Author: His Beatitude Daniel, Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church
Keywords: Romania, village, peasantry, Church, parish, priest, community, agriculture
Abstract:
The study is divided in four sections: 1. The Traditional Spirituality of the Romanian Village, 2. The Present Crisis of the Romanian Village. 3. Hope for the Romanian Village: A Profitable Agriculture, Socially, Ethically and Ecologically-Oriented. The traditional Romanian village, with all its values, spiritual, cultural and material represents the perfect human community that can assure a sustainable future for the whole society. This future can be achieved (as history has proved) by two factors: by the Church (through the priest and the faithful and by the popular culture and traditions associated with this) and by the small and medium agriculture, or sustainable, but not separately. The manner in which these two factors have worked together in time, preserving a continuity that made it worthy to be desired even for the westerners who support the excessively mechanized agriculture and a nihilistic culture, is probably the main force of the present study. It has been noticed throughout history that any separation between them, or any change of their traditional course (i.e. the persecuted Church, atheistic culture, collectivization, the excessively mechanized agriculture, popular tradition left behind etc.) led to bad results. Unfortunately, the Western society (although less on the level of decisional factors), that many people are vainly imitating it, has ill-timed noticed that the excessively mechanized agriculture, together with the non-christian view on earth or land, have returned as a boomerang against it, causing irrecoverable ecological crises. This happened due to many reasons, also deeply analysed by His Beatitude Father Patriarch Daniel.
(The present text represents the inaugural speech given by His Beatitude, Father Patriarch Daniel, on the occasion of receiving the academic title Doctor Honoris Causa by the “Babeș Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, 7th December 2011).
Pages: 12-22