{"id":1044,"date":"2020-04-08T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2020-04-08T09:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2020-04-08T08:01:50","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T08:01:50","slug":"high-religiosity-and-resisting-covid-19-governmental-advice-in-romania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=1044","title":{"rendered":"High religiosity and \u2018resisting\u2019 Covid 19 governmental advice in Romania"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By Maria Nita<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Covid 19 social distance posed real challenges for the largely rural, traditional and sensorial Orthodox Church in Romania \u2013 where kissing icons and other embodied rituals could not so easily find a virtual counterpart. In a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/fact-tank\/2018\/12\/05\/how-do-european-countries-differ-in-religious-commitment\/\" onclick=\"javascript:urchinTracker ('\/outbound\/article\/www.pewresearch.org');\">Pew survey<\/a>, Romania scored 1st among 34 European Countries as the country with the highest religiosity\u00a0\u2013 yet we have to look beyond religious commitment if we are to dig deeper into the reasons why Romanian priests seemed to ignore official advice and gave communion in the midst of the pandemic. A recent\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/2020\/03\/24\/priests-give-communion-with-shared-spoon-as-romania-covid-19-cases-grow\" onclick=\"javascript:urchinTracker ('\/outbound\/article\/www.euronews.com');\">euronews article<\/a> suggests that priests had not had an order from the Patriarch \u2013 which makes an interesting point about religious authority in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n<p>High religiosity aside, as a British-Romanian academic I can see the \u2018new Romania\u2019 of the last couple of decades embracing European freedoms and progressive values and being increasingly at odds with the highly conservative Romanian Orthodox Church. Yet I can also see Orthodox churches preserving their special status in both town and country, much like the candle-lit golden oases in the grey Communist Romania of my childhood.<\/p>\n<p>When Ninian Smart, the British scholar of religion, asked a Romanian informant in the 1970s whether the Orthodox Church had \u2018a dialogue\u2019 with the Communist Party, which might help it thrive at the side of \u2018an ideologically hostile regime\u2019\u00a0\u2013 the retort captured the dry taste of Romanian humour: \u2018Why should we have dialogue if we see each other every day?\u2019 The\u00a0Church maintained its independence from the Communist Party through silent acts of resistance. Clearly, new survival and adaptive mechanisms are now badly needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Maria Nita The Covid 19 social distance posed real challenges for the largely rural, traditional and sensorial Orthodox Church in Romania \u2013 where kissing icons and other embodied rituals could not so easily find a virtual counterpart. In a recent Pew survey, Romania scored 1st among 34 European Countries as the country with the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1046,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[387,386,390,389,184,388],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-corona","tag-covid","tag-orthodox","tag-religiosity","tag-romania","tag-virus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1044"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1045,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions\/1045"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}