymity and security, not ask sexual workers to perform unwanted sexual acts or
unprotected sex, refuse under-age clients, post prices visibly, submit to financial audits,respect the security and rights of sex workers, and offer free condoms to clients and
free medical check-ups to their workers (Article 17). Prostitution of unauthorised
persons or medically unfit authorised individuals, and the filming of persons enteringsex establishments, are punishable with a jail sentence of up to two years. Recruitment
of minors, foreigners and poor people is punishable with jail for up to seven years.
Offering sex services in homes with minor children or unauthorised places ispunishable with jail for up to a year. Allowing minors access to sex establishments, not
submitting to medical check-ups, obliging workers to have unprotected sex and
maintaining a dirty establishment are misdemeanours punishable with fines between
10 million and 100 million lei (Article 23).
After being introduced in the Senate, the draft bill reached its permanent
committees. Out of respect for the beginning of the Advent season, ‘a period of
spiritual purification’, members of the committee on the equality of results for men
and women postponed debate on the bill. The draft was opposed by the SocialDemocrat Nastase government on the grounds that it ran counter to the new Criminaland Labour Codes and did not accord with the international convention on theprevention of human trafficking. In its response to the parliament the governmentRELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 303

rejected the proposal to set up sex establishments (brothels) but remarked that
freelance prostitution would conform to European Union standards.44During
debates, Greater Romania Party representative Radu Ciuceanu made the case against
legalising prostitution, dismissing the initiators’ claim that legalisation would control
sexually transmitted diseases, arguing that Western countries where prostitution waslegal registered rates higher than Romania’s, and rejecting the claim that regular
medical check-ups limited the spread of AIDS, since prostitutes continued to infect
their clients during the incubation period. For Ciuceanu, legalisation of prostitutionhad the potential to undermine family life and to fuel the sex trade, while being unableto prevent aggression against prostitutes.
45
Days before the parliamentary committee on the equality of results of men and
women was to discuss the bill, the Senate prayer group and committee on human
rights organised a debate on the legalisation of prostitution presided over by Social
Democrat senator and Orthodox priest Ioan Aurel Rus and special guest Alexandru
Plescan, a Bucharest Orthodox priest. Most senators supported the bill, and Rus
stated that ‘as a senator, I am for the bill, but as a priest, I am against it’. By contrast,Plescan denounced prostitution as a ‘calamity which must be eradicated’, condemned
women who sold their bodies for money, and urged church and state to curb
prostitution. He even argued that the introduction of sexual education in schools ledto an increase in prostitution, but the senators dismissed this view.
46
Plescan simply presented the view of the Orthodox church, which mounted
considerable opposition to legalising prostitution. The church’s view on the subject
was presented in a roundtable moderated by the respected religious painter Sorin
Dumitrescu, known for his close ties to the Group for Social Dialogue, a small but
vocal civil society association including Romania’s pre-eminent intellectuals.Dumitrescu is head of the Anastasia press, which publishes Orthodox theologyworks. The roundtable included Father Ilie Moldovan alongside Orthodox clergy
affiliated with the Centre for Applied Theological Studies of Craiova. Moldovan
resumed the theological arguments against legalising prostitution, maintaining thatprostitution ran counter to the divine order to procreate, two of Moses’ divine
commandments (‘Thou shall not commit adultery’ and ‘Thou shall not covet thy
neighbour’s wife’) and Paul’s warning that ‘neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor
adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with men, nor thieves, nor
the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortionists shall inherit thekingdom of God’.
47For Moldovan, legalising prostitution — like abortion and
homosexuality — endangered not only the individual but also the community andthe nation’s ‘vital energies’. Doru Costache added that prostitution was a form of
‘spiritual suicide’ annulling the difference between the human being and the animal,
while Father Pavel Chirila, co-author of the pamphlet Fata nevazuta a prostitutiei
(The Unseen Face of Prostitution), dismissed the argument that the legalisation of
prostitution would help control sexually transmitted diseases. The roundtableconcluded with Dumitrescu announcing that the ad hoc Initiative Group for the
Protection of the Family had sent members of the parliament a comprehensive
anti-prostitution document.
48
As Nistorescu wrote in his editorial, ‘there is only one obstacle to legalising
prostitution: the church’, whose resistance to change should be dismissed by304 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

legislators, since the benefits of legalising prostitution far exceeded the drawbacks.
‘The church does not make the laws of a country’, Nistorescu wrote, ‘but guides itspiritually. The legalisation of prostitution is the job of the parliament. . . This issue
might forever divide the parliament and the Romanian Orthodox Church, but would
not mean the end of the world’.
49The political class ultimately did not heed the pro-
legalisation arguments. In November 2003 Patriarch Teoctist condemned the bill in a
letter to the parliament which admonished legislators for discussing the possibility of
legalising prostitution, denounced the bill’s anti-Christian and inhumane character of‘transforming persons into objects of pleasure’, insisted that criminality rose incountries that legalised prostitution, and contended that the women ‘caught in thedrama of the brothels [were] irremediably affected psychologically and physically’. Thechurch called on parliament members to remember that they were representatives ofan electorate that overwhelmingly opposed the legalisation of prostitution.
50On 17
February 2004 the Social Democrat representative Minodora Cliveti proposed the
legalisation of prostitution but the Chamber of Deputies judicial committee rejected
the proposal. The committee agreed on jail sentences of up to one year for
prostitution, which it defined as the activity of those persons who derive most of theirincome from selling sexual services.
51
Besides mounting pressure on legislators to stall the adoption of the draft bill, the
Orthodox church initiated a number of active and pro-active programmes against
prostitution. In 2000, for example, it launched anti-prostitution campaigns in
Bucharest high schools at the prompting of Lucretia Vasilescu, a Bucharest Faculty
of Orthodox Theology professor of social work. The campaign, a joint programme
developed by the Police General Inspectorate and the Social Assistance Bureau of the
Patriarchate, aimed to explain to high school students the danger of advertisementspromising high-paying jobs in other countries but in fact covering the activities of
international prostitution rings. It was announced that the ambassadors of the
countries where most Romanian women ended up as prostitutes were to be invited toseminars, alongside priests, sociologists, police officers and victims of prostitution
rings to address the students directly.
52Far more publicity was gained by the Holy
Synod decision of April 2003 to suspend ten priests who were filmed blessing brothels,
sex shops and a weapons store. The Prima TV station filmed the priests undercover
performing the blessing in exchange for money and goods. It is traditional for
Orthodox priests to bless homes, offices, cars and gardens to ward off the devil, butpriests are forbidden to bless places deemed unholy, such as brothels and abortion
clinics.
53
Sexuality within the Orthodox Church
The previous discussion referred to the churches’ involvement in defining acceptable
sexual behaviour for Romanian society in general through new legislation and socialprogrammes. While the clergy, together with the rest of society, falls under the
jurisdiction of this legislative framework, the debate on sexuality included additional
pronouncements and positions affecting bishops, priests and monks. Sexuality withinthe church, involving celibate or married clergy, brought additional issues to the fore.These are the subject of this section.RELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 305

To date, religious denominations in Romania were spared the allegations of sexual
harassment levelled against priests in Western Europe and North America (forexample, the Boston Roman Catholic diocese) by altar boys who spent some time in
the company of their spiritual mentors, celibate Roman Catholic priests. As a minority
church closely monitored both by the state and the majority Orthodox church, theRoman Catholic Church in Romania has paid special attention to its clergy, who so
far have never been publicly accused of sexual impropriety. The Orthodox and the
Greek Catholic churches accept married priests, whose main temptation seems to beadulterous liaisons, not homosexual relationships or paedophilia.
54The only case to
receive media attention involved the starets (superior) of the Cernica monastery,
situated on the outskirts of Bucharest, who stood accused by two male seminarystudents of sexual harassment.
55The monastery runs a pre-university theological
school enrolling dozens of teenage students. The accusations apparently had enough
validity for the Orthodox Monastic Consistory, a high prosecutorial church body, to
investigate the case, temporarily forbid the starets from celebrating mass, and seek
further punishment according to church law.
In doing so, the church leadership asked the Romanian police to stop investigating
thestarets , on the grounds that the case fell under the jurisdiction of the church rather
than the secular law. The jurisdiction over criminal cases involving clergy and their
close relatives has been a contested issue ever since the modern Romanian state wasformed in 1918, with both the church and the state claiming jurisdiction over as many
cases as possible. Since 1989 the Romanian state has tacitly agreed to allow the church
to hear and rule on misdemeanours committed by the clergy. Only special cases have
reached the secular courts after the approval of the Orthodox church leadership. Even
when the police and the secular courts have started investigating clergy and monks, an
Orthodox church concerned with its public image has successfully intervened to stopthe trials. Indeed, the number of cases the church forwarded to the state during the last
15 years has been negligible, prompting civil society representatives to denounce the
Orthodox church’s position of ‘a state within a state’ and other religious denom-inations to ask for the same privilege or demand that the Orthodox criminal
jurisdiction be curtailed to levels similar to theirs. Since the agreement between the
Orthodox church and the state is tacit and never formalised, it is hard to discern which
cases are to be settled only by the church and which are to be heard by secular courts.
For now, it appears that the church delegates full authority to the state in criminalcases involving members of the clergy (monks, nuns and priests), while preferring toexert its influence in most civil cases and traffic violations.
The scarcity of reported cases of sexual harassment and homosexual behaviour
among Orthodox clergy does not mean that these problems are non-existent. For a
long time the church has struggled to hide the homosexual behaviour of its monks,
which is rumoured to be widespread but the frequency of which cannot be estimatedowing to the veil of secrecy surrounding it. It is also true that accusations of sexual
harassment were sometimes used against priests who dared to criticise church leaders.
In 2003 Vasile Danion published Mangaiere si mustrare (Comforting and Admonish-
ing), a volume of personal interviews with Father Calistrat Chifan, priest at Barnova,a monastery set up in northern Moldova in 1991. The book’s most controversialsection was the ten-page chapter on ‘The Sins of the Priests’, in which Chifan306 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

commented on ‘the church’s spiritual and intellectual collapse’, its insensitive
bureaucracy, corrupt and ineffective leadership and venal priesthood. Summarisingcurrent church problems, Chifan said that it was easy to find ‘drunkard priests, priests
owning private shops, priests practising black magic, priests who did not tell believers
about the role of regular confession, communion, mass participation and abandoningsin, or Sunday mass’. He criticised the hierarchs’ leniency toward priests who too
frequently and easily broke the canon law and involved themselves in practices he
viewed as problematic and lacking in spiritual value. The reaction of church leadersand the volume’s reception in Orthodox circles speaks for itself. The book waspromptly withdrawn from the market on Metropolitan of Moldova Daniel Ciobotea’sorder, and Chifan was banned from hearing confession. The official reason for hispunishment was related not to his views on the church but to an incident in which fourseminary students accused him of sexual harassment, a charge contested by the localpress. To date, no religious or secular court has heard Chifan’s case.
56
The Orthodox church has faced an unprecedented rise in priest divorce and
separation rates. Church law bans Orthodox priests from seeking divorce but cannot
do anything about divorce initiated by the wife, in which case the husband may notremarry. A number of recent cases involved priests who married previously divorcedwomen or priests who remarried, defying canon law and Orthodox tradition.
According to members of the Synod who spoke to one of the authors of this article,
this old problem escalated after 1989 owing to increased acceptance of divorce and theclergy’s loss in prestige and material and social standing. At first the church turned a
blind eye, hoping that divorce, separation, remarrying and marrying unsuited partners
was nothing more than a short-term phenomenon, but recently hierarchs have singled
out cases to set an example in the hope of curbing and even reversing the trend. In
2001 a Transylvanian village priest who married a divorced woman lost his parish,while in 2003 a Constanta priest who married for the third time was defrocked.
57This
latter case provoked much anguish to the local community, which seemed ready to
forgive the priest, who argued that his first wife, with whom he was married before
being ordained, had died, the second had left him to emigrate to Germany, and for the
third marriage he had obtained the verbal approval of the late Archbishop of Tomis
Lucian. Archbishop Teodosie, Lucian’s successor, opined that ‘for a priest remarrying
is equal to polygamy. The priest cannot celebrate mass again unless he gives up hiswife and retires to a monastery as a celibate priest’. When Teodosie arrived in the
village to remove the accused priest the parishioners locked him in the church, and
only police intervention saved the day. Though some 150 parishioners held a silentprocession in his support, the priest was unable to retain his post. Many local
observers wondered why it took Teodosie four years after the priest’s third marriage to
defrock him and claimed that the decision to remove him was political.
The Romanian post-communist state has respected the right of religious
denominations to regulate the sexuality and marital status of their members. For
scholars interested in the interplay between religion and politics, the important issuehere is not so much whether the rules on sexual behaviour imposed by the church are
stricter than those the larger society adopts, but rather where the line dividing cases
settled by the church and cases settled by secular courts falls for each officiallyregistered religious denomination. For now, the line is determined by informalRELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 307

gentlemen’s agreements clearly favouring the larger Orthodox church. It is hoped that,
as Romanian democracy consolidates, the state will find it necessary to be moreevenhanded toward different religious groups and equalise the privileges it grants
them.
Conclusion
During the last 15 years sexuality has been a contested territory claimed as a private
space by civil society representatives and a largely public space by the state and
religious denominations. In the early stages of post-communism the state rolled backits encroachment on sexual life, mostly in an effort to demonstrate a definite break
with communist policies, by legalising abortion, importing contraceptives and turninga blind eye to prostitution and the booming sex industry. Soon afterwards, however,the religious denominations — and especially the Orthodox church — claimed the
territory lost by the state as their own and launched an active campaign to regulate
sexuality. To do this, the churches used the courses on religion introduced at the pre-university and university levels in an effort to shape public behaviour and attitudes, as
well as direct and indirect pressure on the political class in an effort to delay and even
block permissive legislation.
This analysis reported primarily on the position of the Romanian Orthodox
Church, the most vocal among the country’s religious denominations in defending
traditional views and opposing a new, more permissive understanding of sexuality.
Note that the distinction between these understandings lies in their chronology more
than in any qualitative superiority of the new versus the old. Apparently, the
Orthodox church’s prominent position resulted from a combination of factors.Whether a conscious decision or not, religious denominations concluded that the
Orthodox church, by sheer numbers, had the best chance of influencing the legislative
decision-making process to maintain the ban on homosexuality and prostitution,reverse the legalisation of abortion and restrict the availability of contraception. As
the Orthodox position on these matters has often been very conservative, churches
with more moderate views on the subject felt no need to intervene in the debate in any
forceful way, since by satisfying the Orthodox demands the Romanian state would
have implicitly fulfilled their demands too. On contraception, for example, the Roman
Catholic Church in Romania remained silent, although in other countries it made itsposition very clear. The silence seemingly stemmed from the radical Orthodox
position, which rejected even the Catholic-accepted Ogino method of controlling a
woman’s reproduction. If the Romanian state is to embrace the Orthodox positionand ban any kind of contraception, the Romanian Catholic church is unlikely to
object.
In the fight between church and state to regulate sexual practices much depends on
the position of society, for whose benefit both church and state have handed down
numerous prescriptions. In areas of sexuality like acceptance of homosexual behavioursociety apparently is not as traditional as the Orthodox church, but not permissiveenough to embrace readily the position advocated by the new legislation adopted atthe insistence of either the European Union or progressive local politicians. Withrespect to abortion and prostitution, however, Romanian society seems to be far more308 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN

permissive than both the church and the state. While more research is needed to
uncover the full extent of the relative position of church, state and society with respectto different facets of sexuality, as local civil society gains in strength and prominence
both church and state will have to consult it more often and listen to it more carefully
if searching for long-term behavioural and attitudinal change.
St Francis Xavier University
We would like to thank Caroline Ely for her comments on an earlier draft of this article. All errors of
interpretation are ours. Research for this article was generously funded by a Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada standard research grant.
1 Paul Goma, Culoarea curcubeului ‘77 (Chisinau, Moldova, Flux, 2003), pp. 172, 185.
2 Homosexuality and abortion were discussed in Lavinia Stan & Lucian Turcescu, ‘The Romanian
Orthodox Church and Post-Communist Democratisation’, Europe-Asia Studies, 52, 8, December
2000, pp. 1467 – 1488.
3 BBC Romanian Service, 20 December 2001.
4 The decision is available on the Constitutional Court website, www.ccr.ro.
5 Christian Democrat deputy Emil Popescu, quoted in Human Rights Watch and International Gay
and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Public Scandals: Sexual Orientation and Criminal Law in
Romania (New York, HRW and IGLHRC, 1998).
6Monitorul , 8 May 1998.
7 Reuters, 13 September 2000.8Central Europe Review , 18 September 2000.
9 Canons 7 and 62 of Basil of Caesarea, in Philip Schaff & Henry Wace (eds), The Seven Ecumenical
Councils (Peabody, Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), pp. 604 and 608.
10 Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul fericirii (The Journal of Happiness) (Cluj-Napoca, Dacia, 1991).
11 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, ‘The Ruler and the Patriarch: The Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church in
Transition’, East European Constitutional Review , 7, 2, Spring 1998, http://www.law.nyu.edu/eecr/
vol7num2.
12Monitorul , 14 May 1998.
13 BBC Romanian Service, 20 December 2001.
14Evenimentul Zilei , 15 May 1998.
15Evenimentul Zilei , 16 April 1998.
16Evenimentul Zilei , 4 September 2000.
17Evenimentul Zilei , 9 September 2000.
1822, 3 – 9 March 1998.
19Monitorul , 20 June 2000.
20 Quoted in Public Scandals , chapter 4.1.
21Evenimentul Zilei , 15 May 1998.
22Cotidianul , 26 September 2001.
23Evenimentul Zilei , 29 August 2000. For membership figures see the 2002 census, www.insse.ro/
rpl2002rezgen/16.pdf.
24 BBC Romanian Service, 20 December 2001.
25 The pre-eminent book on reproduction in Romania is Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity.
Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998).
26 Cf. John Luxmoore, ‘Eastern Europe 1995: a Review of Religious Life in Bulgaria, Romania,
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland’, Religion, State and Society , 24, 4, 1996, p.
363, and Sunday Herald , 9 February 2003.
27Ziua, 9 February 2004.
28Sunday Herald , 9 February 2003. Another study showed that the total induced abortion rate
doubled from 1.7 lifetime abortions per woman in 1987 – 90 to 3.4 in 1990 – 3. The largest increase
in abortion occurred among 15 – 19 years olds, women with only primary school education,
Bucharest residents and women with low socioeconomic status. Some 67% of abortions wereperformed to limit or space births, 20% for socioeconomic reasons, 4% for reasons related to thewoman’s relationship with her partner and another 4% for health reasons; see Lisa Remez,
‘Romanian Maternal Death Rate Fell by Two-Thirds after the 1989 Revolution’, Family Planning
Perspectives , 27, 6, November 1995, p. 263.RELIGION, POLITICS AND SEXUALITY IN ROMANIA 309

29Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei, partea a II-a, 27 January 1994.
30National Catholic Reporter , 30, 13, 28 January 1994, p. 4.
31Sunday Herald , 9 February 2003.
32Telegraful de Constanta , 9 June 2003.
33 Ilie Moldovan, Darul sfint al vietii si combaterea pacatelor impotriva acestuia ––Aspecte ale nasterii
de prunci in lumina moralei crestine ortodoxe (Bucharest, 1997). This pamphlet is the only viewpoint
on abortion and contraception to meet with the tacit approval of the Orthodox church, and to bedistributed to priests.
34The Catechism of the Catholic Church (London, 1999), entries 2368 and 2370; also Pope Paul VI,
Humanae Vitae 16.
35 See Schaff & Wace (eds), The Seven Ecumenical Councils , pp. 73 and 404.
36Monitorul , 9 October 2003.
3722, 3 – 9 March 1998.
38Dilema , 5 – 11 March 1999.
3922, 3 – 9 March 1998.
40Cotidianul , 26 September 2001, and Telegraful de Constanta , 12 May 2003.
41Cotidianul , 14 November 2001.
42Monitorul , 1 January 1998.
43Evenimentul Zilei , 4 May 2001.
44Curentul andAdevarul , 27 November 2003.
45 Summary of the Chamber of Deputies session of 12 February 2002, Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei,
partea a II-a .
46Monitorul andCurentul , 9 October 2003.
47 See Exodus , 20.14 and 20.17, and I Corinthians , 6, 9 – 10.
48 A transcript of the roundtable is available at www.czc.go.ro/prostitutia.html.
49Evenimentul Zilei , 4 May 2001.
50 BBC Romanian Service and Monitorul , 13 November 2003.
51Adevarul , 18 February 2004.
52Evenimentul Zilei , 14 October 2000.
53 Associated Press, 17 April 2003.
54 The canon rule reads that the marital status at the time of ordination must be preserved afterwards.
This prompts many Orthodox and Greek Catholic seminary and university students to seekmarriage before graduation and ordination as priests. Priests who are celibate at the time of
ordination are not allowed ever to marry.
55Evenimentul Zilei , 9 November 2001.
56Ziua, 13 March 2003.
57Evenimentul Zilei , 27 June 2001, and Replica , 20 August 2003.310 LUCIAN TURCESCU & LAVINIA STAN