Tateo , Giuseppe Under the Sign of the Cross: The People's Salvation Cathedral and the Church-Building Industry in Postsocialist Romania (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 189 Tateo, Giuseppe. Under the Sign of the Cross: The People’s Salvation Cathedral and the Church-Building Industry in Postsocialist Romania. Space and Place, 18. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2020. xix + 243 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $120.00: £89.00. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Orthodox faithful in Romania were not well served by their leaders under Ceaușescu. The church leaders’ compliance with the regime can be explained by the privileged position and the freedom to worship which they enjoyed, and they expressed their gratitude for that privilege in the ritual adulation of Ceaușescu. Sycophancy towards Ceaușescu became a commonplace amongst the Orthodox hierarchy, spawning declarations in which black was presented as white. Whilst reprehensible in itself, this toadying to the regime was surpassed in its infamy by the silence of Orthodox prelates in the face of the destruction between 1984 and 1989 of eighteen churches as part of Ceaușescu’s plan to rebuild the centre of Bucharest. If this silence was a hallmark of acquiescence to the regime, Patriarch Teoctist’s telegram of support for Nicolae Ceaușescu, sent on 19 December 1989, just two days after the shootings in Timișoara, was an outrageous act of validation. The telegram congratulated Ceaușescu on his re-election as Party leader at the November Party Congress and praised his ‘outstanding activity’ and ‘wise and far-seeing guidance’. It hailed the ‘golden age which justifiably bears your name and its achievements which will endure for thousands of years’ (‘Telegramă’, România liberă, 20 December 1989). Any grain of honour Teoctist might have gained on 18 January 1990 by bowing to public pressure and resigning was lost within two months when he was recalled, a sign that perhaps the Orthodox hierarchy was unable to find any prelate less compromised. Teoctist’s reinstatement was proof of a poverty of morality and eloquent testimony to a church badly compromised by almost total servility to a despot. It is in this context that Giuseppe Tateo’s arresting study of the project to build the People’s Salvation Cathedral in Bucharest (Catedrala Mântuirii Neamului) can be placed. Consecrated in November 2018, the cathedral is still under construction and is claimed to be the largest eastern Orthodox church in the world by area. Its final cost is estimated to be in excess of $400 million. Tateo describes it as a ‘compensatory project’. Presenting itself as a victim of Ceaușescu’s plan of urban and rural ‘systematization’ (sistematizare) — Tateo terms it curiously resistematizare (p. 39) — the Romanian Orthodox Church claims the right to build the cathedral as partial reparation for those churches bulldozed by the regime between 1977 and 1989. Drawing upon detailed ethnographical research, leavened with an impressive command of theoretical literature on the social life of architecture and SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 190 urban special symbolism, the author examines the development of religious infrastructure in Romania, where four thousand Orthodox churches have been constructed over the three decades since the revolution. At the same time, Tateo’s book offers an analysis of secularization and urban change, and their impact upon the course of nationalism in the country. In doing so, he provides signposts for the study of these phenomena within eastern Christianity as a whole. In reading postsocialism through the lens of religious practice, the author argues that political and cultural discourse has been conducted ‘under the sign of the cross’. This approach has much to commend itself, insofar as the study of postsocialism in Romania has underestimated the significance of the growth of secularization, especially in the ranks of the younger generation. That secularization has drawn upon anti-clericalism, fuelled itself by the disenchantment of those who see many priests as placing a pecuniary interest above a spiritual one in serving their flocks. Parishes are urged to buy icons, candles, calendars and books and sell them to the faithful in order to recoup the cost. The fees for life-cycle rituals have doubled over the last five years, and in some parishes, priests solicit donations from believers by making unannounced visits to their homes. Tateo’s...