Clark, Roland. "Missionaries." Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania: The Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 125–139. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350100985.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 26 September 2021, 09:12 UTC. Copyright © Roland Clark 2021. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 7 Missionaries Evangelical groups such as Baptists, Brethren, Pentecostals and Nazarenes saw an enormous difference between themselves and other Repenters such as Seventh-Day Adventists and Bible Students. The Romanian police did not. They categorized all Repenters as criminals, together with a number of other illegal religious movements including Inochentists and Old Calendarists. Officials often confused the Bible Students with Nazarenes in particular, although both movements took pains to distance themselves from each other.1 One report from 1923 claimed that Inochentists and Adventists from Piatra village in Orhei county became over-excited when they saw two rockets in the sky that had been launched by a military unit nearby as part of a celebration. Believing that the Holy Spirit had come to earth, they attacked the gendarme station, the post office, the priest and a Jew.2 As Kapaló has shown, such reports had little basis in reality. This one was copied almost verbatim from a sensationalist newspaper article in Universul and the facts were not verified until five years later, when another report confirmed that nothing of the sort had happened.3 Many of the groups that police equated with Repenters were Russian movements such as Shtundists, Dukhobors, Molokans and Old Believers (Lipoveni). According to the police, Reapers (Secerătorii) believed that they were living in the last days and that Jesus would soon return to gather them to heaven. They refused to take oaths or to serve in the military. Karaimites were Jewish Christians who practised circumcision, Skoptsy castrated themselves entirely and Khlysts (also known as Milenarişti) were apparently pantheists who believed that God communicates directly with all of creation. If one believes the police reports, they engaged in ecstatic dances to gain supernatural visions and indulged in night-time orgies. The Swedenborgians followed the teachings of the 1 ANIC, Fond MCA, Dosar 137/1922, ff. 13, 18. 2 Ibid., Dosar 177/1923, f. 9. 3 Kapaló, Inochentism, 156–9. 126 Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg; the Quakers (Tremurătorii) worshipped by dancing, jumping and weeping in order to gain illumination; and the New Israelites tried to convert Christians to Judaism. Finally, Salvationism – or the Salvation Army – ‘is a military organization with ranks, decorations, marches, parades, etc., including uniforms for both men and women. They conduct propaganda through singing and fanfare’.4 One heresy gave birth to another, Vartolomeu Stănescu said, and heretics made sins into virtues, such that Inochentists supposedly treated sexual immorality as a means of salvation.5 Convinced that Repenters were a threat to society, individual gendarmes abused their power to prevent them receiving permission to open churches, to stop children attending school, or arresting and beating men, women and children attending prayer meetings.6 Particularly zealous gendarmes occasionally closed Reformed or Lutheran churches as well, and these churches had to write to the ministry reminding them that they were legally recognized denominations.7 The international connections Repenters enjoyed made them particularly susceptible to accusations that they were ‘not Romanian’. Occasionally, priests wrote entire pamphlets about the dangers of Khlysts and Mormons even though there were very few Khlysts and no Mormons in the country.8 These pamphlets used fear campaigns about Mormons spreading polygamy to tar all ‘sectarians’ with the same brush. Repenters in Broscăuţi, in Dorohoi county, reported that the priest and teacher were planning to murder them and throw their bodies into the river. Other priests encouraged their parishioners to attack Repenters, disrupting weddings, vandalizing prayer houses and beating preachers.9 The earliest coordinated Orthodox attempt to combat Repenter Christianity in Romania was the Romanian Orthodox Association, founded in 1885 to fight ‘foreign propaganda’, which it said was being distributed freely by Repenter evangelists.10 During the inter-war period the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) appointed anti-sectarian missionaries whose role was to work in rural communities combating the influence of Repenters and trying to convert them back to Orthodoxy. They produced a vast quantity of anti-sectarian writings 4 ACNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 10727, vol. 2, ff. 3–6. 5 Vartolomeu Stănescu, ‘Ce sunt ereziile creştine şi din ce cauza se nasc ele?’ Misionarul 2, no. 6 (1930): 499. 6 Dobrincu, ‘Sub puterea cezarului’, 116–19. 7 ACNSAS, Fond Documentar, Dosar 13408, vol. 1, f. 250. 8 Vasile Loichiţa, Chiliasmul (Milenarismul): Expunere şi critică dogmatică (Cernăuţi: Editura Autorului, 1926); Marin Iliescu, Poligamiea în America: Secta mormonilor: Doctrina, obieceiurile şi istoria lor (Alexandria: Tipografia Alecsandri, 1932). 9 Dobrincu, ‘Sub puterea cezarului’, 121. 10 Ursul, ‘From Political Freedom’, 233. Missionaries 127 attacking and defaming Repenters.11 Vasile G. Ispir was appointed Professor of Sectology at the University of Bucharest in 1922, publishing sermons, pamphlets and textbooks attacking Repenters and describing missionary strategies.12 In addition to his active role as a preacher and teacher, on Sunday mornings Ispir organized teams of students to run ‘Sunday Schools’ in primary schools on the outskirts of Bucharest. Their goal was ‘to touch those chords of the soul which develop in children with appropriate dispositions [simţăminte alese] and to cultivate a noble character and a respect towards holy things’.13 Other Orthodox churches had tried similar missionary initiatives during the nineteenth century. From 1885 onwards Serbian priests in Austria-Hungary began holding congresses to discuss how to combat the popularity of the Nazarenes. These were grassroots initiatives by parish priests. They began by calling for harsher state repression, but by the mid-1890s these assemblies began looking inward and argued that people were becoming Repenters because Orthodox priests were not doing enough to combat the threats of Western liberalism, the secular intelligentsia, civil servants and the press.14 Their arguments focused on Orthodox failures, national identity and foreign threats, and the solutions they proposed consistently involved changing Orthodoxy itself. This was as much a debate about the relationship between Orthodoxy and modernity as it was about actual conversions. The Russian Orthodox Church organized ‘internal missions’ between 1886 and 1917, which were specifically focused on preventing the spread of Repenters and other non-Orthodox religions.15 Metropolitan Evlogii 11 Representative titles of this literature include Const. Nazarie, Duminica, botezul şi ierarhia bisericească după adventişti (Bucharest: Tipografia ‘Cărţilor Bisericeşti’, 1910); Const. Gr. Chirică, Lupi rapitori în piei de oi (Galaţi: Institutul de Arte Grafice ‘Energia’, n.d.); Ioan Cotârlă,Sf. Cruce, Sf. Icoane, luminările şi tămâia (Arad: Tiparul Tigpografie Diecezane, 1929); Mina Gaşpar, Legea lui Moise, sâmbăta evreilor şi duminica creştinilor (Arad: Tiparul Tigpografie Diecezane, 1929); Vasile Gheorghiu, Despre botezul ‘cu Spirit Sfânt şi cu foc’ şi darurile harismatice (Arad: Tiparul Tipografiei Diecezane, 1929); I. N. Dăvărescu, Feriţi-vă de adventişti şi de toţi rătăciţii vremurilor noastre! (Arad: Tiparul Tipografiei Diecezane, 1930); Ilarion V. Felea,Critica ereziei baptiste (Sibiu, 1937); V. Dolinescu, Lupta contra sectelor religioase (Bârlad: Atelierele Grafice N. Peiu, 1939). 12 Vasile Gh. Ispir, Bibliografia subiectelor tratate în Seminarul de Sectologie de sub direcţiunea d-lui Profesor Dr. V. Gh. Ispir, în anii 1932/33, 1933/34 şi 1934/35 (Bucharest: Tipografia Ziarului, 1936); Vasile Gh. Ispir, Curs de sectologie (Bucharest: Facultatea de Teologie din Bucureşti, 1938); Vasile Gh. Ispir, Sectele religioase. Un pericol national şi social (Bucharest: Tipografia ‘Cărţilor Bisericeşti’, 1942). 13 Asociaţia Misionară a Studenţilor Creştini Ortodocşi. Zece ani de activitate (1926–1936) (Bucharest, 1936). 14 Aleksov, Religious Dissent, 135–41. 15 J. Eugene Clay, ‘Orthodox Missionaries’, 38–69; Heather J. Coleman, ‘Defining Heresy: The Fourth Missionary Congress and the Problem of Cultural Power after 1905 in Russia,’Jahrb ücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52, no. 1 (2004): 70–91; Heather J. Coleman, ‘Theology on the Ground: Dmitrii Bogoliubov, the Orthodox Anti-Sectarian Mission, and the Russian Soul’, in Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context, ed. Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 64–84. 128 Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania wrote that ‘in the dioceses, in Church circles, [the missionaries] were feared, but they were not loved nor were they trusted’.16 Associated with Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, the missionary endeavour in Russia was about