I. Introduction
The fall of Communism in 1989 left the Romanian Orthodox Church in a delicate position in the public mind. Some of its most reputed bishops, illustrious theologians, and dedicated priests had closely collaborated with the ill-famed Communist Secret Police (the Securitate), denouncing their fellow clergymen and sometimes even revealing the confidential confessions of their parishioners. The unrepented past of some theologians, such as Father Dumitru Stăniloae (1903–1993), and some of the members of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church cast a shadow of doubt on the credibility of the Orthodox Church and its clergymen in post-Communist Romanian society.Footnote 1 During the interwar years, through his newspaper articles, Father Stăniloae supported the ultranationalist and antisemitic agenda of various Fascist movements and promoted an anti-ecumenical and xenophobic brand of Orthodox theology among his Sibiu students.Footnote 2 Following his imprisonment during the early Communist years, scholars turned their attention from his tainted past, and Staniloae's works received an enthusiastic reception in Western academia, thus propelling him to become one of the major theologians of the twentieth century.Footnote 3
Using Father Stăniloae's case as a precedent, historians affiliated with the Orthodox Church have whitewashed some of the biographies of the interwar generation of Transylvanian theologians.Footnote 4 By disregarding the controversial details about a number of respected theologians’ and clergymen's Fascist allegiances, antisemitic views, and collaborations with the Securitate, church historians have used their post-Communist writings to forge a deliberate process of collective ecclesiastical forgetting of the Fascist and Communist past of church officials.Footnote 5 Therefore, the highly compromised personal and political histories of the “Stăniloae generation” of theologians from Sibiu (Father Stăniloae, Father Liviu Stan, Father Teodor Bodogae, Father Spiridon Cândea, Father Nicolae Terchilă, and Father Nicolae Mladin) have been sealed away in private files in the church's archives, while—thanks to church historians’ carefully crafted writings—these men have enjoyed the status of role models for future generations of young theologians.Footnote 6
One of the most striking examples of a church biography that bears the markings of its post-Communist recuperation is that of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973), the leading canonist of the Romanian Orthodox Church.Footnote 7 During Communist times, he was a top bureaucrat in the State Department of Religious Denominations, as well as the insider who helped the Communist authorities draw up their 1948 religious policy.Footnote 8 In the early 1950s, he envisaged the first systematic criteria for the canonization of saints in the Orthodox Church and, consequently, worked closely with the Communist Party and the central administration to achieve the first national canonizations in 1955.Footnote 9 In addition, he was the designer of the ecumenical openness of the Orthodox Church in the early 1960s.Footnote 10 Furthermore, the Securitate used him in the early 1950s as bait in international operations which aimed to repatriate several Fascist exiles condemned by the Communist authorities—such as, for instance, Metropolitan Visarion Puiu in France and Archbishop Valerian Trifa in the United States—and bring them to court.Footnote 11
With an academic and bureaucratic career spanning almost four decades and a chameleonic ability to survive political changes, Father Stan remains a theological model, respected and imitated by contemporary Orthodox theologians. Nevertheless, his political activities during the interwar years remain a well-kept secret from most clergymen and theologians. For instance, during his student years, Stan enlisted in radical nationalist student organizations in Cernăuți (such as Arboroasa and the Student Legionary Center), became a leading member of the Iron Guard in Sibiu County, and served as director of the Department for Religious Denominations during the short-lived National Legionary State. After the Communist takeover, in 1947, he survived the purges against former Legionary members of the Orthodox Church by making extensive use of his contacts in the political arena.
Always possessing a double allegiance—to the church on the one hand and to the state or the ruling regime of the day on the other—people like Father Stan were able to play one allegiance against the other in their struggle for survival. Through the lens of Father Stan's life and political fortunes, this article presents a detailed account of the successive ideological reconversions of a certain professional religious category—namely that of Transylvanian Orthodox clergymen—from the early 1930s until the mid-1940s.
The first part of this article centers on Stan's Fascist activism as manifested through his publications in the Legionary press, which was in line with his ambition to climb the promotional ladder in both the Legionary Movement and the academic structures of the Orthodox Church. As a Fascist and a theologian, Liviu Stan preserved his double allegiance to the Legionary Movement and the Orthodox Church.
Part two discusses the events that followed September 5, 1940, when Stan's promotion in the National Legionary State's administration resulted in the materialization of the general will of the Orthodox clergymen, whereby they demanded the reform of the ossified institutional structure of the Orthodox Church. Although a failure in late 1940, the theological and ideological continuities between the professional elites of the interwar period and the Communist times insured that Stan's design for new religious legislation was adopted by the Communist regime in the 1950s.
Part three discusses Father Stan's views about racism and the racial theories which circulated in southern Transylvania, especially in the Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People (ASTRA) circles and at the Schools of Eugenics and Biopolitics in Cluj and Sibiu. Stan's response to the emergence of Nazi-influenced racial theories in the field of medical studies and eugenics underscored the importance of Christianity in shaping a racist identity for the Romanian nation.
The interaction of different professional groups with Fascism and the authoritarian regimes in interwar Romania has already received the attention of scholars.Footnote 12 During the last decade, the survival of the professional elites—such as professors, architects, and army officers—from the Fascist interwar period to the Communist period has begun to interest scholars, who have been eager to point out the commonalities between the two totalitarian ideologies.Footnote 13
Using primary sources from a vast array of archival collections—such as the Romanian National Archives, the National Council for the Study of Securitate's Archives, theological journals, and Legionary newspapers—I argue that some theologians have also survived political regimes and changed their discourse to fit the new political power. Theologian Liviu Stan had a remarkable ability to survive political purges and make himself available for any newcomer in power in Romanian political life. For the purposes of this article, he functions as an ecclesiastical “Menocchio.”Footnote 14 Rather than focusing on the detailed biography of Father Stan, by making use of the microhistorical approach, this text uses the allegory of Stan's life to decipher the interactions of an entire generation of Transylvanian theologians in the context of the interwar reshaping of the hierarchies of power and authority. It also deals with their subsequent collaboration with ultranationalism (Fascism), racism, and a dictatorship and their innate ability to survive purges and political change.Footnote 15
While present-day historiography focuses on the interactions between the Orthodox clergy and the Iron Guard during the interwar period, this article challenges this time frame and perspective by pointing out that some of the Fascist clergymen survived the collapse of the National Legionary State (January 1941), the downfall of General Ion Antonescu's military dictatorship (August 23, 1944), and the stealth transition toward a Communist regime (1944–1947) by accommodating their views to the mainstream ideology of the day.Footnote 16 It unravels the multiple ideological permutations of this clerical opportunism in a manner that goes beyond the usual concept of “clerical Fascism” by describing the ultranationalist allegiances of Christian clergymen.Footnote 17
II. The Early (Fascist) Years (1932–1940)
The youthful political adventures of the future theologian began during his student years in the Department of Orthodox Theology at Cernăuți University (1928–1932).Footnote 18 During this time, Liviu Stan engaged in nationalistic politics through his active membership in student organizations. With a large German-speaking Jewish community and, after the 1918 union between Bukovina (formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the Romanian Kingdom, with an increasing number of students from Transylvania, the Old Kingdom, and Bessarabia, the former German-speaking Cernăuți University experienced a sweeping transformation.Footnote 19 The radicalization of the Romanian youth toward Jewish and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) minorities was the result of the state-imposed process of the nationalization of the primary and secondary school system in Bukovina, responsible for forcefully birthing a generation of autochthon nationalist antisemites.Footnote 20 Under the impact of the state's nationalization policies in Bukovina, the Romanian-, German-, and Ukrainian-speaking student communities transformed the liberal values of mutual toleration into a cauldron of xenophobic rancor directed against Jewish students. Through accusations that they were “invading” Romanian universities, Jewish students became the main targets of discrimination by “Christian” students—even if statistics show that in the Departments of Law, Letters and Philosophy, and Sciences, Jewish students hardly comprised more than 40 percent of the total number of students.Footnote 21
The fact that the Orthodox clergy and the students radicalized their antisemitic views and sided with the Iron Guard is also connected to the academic milieu of the Department of Orthodox Theology at Cernăuți. Young students started looking for salient intellectual alternatives to the faculty that after 1918 supported conventional democratic parties such as the National Liberal Party (PNL).Footnote 22 When the Student Center from Cernăuți was founded, with its platform following the radical nationalist and antisemitic principles of the so-called “1922 Generation” (which comprised of the leaders of the antisemitic student riots in unified Romania), its first leader was Father Domițian Spânu (1892–1936), a young, cutting-edge professor in the Department of Orthodox Theology whose antisemitic and nationalist views influenced the students.Footnote 23 In their attempts to contribute to the state-implemented process of ethnic homogenization in post-1918 Romania, the martial language employed by this young generation of ultra-nationalists—portraying the Jewish minority as their enemy—struck a powerful cord in the souls of the theology students.Footnote 24 They perceived antisemitic activism as a form of missionary work that they, as the future spiritual enlighteners of the masses, had to perform.Footnote 25
In the Fascist “mazeway resynthesis,” Christian theologians associated their love of mankind with their hatred for their neighbor and their Christology based on Christ's commandment for love of humankind with an almost ecumenical theological justification for the racial hatred they directed against Jews and other ethnic minorities.Footnote 26 Whether or not they were aware of this ambivalence, Fascist theologians stuck to their theological specializations when publishing in state-patronized or theological journals and expressed their Fascist views when writing in the Legionary press. This striking difference in tone and content between the publications in the theological versus the Legionary press can also be interpreted as a sign of the coexistence of academic professionalization and political activism. As was the case in Nazi Germany—besides the social and economic reasons behind the interest of theologians and Christian clergymen in the “science of antisemitism”—this co-existence of seemingly mutually exclusive views was related to the innovative, avant-garde nature of the synthesis between Christian theology and the emerging nationalist narratives of racial hatred.Footnote 27
In this context, while studying at the Department of Orthodox Theology in Cernăuți, Liviu Stan emerged as a dedicated political activist.Footnote 28 According to his later statements before the Communist authorities, he had enrolled in the famous nationalistic student organization Arboroasa while there.Footnote 29 On January 21, 1931, together with his fellow students Ioan Beju (in his fourth year of studies, the librarian of the Cernăuți Theological Department), Costache Ioan (also in his fourth year, the leader of the university student center), and others, Stan (in his second year) took part in a manifestation in front of the offices of the Jewish newspaper Vorwärts, protesting against the nomination of Nicolae Fotino, a Jewish actor, for the position of director of the Romanian National Theater. They broke the windows and afterward stormed the building, beating everyone present.Footnote 30 His violent activism in the ranks of the student center and in the student body of the whole university earned his election, in October 1931, as the president of the Cernăuți student center, but due to unknown “political reasons,” he declined this position.Footnote 31
After graduating from Cernăuți University summa cum laude with his bachelor of arts and being admitted to their doctoral program in Canon Law, Stan asked the metropolitan of Transylvania, Nicolae Bălan (1882–1955), for financial support to pursue his studies abroad in Athens where he could improve his proficiency in Ancient Greek.Footnote 32 During his time in Athens, he cemented his friendships with other Romanian students such as Gheorghe (Iustin) Moisescu (1910–1986), the future Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church (1977–1986); Petre Andonescu (1902–1967), the future leader of the Arnota Legionary work camp; and, most importantly, Father Spiridon Cândea (1902–1990), who joined the Romanian group of students in Athens at his own expense.Footnote 33 According to a statement delivered later to the Securitate, Stan initially resented the Legionary Movement and constantly ridiculed Andonescu's fanatical Legionarism.Footnote 34
Nevertheless, an informative document remitted by the General Inspectorate of Police to the Communist Secret Police stated that it was during his Athenian period, and due to Father Cândea's increasing influence, that in 1932 Stan eventually expressed his genuine support for the Iron Guard.Footnote 35 Another external influence on the young Liviu Stan might have been Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan himself, who persuaded the authorities to release the Legionary leaders of Sibiu County from prison on Christmas Eve 1933 following the governmental ban of the movement on December 9 of that year.Footnote 36 By sponsoring a new generation of outstanding theologians with fellowships abroad and inspiring their Fascist conversion, Metropolitan Bălan should be considered the spiritual father of the interwar generation of Fascist Orthodox theologians in southern Transylvania and their protector after the suppression following the Legionary rebellion (January 1941).Footnote 37 Before the Stăniloae generation, there was a Bălan generation to which Stăniloae and Stan also belonged.
Father Stan's later testimonies about his Legionary involvement tend to be in contradiction with his articles in the Legionary press during the mid-1930s. In his memoirs, written in Spanish, the exile lawyer Ion Fleșeriu, one of the leading Legionary figures from Sibiu, confirmed that Stan's Fascist conversion occurred in 1935.Footnote 38 During his time in Athens, Liviu Stan penned several articles in the cultural journal of Cernăuți, which had the same name as the cultural movement associated with it: Iconar.Footnote 39 At the beginning of the 1930s, most of the important members of the circle around this cultural journal—Vasile Posteucă (1912–1972), Traian Chelariu (1906–1966), and Iulian Vesper (1906–1986)—were members of the same student organization, Arboroasa, and there is a chance that they met Stan while pursuing their studies.Footnote 40 Their Legionary conversion in 1935 coincided with Stan's decision to side with the Iron Guard.Footnote 41 In his first article published in Iconar, while advocating in favor of the authentic character of the divine call for repentance through the voice of the shepherd-prophet Petrache Lupu (1907–1994), Stan praised Legionary work as a form of self-sacrifice, as the historical enactment by the Legionaries of the Revelation of Maglavit (in 1935) and God's appeal to penance and a return to His ways:Footnote 42
In our times, divine signs and miracles follow swiftly defying those agnostics who smiled condescendingly. These decaying mummies with an arid posture feel they lost their ground in front of entire legions of determined Romanians who tread contemptuously, who bow before the Almighty, who work singing, who recover their moral values and belief, who sanctify every place with the sacrifice of their lives, and who place these values at the core of the new world they are building. Young people hard as nature toil the labor of slaves for their faith, and they do it because they found the meaning of their existence. Believing in God and in the signs of time, they found their way toward eternal salvation on the brink of the murderous abysses to which they were lured by those considering them already damned.Footnote 43
As Jorge Dagnino has pointed out, Fascism brought a new vibe to institutionalized religions, such as Roman Catholicism, by instilling in the ranks of the Catholic militancy a new approach to religion that forged a parallel modernity, a regenerative force spiritually healing the technological malaise and decadent alienation of the modern world.Footnote 44 In this sense, the Legionaries followed in the footsteps of Italian clergymen and developed a fixation with religious mass experiences (Maglavit, the Vladimirești revelations, the Burning Bush Movement, and so on) which exalted the virtues of mystical communion and unmitigated access to transcendence.Footnote 45 In addition, the metaphor employed by Liviu Stan, describing Legionaries as “slaves of their faith” and radical nationalist politics as a means of achieving internal religious salvation, stemmed from the quasi-religious ethos cultivated in the Legionary imagination earlier by Ion I. Moța (1902–1937) and Mihail Polihroniade (1906–1939).Footnote 46
The transfer of Legionary ideas into religious rhetoric, namely the movement of these ideas between the secular and religious milieus of the Iron Guard, can also be noticed in the “cult of the Captain.”Footnote 47 In the context of Corneliu Codreanu's divinization, Stan produced a eulogy to the Legionary leader's messianic personality, meant to seduce clergymen and theology students alike:
An archangel with a fire sword [Corneliu Codreanu, the Legionary leader] came to strike down the beast digging our grave, to sound the alarm with the trumpets of hope and, through the power of his actions, to mobilize around him all of those with clear conscience and a heroic will from the swamp in which we have dwelled for almost twenty years. Against this “sign” under the banner of Archangel Michael, the head of the celestial powers, stood all the organized forces of Satan and they arose against him with all their devilish instruments. But the sign continued to sound its trumpet, crying out loud to those in awe with him and the good news [of national redemption] spread on the streets.Footnote 48
Just as Petrache Lupu had conveyed God's message for collective penance and a return to His ways, according to Stan's account, under the protection of Archangel Michael, Codreanu surfaced as an apocalyptic prophet crying out for the national return of the younger generation to God.Footnote 49 This brand of religious rhetoric can also be found in other press articles and eulogies delivered by Legionary priests or theologians associated with the movement.Footnote 50
The same is true for the usage of the Legionary metaphor of national resurrection, a theological category dear to the young Liviu Stan.Footnote 51 In his view, the resurrection of the Romanian nation, achieved by the unification of the Old Kingdom and the newly acquired provinces in 1918, had a complementary relationship with what Stan termed “the Romanian law” (legea românească).Footnote 52 Following the example set by the Walachian and Moldavian princes in the past of priviledging their own subjects over foreigners in front of the law, Stan believed that the spirit of the law had to be subordinated to national imperatives alone, rather than aiming for a sense of justice for everyone.Footnote 53 More importantly, by abiding to the primacy of the nation in the judicial process, the Romanian law carried within itself the seeds of the new and final resurrection of the Romanian nation.Footnote 54
After his time in Athens, Stan moved to Warsaw to study Law, Catholic Theology, and Letters for one year in 1934, followed in 1935 by another year of studies in Rome at the Gregorian Institute, focusing on Canon Law and Catholic Theology.Footnote 55 Between 1936 and 1937, he studied Law and Philosophy at the University of Munich.Footnote 56 Just as in the cases of other Orthodox clergymen, the turning point in his Legionary affinities came during the funeral ceremonies, organized by the Iron Guard, of Ion I. Moța and Vasile Marin, two Legionary leaders who died during the Spanish Civil War while fighting on the side of the Spanish nationalists (on January 13, 1937).Footnote 57 When the train carrying the bodies of the Legionary martyrs reached the Romanian border, Stan and his wife boarded the train and took active part in the ceremonies, including the grandiose burial staged by the Legionaries in Bucharest (on February 13, 1937).Footnote 58
Following these events, Stan officially joined the ranks of the Legion at the suggestion of Metropolitan Bălan, whose real intention was to use Stan as his eyes and ears in the Legionary Movement.Footnote 59 He also ordained the young Liviu Stan as a priest and offered him a teaching position—first in Apologetics, then in Canon Law—at the Academy of Orthodox Theology in Sibiu in order to put the financial investment in Stan's theological training to good use.Footnote 60 As Zoltán Pálfy has noted, in the eyes of the Transylvanian Romanian elite, priesthood was “the quintessence of the intellectual career within traditionalist ethnic society.”Footnote 61 In other words, in interwar Transylvania, Orthodox priesthood came with several advantages, such as social prestige and a leading position in society.
Stan's official membership was not the result of a hasty, irrational decision. Rather, it signaled the fact that after the burials of Moța and Marin, 33 percent of the Legionary candidates who stood for election in Parliament were Orthodox priests who had joined the ranks of the Iron Guard.Footnote 62 In this context, scholars have also stressed the importance of soldiers, civil servants, teachers, university professors, and the clergy in all forms of Fascism in the Habsburg “successor state.”Footnote 63
Due to their religious affiliation, Orthodox clergymen in Transylvania expressed a provincial, Romanian, and clerical form of Fascism, which in some respects differed from that of their Bucharest counterparts.Footnote 64 Despite their fondness of the Fascist ideal that said that all Christian denominations should be considered equal, when Metropolitan Bălan protested against the financial beneficies awarded to the Roman- and Greek-Catholic churches by the Romanian state following the scandal regarding Romania's concordat with the Vatican (1927), theologians in Sibiu professed a vivid contempt for the Uniate Church, whose claim of being a “national church”—long before the Romanian Orthodox Church—caused it to fall from the Legion's good graces.Footnote 65 The debate around the signing of the concordat encouraged some of the right-wing intellectuals (Nae Ionescu, Nichifor Crainic) and the Orthodox clergy in Transylvania to profess disdain toward democracy and look for other political outlets, such as the Fascist Iron Guard, to defend their “Christian” values in the political arena.Footnote 66
The administrative autonomy of the Orthodox Church in Transylvania from the Bucharest Patriarchy, the call for administrative decentralization, and the frenetic emphasis on the Orthodox faith as the only spiritual basis for developing any future Romanian nationalism were also hot items on the agenda of the clerical Fascists at the Theological Academy in Sibiu.Footnote 67 In addition, many Orthodox clergymen embraced the Fascist revolution as a means to improve their clergy's apostolic training and reshape its destitute status in relation to the Romanian state.Footnote 68 Accordingly, Stan reinterpreted the Legionary myth of national resurrection as prophesized by Corneliu Codreanu in a pragmatic manner, as an institutional reorganization of the Orthodox Church, and as a spiritual renewal of the moral apostolic life of its clergy; in other words, issues that had to be dealt with in a future Legionary state.Footnote 69
During the electoral campaign in autumn 1937, Ion Fleșeriu, the Legionary leader of Sibiu County, decided that Stan should deliver electoral speeches in different villages and small cities in Sibiu County in favor of the Legionary candidates on account of his brilliant intellect and his ardent Legionary activism.Footnote 70 He did just that when he took to the stage at an electoral rally in Miercurea Sibiului to speak in favor of the Legionary candidates in the upcoming elections with Commander of the Annunciation (comandant al Bunei-Vestiri) and one of the founding members of the Legion Corneliu Georgescu (1902–1945) and Legionary commander Dumitru Banea (1911–2000) who was the brother of the Legionary leader of Transylvania, Ion Banea (1905–1939).Footnote 71 With Ion Fleșeriu, Liviu Stan advertised the Legionary electoral list in the villages of Bradu and Alțâna, and with Ion Olteanu, he took part in another electoral meeting in Apoldu de Sus.Footnote 72
In order to increase the impact of the propaganda carried out by Orthodox priests, the Legionary program targeted specific social classes—peasants, blue-collar workers, village intellectuals, and so on—by referencing the sacrifice of Moța and Marin and by describing the Legionaries as “the soldiers of Christ.”Footnote 73 Aware of the peculiarities of the clerical Fascists from the Theological Academy in Sibiu, the local Legionary leadership sent them on propaganda tours only in villages where the population was overwhelmingly in favor of the Orthodox Church in order to prevent violent clashes between the Orthodox and the Uniates, which would have had undesirable consequences for the Legionary propaganda effort.Footnote 74
Stan later claimed that during the 1937 electoral campaign, at the direct recommendation of Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan, besides being responsible for Legionary propaganda, the leadership of Sibiu County entrusted him with the evaluation of new applicants and issuing new membership cards.Footnote 75 This promotion came as a reward for his intervention with Metropolitan Bălan where he encouraged Bălan to vacate the Sibiu archbishopric's two-room apartment at the Bulevard Hotel in Sibiu to make room for the new Legionary party headquarters.Footnote 76 Furthermore, he left the “Gheorghe Lazăr” nest (the smallest Legionary organization, made up of twelve men) headed by Nicolae Petrașcu (1907–1968) and joined a group of Legionary theologians from the Academy of Theology in Sibiu led by Father Spiridon Cândea (1902–1990).Footnote 77
The instauration of the royal dictatorship of Carol II (1893–1953) in February 1938 caused the Legionary priests to reconsider their allegiances to the Iron Guard.Footnote 78 One of these “repenting” priests was Liviu Stan, who decided to officially end his membership of the Iron Guard.Footnote 79 In autumn 1938, Metropolitan Bălan requested from all his subordinates, Stan included, a public statement of dissociation from the Iron Guard and convinced them to hand over all the Legionary propaganda material in their possession.Footnote 80 According to Ion Fleșeriu, the explanation for this unusual request might be related to the fact that even after Codreanu's assassination on November 29, 1938, Bălan sought to remain on good terms with King Carol II. Together with the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Alexandru Nicolescu of Blaj, he voiced his support for the royal government of Patriarch Miron Cristea at a public rally in Alba-Iulia.Footnote 81
Despite the public denunciation of his allegiance to the Iron Guard, Stan continued to foster Legionary ideas and to cultivate personal relations with Legionary clergymen. At the request of Father Ilie Imbrescu (1909–1949), a famous Legionary priest, Stan hid the manuscript of Imbrescu's book Biserica și Mișcarea Legionară (The Church and the Legionary Movement) and his personal papers at the Library of the Theological Academy in Sibiu.Footnote 82 A similar thing happened with the Legionary manifestos and three or four pistols belonging to the monk Mihăilescu, who in summer 1940 entrusted them to Liviu Stan for safekeeping.Footnote 83
III. Reforming the Church: A State Bureaucrat During the National Legionary State
On September 6, 1940, the authoritarian reign of King Carol II ended abruptly in abdication due to the social unrest caused by the territorial losses to Bolshevik Russia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. General Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) and the Legionary Movement, operating out of his underground hiding near Horia Sima, contributed to this event by inciting the masses to overthrow the dictatorial regime of Carol II.Footnote 84
The Legionary priests from Sibiu profited from the takeover of power, and because of their ability to survive the purges of 1938–1939, they were promoted within the ranks of the movement itself, the state, and the Orthodox Church.Footnote 85 No wonder that Metropolitan Bălan appointed his man Liviu Stan as Secretary General at the Department of Religious Denominations.Footnote 86 In an informative note received by the Securitate about Stan, the informant described him as “a fanatical Transylvanian Legionary, a superficial young man who always sits at his desk dressed in a green shirt with his revolver on the table.”Footnote 87 The recollections of archaeologist Vladimir Dumitrescu (1902–1992), who at that time was undersecretary of state at the same department, confirms this testimony. When describing his collaboration with the Legionary priests and theologians (Father Palaghiță, Father Imbrescu, Father Stan, and lay theologian Gheorghe Racoveanu), Dumitrescu remembered them as people “eager to do whatever they wanted, without any control” from the state administration.Footnote 88
In his new appointment, Father Stan committed himself to the consolidation of the Orthodox bishopric of Banat with its seat in Timișoara, as well as the preservation of the traditional autonomy of the Transylvanian Orthodox Church.Footnote 89 But the most challenging initiative of the Legionary clergy at the Department of Religious Denominations was related to a new law regulating the status of the Orthodox Church in the National Legionary State. Through the Patriarch Nicodim Munteanu (1864–1948), the Orthodox bishops had already initiated a discussion with General Antonescu about a future reorganization of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the newly emerging legislative framework of the military dictatorship. In official correspondence between the general and the patriarch, the collaboration with and the unchanged status of the Romanian Orthodox Church was secured.Footnote 90 Encouraged by his fruitful exchange with the patriarch, General Antonescu made a public appeal to the Romanian clergy asking them to refrain from any involvement in politics and to focus only on their pastoral duties.Footnote 91
Nevertheless, in autumn 1940, the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church assembled a committee of theologians, monks, and bishops to come before the Holy Synod and the state authorities to propose a new law intended to reshape the institution of the Orthodox Church according to authoritarian, Fascist principles.Footnote 92 By making use of different Legionary projects regarding the reformation of the Orthodox Church, these clergymen came up with a detailed piece of legislation that subordinated the church to the state, reformed monasticism, and drastically reduced the powers of the bishops.Footnote 93
In late November 1940, this group of clergymen presented Father Stan with the final draft of the proposal for him to revise and correct and then send to the Holy Synod for sanctioning and comments.Footnote 94 Revising the draft, Stan outlined a thirty-point document that encapsulated all the suggestions from the lower clergy, the monks, and the Legionary Movement.Footnote 95 A Canon Law expert, Stan translated Codreanu's precepts of national renewal through the lens of Orthodox canon law and, enjoying the upper hand, duly accommodated the ecclesiological views of the Legionary Movement with the latest legal decisions of the state.
Furthermore, through the voices of its intellectuals, theologians, and clergymen, the Iron Guard launched a press campaign and used all of its institutional leverage in the National Legionary State to put pressure on, and to set the agenda of, the deliberating bishops.Footnote 96 A series of articles signed mainly by Gheorghe Racoveanu suggested that the Holy Synod should adopt the proposal for the new law designed by the Legionary clergy.Footnote 97
Father Stan also contributed to this debate with articles in the most prestigious Legionary newspapers, targeting the intellectual members of the Legion. By praising the personality of Hieromonk Chesarie Păunescu (1888–1970), the former abbot of Cernica Monastery and the director of its monastic seminary, Stan excoriated the members of the Holy Synod as “young, elegant monks, exhibiting the manners of bachelors, always advertising themselves for higher office.”Footnote 98 Stan literally claimed that the most worthy and intellectually capable of the Orthodox monks were denied promotion to the position of bishop due to corruption in the church and the political intrusion of different political parties in the election process of bishops.
In the ordinary sessions of the Holy Synod, on December 3 and 4, 1940, in the context of a deterioration of the relations between the Iron Guard and General Antonescu, the proposal for the new religious legislation was presented to the Holy Synod for its attention and approval.Footnote 99 Among other things, the proposal stated that there was a need for educated clergymen (point six), the reform of the monasteries (point ten), a unitary view of church and state regarding the renumeration of priests (point fifteen), the termination by the Orthodox Church of any rental contracts with Jews (point twenty-eight), and the church to refrain from any involvement in politics (point twenty-six).Footnote 100 It was a sign of the discontent that had long been present among Orthodox clergy, coming from theologians and priests associated with the Iron Guard, who, at one time or another, had had their own specific problems with the Orthodox hierarchy.Footnote 101
After the proposal was discussed in the Holy Synod and reports were drawn up by various hierarchs in order to present the risks of adopting such a law unfavorable to the future of Romanian Orthodoxy, the final vote was held. Metropolitans Nicoale Bălan of Transylvania and Tit Simedrea of Bucovina vetoed the proposal's last point, which wished to reorganize the Orthodox Church by changing its internal statutes and requiring a much closer relationship of obedience to the state, causing the Holy Synod to unanimously reject the proposal for the new law in favor of the old one.Footnote 102 Father Stan's reaction to the decision of the Holy Synod was to side with the bishops, against his fellow Legionary priests, and to express his support for the relationship of mutual appreciation between the Orthodox clergymen and the Iron Guard.Footnote 103
IV. The Racist Years (1940–1941)
During the National Legionary State (September 14, 1940 to January 21–23, 1941), under the influence of the Nazi racial ideas that were streaming through the Iron Guard's intellectual milieu, Father Liviu Stan displayed an increasing propensity for racism in his writing for the Legionary press. He followed the path initiated by Constantin Papanace on the pages of the Legionary newspaper Cuvântul and at the School of Eugenics in Cluj—which moved to Sibiu in 1940 and was led by Iordache Făcăoaru, Gheorghe Făcăoaru (1881–1975), and Sabin Manuilă (1894–1964). Papanance, under the influence of the “racist scholarship” of the Nazis, had pointed out the existence of a “Gypsy problem” in Romania.Footnote 104 Stan constructed his own racial mindset, which excluded the Roma community from the Legionary nation.Footnote 105 He also claimed the necessity of
racist policies against the Gypsies. For all these reasons, racial policies should apply more to Gypsies than to Yids. It is enough to say that in comparison to Jewish blood, Gypsy blood is more present in Romanian blood. . . . Biologically speaking, Gypsies altered the national being more than the Jews. Bearing in mind that the purity of blood determines the purity of our spiritual being, the Gypsies caused more spiritual and moral damage to our spiritual and racial being than the Jews. Moreover, the Gypsies created the biological and spiritual context favorable to the Judaization of our nation. If they, together with the Fanariot rulers, had not sapped the foundations of the healthy, fiery, noble, and self-conscious being of our nation, the Judaic chain would have never been put on us.Footnote 106
The only solution that Father Stan saw for this imaginary alteration of the Romanian soul was the complete exclusion of the Gypsy minority from all the branches of the state, and ultimately, their isolation into a “Gypsy ghetto.”Footnote 107
According to Stan, the “Philistines” from the universities and political life were the fellow travelers of the Jewish spirit, incapable, however, to oppose the Legionary revolution.Footnote 108 Because of his rabid antisemitic and racist ideas, but also because of his strong belief in the Legionary revolution, the leadership put Stan's name on a list of Legionary intellectuals and leaders meant to deliver speeches on Sunday, January 19, 1941 in major cities all across Romania.Footnote 109 However, archival finds offer contradictory accounts about Stan's part in the Legionary rebellion of late January 1941, which ended with the public ban of the Iron Guard and the imprisonment of some of its top leaders.Footnote 110
The official state records keep a respectable silence regarding the implication of Stan in the Legionary revolt that was meant to overthrow their ally, General Antonescu.Footnote 111 Father Stan was brought for official interrogation in front of a military prosecutor, who afterward released him when Stan reminded him of his visit, in October 1940, to Nicolae Iorga and their anti-Fascist correspondence.Footnote 112 Nevertheless, according to the recollections of Nistor Chioreanu, Stan refused to sign a public statement disowning Horia Sima as the leader of the Legionary Movement.Footnote 113 Because of his unwillingness to publically condemn the Legionary leadership and his constant strife with the newly appointed bureaucrats in the ministry, on February 15, 1941, he submitted his resignation and returned to Sibiu.Footnote 114 The fact that Stan lost only his position in the government and escaped imprisonment after the Legionary rebellion was largely due to Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan, who threatened General Antonescu that he would expose how the state harassed the Legionary Orthodox priests from his diocese in a sermon.Footnote 115
Following his departure from the central state administration, Father Stan continued to teach and write extensively in Sibiu, focusing on his theological interests and abstaining from any political opinion or involvement.Footnote 116 Because of his former position in the Legionary government, Metropolitan Bălan—careful not to raise the suspicions of the state, which was still hunting for Legionaries—prohibited Father Stan from serving as a priest in the Orthodox Cathedral in Sibiu.Footnote 117
After the start of World War II, the antisemitic speech of the Orthodox Church changed dramatically in intensity and tone. Reputed theologians and bishops, such as the Patriarch Nicodim Munteanu (1864–1948) and the metropolitan of Moldavia, Irineu Mihălcescu (1874–1848), claimed that the Romanian army fought a “holy war against the Bolshevik hydra,” its sole purpose being the complete cleansing of the “Judaic Freemasonry.”Footnote 118 The recuperation of the provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which had been lost to the Soviets in 1940, and the entrance of Romanian troops into Soviet territory coincided with the deportation of Jews and Roma from Romanian territories to the controlled territories in the east.Footnote 119
The antisemitic turn of the Antonescu Regime, especially after the beginning of World War II, was met by Orthodox theologians with a sharp, almost instant radicalization of their own racial theology. The Departments of Theology in Bucharest and Sibiu produced highly nationalistic and rabidly antisemitic theological idioms in their scientific pursuit of a racial theology. With authors such as Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972), popular among students and clergymen alike, the radicalization of the Academy of Orthodox Theology in Sibiu took nobody by surprise.Footnote 120
Following in the footsteps of the ASTRA School of Eugenics and debating the newest racial anthropological trends presented in Buletin Eugenic și Biopolitic, in 1942 Father Stan published one of the most racist books produced by a representative of the Orthodox clergy during World War II.Footnote 121 Entitled Race and Religion (Rasă și religiune), the book laid the basis for a new approach to the racist undertakings of the Romanian intellectual milieu.Footnote 122 By critically assessing German as well as local theories of race, Stan reacted to the exclusion of Orthodox Fascist clergymen from the pages of Transilvania, the official journal of ASTRA, as well as to the preference of the ethnobiology experts based in Sibiu for Nazi racial theories, especially after the fall of the National Legionary State.Footnote 123
I fully agree with Vladimir Solonari that Romanian racists were faced with a basic yet impossible challenge: namely, claiming the purity of the Romanian race.Footnote 124 According to historical tradition, which held that it was the mixing of Dacians and Romans that birthed the Romanian nation, racist thinkers in Cluj could not uphold the racial purity of Romanians.Footnote 125 Nevertheless, contrary to Solonari, who considers Liviu Stan's racist views as a mere imitation of the discourse of the Cluj School of Eugenics and Anthropology, I argue that Stan's thought constitutes a contradiction with the aforementioned racist school, in an attempt to outline a theological response to scientific racism.Footnote 126 As Iuliu Moldovan has argued: “When others talk of race, we speak of neam or, more precisely, of ethnobiological substance. Because all manifestations of life, including spiritual ones, are biological.”Footnote 127
Father Stan argued that although human blood was the carrier of the biological features of a race, and despite the fact that there existed a symbiotic relationship between the biological and the spiritual traits of a race, only the human soul—as inscribed in spiritual, racial features—had a primacy over the biological body, imagined as the sustainer of the human being.Footnote 128 In other terms, Stan warned his colleagues from Sibiu that their German counterparts worshipped the myth of Aryan racial superiority as the cornerstone of their anti-Christian religion.
By emphasizing the religious, spiritual features of the human race and strongly lambasting the German “myth” of racial superiority associated with the Germanic religion of the Nazis, Stan followed in the footsteps of Nichifor Crainic's early criticisms of the Nazis's racial exaggerations directed against the Christian churches.Footnote 129 He also reacted to the secularist approach of the Cluj and Sibiu schools of anthropology, which wanted to integrate the social work performed by the Orthodox Church and oversee it through a superseding institution, the Cultural Hearth (Căminul cultural).Footnote 130 I hypothesize that, in his book, Father Stan was reacting to the racial radicalization occurring in the ecclesiastical environments of the Saxons in southern Transylvania, as well as the implementation, from the German Reich, of the anti-Christian, racist teachings of the Deutsche Christen among Transylvanian Saxons.Footnote 131
In order to ground his claims about the universal nature of the Christian religion, Father Stan—just as Nazi theologians did before him—ranted against the Jews as a decayed, corrupted, and degenerated race, with the sole purpose of defending the universality of Christianity at the expense of Jewish religion. Not just the Jewish race and religion but also the Nazi myth propagated by Rosenberg and the Deutsche Christen were heavily criticized and surpassed by Stan's racist interpretation of Genesis.Footnote 132
By claiming that from the creation of man onward the human race has been able to trace itself back to God, and that this pristine racial purity was preserved in the Romanian peasant, Stan went even further than Crainic. He claimed that the racial mixing between Romans and Dacians in the ethnogenesis of Romanians had been alleviated by the embrace of Christianity.Footnote 133
Therefore, Father Stan advocated for the religious necessity of a racist outlook in accordance with the divine plan initiated by God's creation of man. He sought to persuade his readers that racism was a divine commandment assigned to every Romanian in order to safeguard the order of the nations and races in the world as assigned by God:
The racist truth with all its consequences and addenda will impose on the lives of western Christians revisions and reforms that for Eastern Orthodox Christians are unproblematic, for both racism and nationalism as different forms of racism with their value systems can be found in the doctrine and life of the Orthodox Church. They are realities that Orthodoxy considers both in the form of doctrine and in its practice, with its organization into national churches, honoring them as creations by the hands of God. Thus, if you are a racist, you are and will be Romanian, and when you are no longer a racist, you begin to vanish as a Romanian, as a nation, to melt, to dissolve into a stronger racist solution, a more concentrated one that will last and survive your temporal, natural role and your eternal, divine role.Footnote 134
According to Father Stan, religious racism was closely related to the integral, religious nationalism voiced by Nichifor Crainic and Nae Ionescu, who considered all Romanians to be Orthodox, and vice versa. The Orthodox racism of the Fascist theologians from the Theological Academy in Sibiu targeted the Jewish minority at the same time as they hoped to provide a theological refutation of Nazi racism on the basis of its assumed anti-Christian character, rather than its genocidal, antisemitic nature. By denying the Semitic origins of Christianity, Father Stan fell in line with the latest developments in German Protestant theology, professing an “Aryan” Christology and draining Jesus's humanity of any hint of Jewish blood. According to one informer to the Securitate, Stan drafted a report to the Department of Religious Denominations suggesting the complete removal of the Old Testament from the Orthodox Church for being merely “Jewish annals” deprived of any hint of divine revelation.Footnote 135
V. Conclusions
Father Stan's ability to survive the Communist purges of Fascist clergymen ended in the mid-1960s when his leverage with the Securitate and the Communist Party's central administration faded away. Nevertheless, his professional career, spanning three decades, proves that in Communist Romania, his life stands out as an illustrative example of the collective biography of a generation of Orthodox Fascist clergymen. Whether they were blackmailed, threatened with details about their past, or confronted with their failing morality in order to be brought in line and used by the state to subdue various elements of the church, the destinies of these theologians prove that—although the policy of Communist cadres was selective and merciless—it could be overcome by those people eager to make themselves available to the state. The double allegiance displayed by Transylvanian clergymen such as Liviu Stan was a form of loyalty first and foremost to themselves, and it was one of the reasons they were eager to collaborate with any political regime in the hope of pursuing their own agendas.
As fellow travelers of the successive political regimes, the continuing presence of bureaucrats such as Liviu Stan in the state administration raises the issue of Communist Orthodoxy in post-1948 Romania. Skillfully playing the church against the state and the state against the church, these clergymen, who acted in their own defense, bounced back every time their credibility or the sincerity of their commitment to the Communist Party or the church was in question. Nevertheless, in the cases of Fathers Liviu Stan and Spiridon Cândea, their ability to maintain a double allegiance backfired, and both men spent their final years living in disgrace, shunned by the state's authorities.
In the context of church history and the process of whitewashing the controversial biographies of Orthodox clergymen in post-Communist Romania, church historians have received an unexpected helping hand from the former Communist authorities. Preoccupied with having a monopoly on the controversial past of various individuals as an instrument of coercion, party cadres and Securitate officers dealing with these clergymen imposed a conspiracy of silence on the Fascist history of the Orthodox Church. By omitting contentious events from its recent past—its participation in the Holocaust, the Fascist allegiances of some of its clergymen, its collaboration with Communist authorities, and so on—historians of the Orthodox Church have molded a canonical version of its history according to the Communist ideal of national history. Accordingly, in post-Communist Romania, this survival of an unexamined historical narrative ensured the unblemished perpetuation disseminated by church historians among students and clergymen, of the myth of the legendary generation of Sibiu interwar theologians.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Victoria Barnett (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), Prof. Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College), and Fr. Kevin P. Spicer (Stonehill College) for their constant encouragement and for their comments on the first draft of this article which improved its overall quality. All mistakes are my own.
