Ovidius University from Constanta

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 Ovidius University from Constanta
Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj Napoca

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT

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F r. A sso c. P ro f. P h D D a n u t P O P O V IC I
9

L ect. P h D C la u d ia P O P A
L ect. P h D M ih a e la O R O S
 *
Tehnoredactare si coperta: Pr. Dr. Nicolae M arius Paicu

O rganizatorii Sim pozionului:

| Prof. U niv. Dr. T eodosie Petrescu,

A rhiepiscopul Tom isului
Pr. Prof. U niv. Dr. Bogdan M oise,
D ecan al F acultatii de Teologie Sfdntul Apostol Andrei din C onstanta
Prof. U niv. Dr. V irgil Frunza,
D ecan al F acultatii de Psihologie si Stiintele Educatiei d in C onstanta
P rof. U n iv. Dr. Razvan Ionescu,
Prodecan al Facultatii de Teologie Sfdntul Apostol Andrei din Constanta
Pr. Conf. Univ. Dr. Danut Popovici,
Prodecan al Facultatii de Teologie Sfdntul Apostol Andrei din C onstanta
Lect. U niv. Dr. Catalina M ititelu,
Facultatea de Teologie Sfdntul Apostol Andrei din C onstanta
Lect. U niv. Dr. Claudia Popa,
F acultatea de Psihologie si Stiintele educatiei din C onstanta
Lect. U niv. Dr. M ihaela Oros,
Facultatea de Psihologie si Stiintele Educatiei a U niversitatii Babes-Bolyai d in
Cluj N apoca

D escrierea CIP a Bibliotecii N ationale a R om aniei

E ducatia religioasa in context european / coord, vol.: pr. conf. univ. dr.
D anu t Popovici, lect. univ. dr. Claudia Popa, lect. univ. dr. M ihaela
Oros. - B ucure§ti: Editura Didactica §i Pedagogica, Bibliogr.

ISBN 978-973-30-3736-1

I. Popovici, Danuf (coord.)

II. Popa, Claudia (coord.)
III. Oros, M ihaela (coord.)

Intreaga responsabilitate p en tru continutul m aterialelor ap artin e in exclusivitate

autorilor.
 Universitatea Ovidius din Constanta 9

Universitatea Babes-Bolyai din Cluj Napoca

SIMPOZIONUL INTERNATIONAL 9

EDUCATIA RELIGIOASA
IN
CONTEXT EUROPEAN
- mai 2014 -

T ip a rita cu b in e c u v a n ta re a
| Prof. Univ. Dr. Teodosie PETRESCU
A rh ie p is c o p al T o m isu lu i

E d itu r a D id a c tic a si P e d a g o g ic a R.A.

B u c u re sti, 2014
9 '
 Content:

f Prof. P hD T eo d o sie PETRESCU , A rc h b ish o p of T om is,

F o rew o rd ...........................................................................................................p . 9
Prof. P hD R azvan IO N ESC U ,
A Q uestion fo r The Third M illen iu m : Is Theology's Place A m o n g The
Academ ic Space A n y lo n g e r ? p. 11

Fr. P ro fesso r E m eritu s N icolae V. D U RA ,

A M odern H igher Education In stitu tio n , O vid iu s U n iversity of
C onstantza (R o m a n ia )..................................................................................p. 26
Prof. h.c. M a n fred W A G N ER,
Religionspadagogische A u sb ild u n g in B aden-W iirttem berg p. 45
Prof. P hD A n d ra s M A TE-TO TH ,
Interpretations o f Religious C h a n g e p . 56
Fr. Prof. P h D G h eo rg h e IST O D O R ,
Christian - O rthodox Education in the C urrent Post-m odern European
C o n te x t p. 70
Fr. Assoc. Prof. P hD D a n u t PO PO V IC I, 9 '

The Internet - a Modern Means for Spreading Religious Information ... p. 80

Fr. Assoc. Prof. P hD D a n u t PO PO V IC I, 9 '

Aspects concernant Veducationreligieuse selon age et in sfru ctio n ............p. 95

Fr. A ssoc. Prof. P hD D a n u t PO PO V IC I,
The Education o f Emperor C onstantine the Great and its reflection on
his relation w ith the Church o f C h r is t.................................................p . I l l
Assoc. Prof. P hD M ih aela D IM ITR ESC U , Assoc. Prof. P h D C o rin a
M aria ENE, Lect. P hD Y vonne LA CRO IS,
Knowledge-based Society and H igher Education in Rom ania. Private
U niversities O ffer A daptation to The Needs o f The Labour M a rket in
The Era o f N e w T echnologies ....................................................p. 121
Assoc. Prof. P h D M ih a ela D IM IT R E SC U , Lect. P hD L u iza SIRBU,
Lect. P h D Y vonne LACRO IS,
Considerations on H igher Education F u n d in g in European U nion
Increasing A cadem ic P erfo rm a n ce........................................................p . 136
Fr. A ssoc. Prof. P h D D o ru D A M E A N , Prof. N ico leta D A M E A N ,
Religious Education Contribution to Prevention o f School V iolence... p . 148
Fr. P h D N icolae M a rin s PA IC U ,
C hristian Education - D eifyin g L o g o th era p y ................................... p -154
Lect. P hD M ih a ela O RO S,
Der reflexive Lehrer A nderung des Bildungsparadigrnas zu r
A u sb ild u n g von auflerordentlichen L e h re rn ....................................... p . 171
Lect. PhD C atalin a M ITITELU,
The R ig h t to Religious Education. The Rom anian Legislation and
Religious E d u c a tio n p. 180
Lect. P hD M ariana M ITRA,
Family Education through V iolence....................................................P - 159
Lect. PhD C laudia POPA,
European Social Policies fo r Religious E d u ca tio n s......................... p- 200
Fr. Lect PhD Nicu§or TUCA, Fr. Lect PhD Dragos BALAN,
God's Place in The Contemporary Romanian S ch o o l......................p . 209
Fr. L ect PhD A drian VASILE,
The Catechetical School of Alexandria - a model of Christian.............. p . 219
Fr. Lect. PhD Iosif G yulai MURESAN,
Religious M usic and The Teaching Role of This A r t p . 231
Fr. Asist. Prof. PhD Maxim VLAD,
Orthodox Canonical Legislation on Religious Education Today...........p. 240
Fr. Asist. Prof. PhD Iulian ISBASOIU,
L'education religieuse en Roumanie et les Recommandations de
VAssemblee Parlementaire du Conseil de V E u ro p e ..................... p. 252
Fr. Asist. Prof. PhD Nicolae POPESCU,
A bout speaking in Parables and Salvation ................................... p. 267
Fr. PhD loan V alentin ISTRATI,
Religious Education in European context. Several rem arks p. 284
Deacon Dr. loan DURA,
Education in a Pluri-Religious and Secular Context: Interreligious
Dialogue as Basis for a Good Social Cohabitation........................... p. 288
PhD Candidate Razvan C onstantin CiMPULUNGEANU,
Religious Education - Component that Shapes Human Personality .... p. 293
A b b re v ia tio n s ................................................ p 305
 g o d s p l a c e in t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y
ROMANIAN SCHOOL

Fr. Lect. PhD Nicusor TUCA

Ovidius U niversity o f Constanta
Fr. Lect. PhD Drago? Corncliu BALAN
Ovidius U niversity o f Constanta

A bstract:

The Chuich and the school have always been supporting each other
in the piocess of man s training, in his preparation for life and society; they
have taught him to dissociate good from evil. The first schools operated in the
places of woi ship 01 next to them. Today, the school separated from the
Church cannot succeed in the huge responsibility of educating children. In
the present Romanian school, one can feel, on the one hand, the consequences
of the materialist-atheist ideology of the communist period, and, on the other
hand, the influences of a world undergoing a full process of secularization.
Religion has always given a sense and a direction to the human existence.
Religion - as an educational discipline - has the role of binder between the
disciplines that have lost or did not have God. By learning religion, the
pupils will better understand the meaning of man, because religion forms
man for himself and for society; it is a need of human nature.

K eyw ords: God, school, education, religion, identity.

In one o f his books, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor

shows that the fundam ental question o f morals is not one o f the kind:
“How should we lead a good (correct) life from a moral perspective?”
or “What rules should we respect to become good?”. The true question
of morals is, on the contrary, “W hat do we live on? W hat are the
moral sources that we use to quench our thirst? What gives us strength
to act m orally ? ” 1

1 Charles Taylor, Quellen des Selbst. Die Entstenhung der neuzeitlichenldentitat, dt.
Ub. Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p. 32.

20 9
 This pow er to act m orally is given to us by our O rthodox faith,
alive for over two thousand years. The culture has assured its future,
its perennially, only on the basis o f the im m orta re lgion. In our
geographic area, eternal culture m eans rt o ox religion,
Christianity! Here is encom passed the essence o f cieation life, the
future - , but also o f the spirit - the trium ph o f good! “Here, in
betw een the Carpathians, the Danube and the Sea, the Romanian
people, the first in time to have populated this aiea and the only one
that inhabited it perennially, has built his existence by w riting his own
national, cultural and religious history. B om out o f the Daco-Roman
osm osis and sanctified by the Evangel, the R om anians are the only
people stepping into history as a Christian people. Latinity and
Christianism are the two coordinates defining and singulaiizing it
am ong the populations o f the Earth. Despite all the vicissitudes that it
has gone through and that it has had to face, this people has come out
victorious every time, accomplishing, with God s help, its calling and
m ission in history and in creation . 2
The Church and the School are two institutions that are
extrem ely close as function so that it is im possible to serve in the
Church and to forsake school and the other w ay round, to be part of
the school and to forsake the Church. This happens if you really
understand and appropriate their role. The fundam ental reason why
the Church and the School suppose one another is the fact that both of
them have in view man. There is no salvation w ithout know ledge and
no knowledge without training. The Church’s m ission is m an’s
salvation and the School’s mission is m an’s training. He W ho founded
the Church, our Savior Jesus Christ, called H im self “Rabbi”
(Teacher), one o f His missions being to teach, and one o f the first
m issions given to the apostles shows that one o f the functions o f the
Church will be that o f teaching: “Go and teach all nations...”
(M atthew 28:19).

T h e R om anian sp iritu ality , a fru it o f th e u n ity between

C h u rc h a n d School
Church and School have always stayed together in m an’s
training process, in m an’s preparation for life and society, they have
taught m an to tell right from wrong, to discern betw een life in sin and
a sinless, normal life, a life o f faith, o f virtue, and especially have

2 Alexandra Ionija, Din trecutul Bisericii p Patriei noastre, Ed. Ex Ponto,

Constanta, 2001, p. 5.

210
 a man to think about the physical life but also about the
edU°atrtality o f *he soui.
in1'110 ^ our R om anian villages, C hurch and School - tw o im portant
• nosing edifices, are situated alm ost alw ays next to each other
al1^ h's happens because the tw o are edifices o f the spirit and o f faith
their place can on^ next 1:0 eac^ °ther. L ight and happiness,
and peace irradiate w ith golden rays both from the altar o f the
h -eh and from the gentle w ord o f the priest, but also from the
I acher’s desk and from the innocent eyes o f the children in the school

^eS^S p rom the begim iings o f Christianity, the priests and the m onks
were erudite people, they read, printed books, wrote letters. This is
why the fust schools functioned in the precincts o f the places o f
worship or near them, and the priests or even the cantors served as
teachers. Let us rem em ber that even our great story-teller Ion C reanga
relates that the priest Ion Hurniilesteanu or badifa V asile, cantor o f the
Church of Humule§ti, w ere his prim ary-school teachers. A t that tim e,
the children learnt using the Church books, w hich w ere their first
ABCs.
On Romanian land, the first schools were, consequently, those
“from the porch o f the Church” and from the m onasteries, and the
Church served the nation’s education and language having the
conscience that this is its mission. Near the Church o f Saint N icholas
of §cheii Bra§ovului was created the oldest Rom anian school o f our
country (1495).
Studying the history o f the Rom anian people, we have the
conviction that the Rom anian school was born in the Church o f the
nation, sprung from it and remained close to it. The books, assets o f
the Church and also o f school, were printed for all the R om anians o f
all the countries. The books o f Transylvania crossed over the
Carpathians in W allachia and M oldova, and those o f W allachia and
Moldova also penetrated in Transylvania “to spread the w ord o f the
Holy Scripture... in all the countries and lands speaking the R om anian
language” 3 and to be o f good use “to all the people speaking
Romanian”4. Printed by the Church, they were taken over by the
school and by the educated people o f the nation and profitably used as
means of reinforcing the conscience o f ecclesiastical and national

Mitropolitul Nicolae al Ardealului, Biserica Ortodoxa Romana, una §i aceea§i in

toate timpurile, Sibiu, 1968, p. 18.
Ibidem.

211
 u n ity o f all the R om anians. “For tw o m illennia, during which the
R o m a n ia n ’s soul was shaped, his soul, - says O ctavian G oga - as a
vast basin, has gathered in it m em ories and hopes, jo y s and crying, ajj
the th rills that m ade it vibrate along the centuries. W ho could disjoint
this treasure o f feelings and select the m ystery that gave birth to the
m u ltifo ld variety expressing our national sp ecifics?” - he w ondered5
T he R om anian spirituality was born in the C hurch and in school, and
has been preserved through the collaboration o f these t\y0
fundam ental institutions; the Rom anian spirituality is a creation, a
m iracle sprung from the unity o f action o f the tw o institutions. By
m eans o f them , the society has preserved, cultivated and transmitted
its cultural values.
For hundreds o f years, in the Rom anian Countries, people have
quenched their thirst from a unique spring o f m oral and spiritual life:
the O rthodox ethos present in the Holy Evangel and generally in the
H oly Scripture interpreted by the Holy Fathers, and in the Holy
L iturgy and in all the divine services o f the Church.
At a certain moment, however, in the history o f the Romanians
there was a breakup that imposed a second source o f the moral life
along w ith the Christian ethos: the ideology and aspirations o f the
Enlightenm ent. Horia Roman Patapieviei, in his work The Recent Man
wrote the following things referring to the fact that only by faith in
God can man go over the threshold o f ephemerality: “The human
societies are bom, live and die on earth; it is here that their destinies
are fulfilled... yet they do not encompass man as a whole. After his
com m itm ent in the society, man still has the noblest part o f himself
available, as he remains with those great capacities by which he
ascends to God, to a future life, to unknown assets from an invisible
world... As individual and identical people, as beings tm ly endowed
with immortality, we have a destiny different from that o f the States . " 6
In the present Romanian school one can feel, on the one hand,
the consequences o f the materialist-atheist ideology o f the communist
period, and, on the other hand, the influences o f a world under
secularization, so that, slowly but steadily, the Romanian school tends
to draw away from the Church, as in it blows the “wind” o f the
autonom y from God. This explains the proliferation o f the cases of
suicide, o f addictions, of delinquents and criminals among pupils and

5 Octavian Goga, Precursori, Ed. Minerva, Bucure§ti, 1989, p. 40.

6 Cf. H.R. Patapieviei, Omul recent, Ed. Humanitas, Bucuresti, 2005, p. 397.

212
 tudents and tbe u nfortunate lack o f subm ission to the educators and
tjie parents.
t0 a G odless school can no longer set in order the lives o f its
^ c a n P r o v i d e t0 fGem com puters, m odem laboratories for
d is c ip le S '
their specialization m one scientific dom ain or the other, but w ithout
God, ^ wil1 not be able t0 Protect th em from robotization,
dehumanization (loss o l their m oral dim ension) and the danger o f
b e c o m i n g rootless people.
The School, sepaiated from the Church, cannot succeed in the
huge responsibility o f education, because o f the opposition o f a series
0f “ideologists , philosophers” , “m oralists” and “educators”, stars,
superstars, m egastars, people with no God, no com m itm ent and no
family, who by their negative exam ple given by their own life in the
media and at concerts, exhort the young generation to im m orality and
laziness and inoculate to them “Freud’s com plex” 7, nam ely F reud’s
theory according to w hich in order to get rid o f com plexes we need to
get rid o f shame.

T he C h ris tia n ed u catio n of th e children

Saint John Chrysostom considers children to be the greatest
caress that God has given to mankind after it has lost immortality, by
its fall into sin. Children are the ray o f light and the source o f jo y in
their parents’ soul, a cane for the old age and for the weaknesses o f
those who have given birth to them and have raised them. They
represent a divine gift, a blessing for their parents, as, with their
coming in the world, our home, our family needs to become a place o f
joy and o f hope.
The joys o f the true parents are the accomplishments or
realizations, successes and achievements o f their children, and
similarly their w orst hardships are not their personal ones, but the
defeats, failures and hardships o f their children. Our children are the
heritage we leave behind, the reason and the m otivation ot our
endeavors and sacrifices o f a lifetime.
In order for them to become a true caress for our tired souls,
burdened by years and difficulties, our children need to be raised and
educated in a Christian spirit, with love for the true moral and
religious values.
Therefore, this education needs to begin in the early childhood,
and must become a constant of their life. And the first exercise they

See Savatie Ba§tavoi, fntre Freud Hristos, Ed. Nemira, Bucure§tf 2001, p. 15.
can acquire is prayer and going to church. I here is n o thing as helpfuj
for a c h ild ’s healthy physical and psychological developm ent as
prayer and faith.
E ducation is the m ost beautiful and the m ost difficult art, the
parents being true artists endeavoring to achieve artistic works. The
child, says Saint John C hrysostom , is, at the beginning, like a block of
m arble. Just as the sculptor has to shape his block o f marble
beautifully, sim ilarly parents need to beautify th eir ch ild ien s lives
w ith the highest virtues and, rem oving all that is sin and alien, need to
turn their children into true living artistic w orks.
The m ethod o f education needs to rely on love, goodness and
kindness.
In conclusion, we can state that the m ost im portant educational
factors are the family, the Church and school. C h ild ien lepresent the
m ost im portant investm ent o f our life. C hildren are the ultim ate and
essential m otivation and reason o f our life and this is w hy a loving and
responsible parent cannot have peace and jo y unless his child has
them as well. W e w ork our w hole life for them , hoping that they will
return som e o f this help to us w hen w e w ill need it m ost, in our
m om ents o f disease and old age, o f need and pow erlessness, ju st as we
have given birth and helped them grow and prosper “in due tim e and
any tim e” . The true heritage that the parents should leave to their
children is not material but purely spiritual and consists in faith,
honesty, goodness, kindness, meekness, love, purity etc. Some o f us
are too busy with the im m ediate and m aterial investm ents and a fast
profit, and forget or ignore the tim e and feelings that n eed to be given
to our children and w hen we realize it, it m ight be too late. Just as a
tree needs to be looked after w hen it has been planted, to grow up
straight and beautifully, sim ilarly we should supervise, guide and
possibly correct the physical and psychical developm ent o f the
children from their early age. Once the tree has grow n up crooked and
sickly, all our efforts m ight prove to be in vain.
Therefore, at the root o f the true education, w e n eed to put love
and patience, because to educate a person, to adorn a p erso n w ith the
m ost beautiful and the highest qualities o f a hum an being is neither
easy, nor a short-term endeavor, but supposes a lifetim e effort.

A rg u m e n ts in fa v o r o f a relig io u s e d u c a tio n
W e w ant a united E urope, w e often talk about globalization,
about a unique State, w e vote constitutions o f the E uropean Union, we

2 14
*** atw? 2 ri
^ o e o o n o m te p rin cip les and desires, y et w e should not let oursclTes
^ inherited” o f th e fu n d am en tal values o f o u r tradition
* In the concert o f m ankind, each and every people has a
specific m essage o f c m h z a tto n and culture, and the R om anian people
Pas been bom to b e C ta stm n -O rth o d o x by excellence. A nd this fact is
I , the more im portant, seeing the w ords Sim ion M ehedinti uttered a
entury ago- - each m an and people in history is worth as m uch as he
haS grasped from the E vangel o f our Savior Jesus Christ” 8
Although there are voices rejecting the functioning o f the
Religious Education class in the nam e o f the S tate’s lay character and
0f the freedom ot thought, w e consider it normal that, in a pluralist
society, people should hear about the Bible in schools, otherw ise the
cultural heritage becom es im possible to understand and they should
hear about the Fathers o f the Church in the study o f thinking9.
The training o f the young people through the educational
system needs to be m ultidirectional and polyvalent, as the school
educates the individual from an intellectual, moral, civic, esthetic
hygienic perspective; this is why the religious component isn a tu rally ’
organically added to the pievious perspectives, meeting the need for
an educational and training complementariness and continuity. For
this reason, it is necessary that these sides o f education be envisioned
as a global, integrative approach . Or as follows; as a discipline o f
education, religion has the role ot binder between the disciplines that
have lost or did not have God; by learning religion, the pupils will
better understand m an’s role, religion trains man for him self and for
the society, it is a need o f the human nature.
The arguments in favor o f the religious education are many:
a. the cultural argument - the religious type o f training sets into
motion the mind and the soul, opens the spirit towards diverse cultural
experiences. The lack ot training from a religious perspective means
spiritual infirmity, being a form o f analphabetism.

8Apud Vasile Nechita, Hristos in ?coald. Impliniri §i e$ecuri in predarea religiei in

Scoala, in TV, nr. 9-12/2002, p. 128.
9Olivier Clement, Viafa din inima morfii, translation by Claudiu Soare, Ed. Pandora,
Targovi§te, 2001, p. 43.
° Constantin Cuco§, Educalia religioasa. Repere teoretice §i metodice, Ed. Polirom,
!a§i, 1999, p. 13.

215
 b. the p sych o lo g ica l a rg u m en t - relig io u s education jnvi.
reflection, to self-know ledge; it is not ju s t the tran sm issio n o f J f T
know ledge but also the shaping or training o t re peisonality. Tuny *C
to religion is healing and saving.
c. the ethical argum ent - the relig io u s ty p e o f m orals can fin
gap or can help overcom e som e existential o rien tatio n gap. ^
d. the sociological argum ent - the le lig io u s values are meant
bring people together, to create sustainable relatio n s
e. the historical argum ent - to r m any centuries, the culture was
hom e in churches and m onasteries
f. the ecum enical argum ent - the religious ed ucation and trainjno
prepare m an for the acceptance and u nderstanding o t his fellow, and
he becom es more generous and less suspicious o f the others
g. the theological argum ent ~ each p erso n should be guided to
God, to reach a deep sense o f life and o f the existence
h. the pedagogical argum ent - religious education opens the
appetite for self-im provem ent and represents a w ay o f making the
self-responsible in relation to the subsequent o p tio n s11.
These arguments in favor o f a religious education correspond to
the essential dimensions o f the hum an personality, those that form the
“puzzle” o f the personality on its way tow ards adulthood: physical
dimension, psychical dim ension but also social dim ension.
Religion gives sense and direction to the existence. The religious
values are values par excellence. The religious values are not
integrable but integrative - the religious values draw a unifying vault
sheltering under their arch the m ost rem ote values.

Desecration and depersonalization. The estrangem ent from God

We would like to believe that to d ay ’s m an has not been bom
o f the founding crime o f N ietzsche’s deicide b ut on the contrary can
be called “homo religiosus ’. However, the contem porary man has
m isunderstood his calling - HOMO SECU N D U S D EU S - looking for
his happiness and accom plishm ent in the tem porality o f this life.
Today, the European type o f civilization w ants itself freed from
religion and morals, therefore it wants itself post-C hristian and post­
modern. This means that man no longer trusts his axiology, his old
reference system that configured it initially and in w hich Christianity
and im plicitly Christ held a central place. Since the Renaissance to
this day, m an has been on the lookout for “trifles” ...

11 Ibidem, p. 26.

216
 T he m an o f o ur century is nhvciraii •
bored o f the w orlds and do es not find his i o v l n ' t h r ^ “ m atter’
tefflity, because b etw een the m an created r n voyages tow ards

W e are u n d er the im pression t w

societies w e liv e in tend f o w L s ^ £
are under the im p ressio n that the technological means and the m ^ s
of living, o f any k in d , are m aking our lives happier and our work
easier, yet, probab y w e do n ot realize that this progress o f any kind
does not have m an s salvation as its aim. Father D um ltru Popeseu, in a
recent paper - The Church and politics (Biserica ppolitico) - w rote
in this sense: m an has w o n great victories in the fight for conquering
the great or the sm all universe, but deep in his soul, he feels
overwhelmed by irrational forces that he can no longer control and
which ceaselessly fuel the explosion o f violence that we are all
witnessing, pow erlessly. O ur Savior Jesus Christ is right when he says
that “m an gam s nothing if he wins the whole world but he loses his
soul"12.
I f we do not need Christ in our schools, if we do not need the
true faith in the education o f our children, if we do not need the
teaching show ing us how to make the difference between right and
wiong, what do we need, then? Yet, in order to be bereaved o f our
identity ot Christian-born people, we are confronted with different
‘methods tiying to uproot us and to lead us astray from our true
feeling and living.
H owever, when troubles appear in our lives, we are
wondering: How can God let all these things happen? An eloquent
answer has been given in this sense by Anne Graham, the daughter o f
the great A m erican preacher, Billy Graham. When asked about the
attacks o f Septem ber 11, 2001: “How could God let this happen?”, she
replied - “I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but
for years w e’ve been telling God to get out o f our schools, to get out
of our governm ent and to get out o f our lives...” 13.

C onclusions
It is strange how people despise God and then they ask
themselves w hy everything is getting worse and worse. It is strange
how we believe all that the papers are writing, but we distrust the

12 Dumitru Popeseu, Biserica §i politica, in Gb, nr. 1-4/2005, p. 120.

13 Apud Vasile Nechita, op. cit., p. 129.
 , , ;s e v e n stran ger th at more often than

«w <e, *the
»fR«om tania
; , . » * » 10 a w ^ has su p p o rted Romania',
temporary eo ^ n . ^ orthodox ^ tQ „ t l y mffitate tc)l
Thf , E uropean C n io it;> e . -tu a l v a lu e s and farth, withow
joining of the ^ forefathers P becauSe “whatever” we may
the m aintaining ^ own identO ' God„ u
^ c h ^ world is not m ied j doubtlessly needs to be pan
believe, l&e , tbe R eligion . th ere th at we iearn to be
Conseq curdcu\u m because ^ y th o u t Christ, we get to

o fth e n a tio n a 0rrect, closer to u se le ss life, a senseless

m ore honest, ^ ^ ins ig n ific a n , _ M s is fee
fall, Se m As a senseless en d tb e piesentation of
tribulation to vided by th e R e t . ^ stat£ o{ dovmfap an(i
im portant less 0f m an in th i ’ u dartce provided by

«**'■” 3* « » » • r'T f“ r - s . * ** *>*>

BdWeda
, Quo vadis, translation by Stan Velea,
ia Henryk Sienkyevncz.
2 0 0 4 ,p . 59.

218