Religion takes sinister root in Romania
By Craig S. Smith The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 4, 2005
TANACU, Romania It started with laughter in this land of haystacks and
horse carts and new churches, whose zinc-clad steeples glint in the sun.
Just weeks after 23-year-old Maricica Irina Cornici moved in January to
an isolated hilltop monastery here with her brother, she began giggling during
Mass. By April, she had descended into madness and doctors at a local
psychiatric hospital diagnosed her condition as schizophrenia.
But for the monastery's two dozen nuns and its eccentric priest, it was
not Cornici mocking and cursing them: It was Satan.
They chained her to a makeshift cross for three days, trying to cast him
out. She died.
"You can't take the devil out of people with pills," the 29-year-old
priest, Daniel Petre Corogeanu, told a Romanian television station during a
four-hour interview taped just before he and the nuns were arrested in June.
The monastery has since been shut down by the Orthodox Church, Corogeanu
defrocked and, along with four nuns, charged with murder and depriving a person
of liberty. If convicted, each of the five could be sentenced to 25 years in
prison.
The case shocked Romania, and has dominated news coverage, with one
newspaper declaring on its front page: "Romania in the Middle Ages."
But the death is more than simply a matter of misguided faith in the
Romanian hinterland. It is a dark measure of the explosive growth that the
Eastern Orthodox Church has experienced in the 15 years since the repressive
regimes of the Soviet bloc disappeared, lifting the lid of official atheism off
a spiritually starved people.
A return to religion in Romania and the region's other formerly Communist
countries has in many places outrun the speed at which the church can screen
and train clergy, leaving institutions like the monastery at Tanacu in the
hands of poorly educated young men like Corogeanu.
"There have been a lot of new churches built, and there is a kind of
competition," said Alfred Bulai, a sociologist in Bucharest.
"There has been a loss of control."
The Communist government closed hundreds of Romanian monasteries, which
in the Orthodox Church accept both monks and nuns, beginning in 1959. Marxism
was never able to extinguish Christianity, but for decades practicing religion
carried risks. Since communism fell, church-building has been booming -
monasteries in particular - paid for by local communities and successful
businessmen as a mark of devotion and pride.
The number of Romania's monasteries has nearly tripled to 600 since 1990,
and the number of its monks has quadrupled to 2,800. The highest concentration
of both is in the region around Tanacu, one of the country's poorest corners,
where water comes from buckets dipped in wells and light at night comes from
candles.
Dan Ciachir, a Bucharest-based author and specialist on the Romanian
Orthodox Church, said the pressure of demand means almost anyone can become a
priest. "There is no longer any selection," he said. "Quantity has replaced
quality."
Ten years ago, Corogeanu was a soccer player in Vaslui, a nearby town. By
his own admission, he never studied much, and, after failing to get into a
university in Bucharest to study sports or law, he enrolled in religious
studies at the theology department at the university in Iasi in the country's
impoverished northeast.
Within a year, a businessman from his hometown recruited him to help
build a small monastery in the hills nearby. The local bishop ordained him,
despite his lack of experience, on the expectation that he would continue his
studies part time. But he soon stopped to devote himself to running the
monastery.
The church now concedes that such laxity has led to irregularities and
has vowed to tighten rules for entering monasteries, including requiring
psychological tests.
By 2003, Corogeanu had clashed with the diocese, where the leaders were
disturbed by his unconventional style. When the aging bishop read him the
church canon that year, Corogeanu dismissed the rules as "freemasonry" and
"19th-century innovations," according to the Reverend Corneliu Barladeanu, the
diocese's acting bishop.
Barladeanu said that Corogeanu had been warned in writing to correct his
ways but that it was to no avail. "He has a strong, dominating personality," he
said.
The monastery's original community of monks broke up as the men left to
become priests and Corogeanu began taking in nuns, who, by all accounts, were
completely devoted to him. He let his hair grow until it reached well down his
back. His mouth disappeared behind his long mustache, and his fluffy
reddish-brown beard grew over his chest.
He draped the whitewashed wooden fence at the entrance to the monastery
with a half-dozen signs warning visitors of the rules inside: Men are not
permitted after 4 p.m., women are forbidden to enter in pants or with their
heads uncovered. Only followers of the Orthodox Church are allowed inside.
"This is God's house, here the angels sing," reads one sign.
On the ramshackle grounds stands an austere concrete church with a
silvery roof and steeple. Beside it is a brown-shingled building where the
sisters live.
Corogeanu's services, held several times a day and in the middle of the
night, attracted a fanatical following from the villages nearby.
He also developed a flair for casting out demons. "He would say prayers
for exorcism on command," said the Reverend Ilie Nicolae Lucian, a young parish
priest in a nearby village, who explained that only well-prepared, pure priests
should undertake such struggles with the devil. "He wasn't humble enough."
A man working a horse-drawn plow between rows of new corn near the silent
monastery said he knew of several people who had undergone exorcisms by the
priest.
Church leaders say the Orthodox Church has no specific exorcism rites
beyond the reading of prayers written by early church leaders. But the
combination of a deeply superstitious rural population and a willful clergy has
led to the spread of more elaborate practices in recent years, and several
priests have gained local renown as effective exorcists.
Corogeanu still has strong support in Tanacu, where many people contend
Cornici was indeed possessed. "Her parents gave her away, they gave her to the
orphanage, and now they're blaming those who took her in and cared for her,"
said Veronica Tomulescu, a nearly toothless, middle-aged matron with a scarf
tied over her hair. "It's not as if they actually killed her. They didn't stab
her or shoot her.
"They took her to the hospital alive."
In the televised interview, with gold icons of Christ and the Virgin Mary
decorating the raw concrete walls behind him, Corogeanu defended his methods,
saying that tying her up was based on the "oral tradition" of the church.
"Only God knows why he took her," Corogeanu said. "I think that's how God
wanted her to be saved."
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