Interview with Ovidiu Romosan which took place on 22 July 2006 in my apartment.


The Romanian Orthodox are without the Bible, and the Church is without Christ. Particularly, the priests banished God from the Church


Chung: How can you define Orthodoxy in Romania?

Ovidiu Romosan: Orthodoxy in Romania must be characterized and defined from a historical point of view. It has had a positive role in Romania’s development because it was closely related to our leaders, who defended Romania from the invasion of the three Empires that surrounded Romania and especially from the Muslims. This is true not only for Romania, but for the whole of Europe.

Many times Romania blocked the Turks conquering strategy, throughout history. Orthodoxy in the past in Romania was positive and some priests, monks or intellectuals had a positive influence in Romania in terms of what concerns the Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, once Communism appeared, with the Russians tanks, we didn’t have more than 2,000 members.

Because of this persecution of the Romanian people in general and even against priests, some of the Orthodox priests began to betray the cause they had been fighting for, the cause of Christ and some of them tried to protect themselves, to stay alive and not to be imprisoned. Others thought that they could make a pact with the aggressor for a short time and they had been waiting for the Americans so long; and this would have been a reason to return to Christ.

So, this spirit of cheap negotiation of the Orthodox priests made society lose its uprightness and the preachers of the Bible lost their backbone. This was transmitted to the people, who thought that if the leaders could betray them, then they could do the same – using compromise as a method of daily survival.

This is what happened which resulted in the Romanian Orthodox being without the Bible and the Church to be without Christ. Particularly, the priests banished God from the Church because they had to make their living easier, sometimes to have fun, to live an immoderate life, even more immoderate than an ordinary citizen who comes to the Church.

This compromise, this hypocrisy of the Church’s leaders, later came to destroy the churches and to sustain the Communists, even in the transition period, after 1989, and to sustain Party leaders who had pro-Soviet attitudes, who imprisoned people, and who brought to trial those who had democratic attitudes during the Communist period.

Those priests compromised both Orthodoxy and the future of the Romanian people, to use these words, they “mortgaged” it.

Fortunately, the Romanian youth, who often won grants abroad or foreign grants sponsored here, in Romania, or who worked in multinational companies in Romania, noticed that hypocrisy is wrong in any place, and from my sociological approach, I can see that the new generation is going to grow; this generation rose in opposition to their parents, maybe even to their elder brothers. Even if, sometimes, this new generation is not entirely under the sway of biblical values, my opinion is that they have a great chance to find the essence of Christianity, which is love for God and love for their fellows.

The respect that young people share is unique; you can’t see the same thing in the people who are 50 or 60 years old and who have an odd way of making bad jokes, while the young people have self-esteem, they enter great companies, they have a “job description”, they know what a “job description” is, they have taken loans from the banks to buy a house or a car; a man with his wife usually, because being alone is difficult, people with one child or two. Credit, which is a Western institution, made the young people more rational, intellectual and able to make less compromises. [Ovidiu has a notably positive view of youth in terms of Romania’s future].

Chung: I want to ask you, Max Weber said that the spirit of Capitalism was lacking in Catholicism and from the Chinese, Indian and even from the Orthodox confession. Do you believe that the young people of tomorrow have something of the capitalist spirit?

I am very sure that they do. There are young people of 18, 20 or 22 years old that already have their own enterprises, they are students in Romania and they’ve got enterprises that are growing.

Chung: Where did the capitalist spirit come from?

The capitalist spirit comes from many things. Firstly, it comes through imitation. If they went abroad to study, they could see it there, and not only that. Some of them went abroad to work, the so-called «strawberry people». We have a few million people who are abroad and who send almost 3 billions dollars back to the country every year. And that money is more important than the social policy of the Government. These young people, especially the ones who had scholarships or the ones who worked in multinational companies learned every day from their colleagues that you can’t exist in a competitive and globalize world if you aren’t professionally well prepared, if you don’t work in teams, and that you can’t go on if you don’t have a well organized life, a decent house to live in, a good car to go to work, (not losing whole days having poor cars serviced). On the one hand, young people, through imitation, have seen what pragmatic behaviour of the modern human being means and, on the other hand, they have reached this idea rationally, deductively.

Chung: Orthodoxy put the accent on the liturgy as a way of praying and homage, but this can lead to a lack of content. The homage’s objective, which is God, as well as God’s Word, is lacking, and these are not reflected in the religious life of Romania. What do you think about this?

You can’t say that in an absolute way, that in a liturgy and in homage you can’t find God, but the connection between the believer’s spirit and God is mediated by priests at a certain level, the human being starts to confuse the priest with God, and the priest abrogates to himself so much importance, that he thinks he is a little God for his parishioners.

So, people think that the priest can do miracles, miracles that have been performed by God at a specific moment. They think only God and Jesus Christ performed miracles and in the present and in the future only the priests or the saints can do miracles. The way in which they sanctify different people, very fast, is wrong. For example they canonized a Moldavian leader, Stephen the Great, who indeed did some great things, in that he defended Europe from the Turks, for example, but at the same time he killed innocent people, he had a lot of women, he was drunk all the time and maybe he was more than that; well, he didn’t do any miracle in order to become a Saint.

In consequence, Orthodoxy, mediated by priests, took on some unique attributes, which are the attributes of God, to perform miracles and to transfer power to a priest, a king or an icon, so that they have the gift to make you healthy if you kiss it. Those things can only be solved through faith in God, and faith exists, if you read the Bible directly, collectively, daily, understanding it rationally, preaching it and testifying to Jesus. There are Orthodox who don’t testify to Jesus, even if they participate in the liturgy and they are impressed by it.

There is a significant difference between Transylvania, on the one hand, and Muntenia and Moldavia, on the other hand. Until 1944, when the Russians came, the Transylvanian development level had been superior to that of Muntenia or Moldavia. Also, the Transylvanian mentality is more positive than the others and is closer to the Germans than to the Turks. Between the Romanian mentality from Transylvania and the German mentality, there is the Hungarian mentality, which is closer to the German mentality than the Transylvanian mentality.
In 1944, when the Russians occupied Romania, Transylvania had a very high level of development; there were factories, centuries old, which were famous for exporting goods. When the Communists came, the first thing they did was to block Transylvania’s development, because it represented a danger and it could “have gone West”. They recruited their future partisans from Oltenia and Moldavia. Years after the Russian occupation, maybe 20- 30 years, maybe until 1980 or even later, all the Romanian policemen were from Oltenia, all the Military Chiefs were from Moldavia, and all the directors (the best positions), were from Transylvania. Policemen could steal, because they didn’t like to work, andf Moldavians liked to give commands, so they went to the Army.

Of course, these elements are not official, they don’t have a clear structure, they are not formal concepts, but, if you do sociological research - and I did when I was young – you can see the difference in mentalities between the three Romanian provinces, and there are gaps. In consequence, the strongest impact has been of an economic kind.

I believe that the lack of well-balanced economic development in the three Romanian provinces and the decline in Orthodoxy, made this situation happen. The fault is not entirely of Communist origin.

Chung: In these times, E.U. Integration has become a current subject for the people to consider; the E.U. was based on Protestant mentality. Even if Western confessional faith has faded, western society’s way of seeing things is based on Protestant Ethics, which is lacking in Romania. So, if Romania integrated, there would be a difference between the mentality and the culture. What do you think about this?

We can say we are on a different step of the European scale of values with our “entrepreneurial” spirit, with our initiative or our responsibility….

Chung: And the lack of ruling?

The lack of ruling is the third thing, because the leadership is based on the first two basic elements, responsibility and initiative. We are still far away from a European middle way, but these values, in my opinion, only sustain a hypothesis, which I have never met before or maybe it existed, but I have never met it. Right now, modern development could be in the opposite way. Capital should determine an initiative, its development and the criterion of responsibility for it. The initiative spirit will itself never lead to the capital.

Why? Because banks are well developed now, young people’s experience in transnational consortiums has already been developed and capital, through its logic, obliges people to protect and to develop it against competitors in order to obtain better efficiency. In order to obtain a higher profit, to obtain economy and efficiency, capital obliges you to invest continually, but there is also an obvious mentality which says that it is appropriate to be rich or to have a lot of capital.

And because credit is very well developed at this moment, Romanian banks use the money for the population, and foreign banks in Romania offer credit to authorities which has never happened before, but we don’t have enough co-financing to use this money. That is why daily credit and experience will force young people to develop their entrepreneurial spirit, because, by imitation, they take on the habits of western consumerist behaviour - they buy cars and houses, they travel, but they can’t do that without working.

And the young people notice it is more advantageous to work as an entrepreneur than as an employee. All these elements, combined with other differences to Max Weber’s time, are another way of combining productivity factors and they will lead to a spiritual development of the entrepreneurial spirit. Unfortunately, it is possible that this will not be correlated to faith in Christ and especially to the faith in the Holy Bible, as preached by the Protestants.

This phenomenon happened in Western Europe, also: I saw churches that were almost empty or occupied by older people. In consequence, there is a possibility that Romania will develop in a progressive way on the surface, in future years, but it might be a development without God, without a religious basis and it is possible that conflicts will be generated between different groups; there are conflicts now, also, and it is possible it may be like it used to be in the U.S.A. , in terms of the fights between the blacks and the whites, between the rich and the poor, to be a class fight, as in Karl Marx’s times.

Chung: It is a proper period to develop relationships with Western Europe, but Romania needs a development model of economic society and the Western Europeans can’t really understand the Orthodox and post- Communist mentality. From where can we take the model? Through Politics, Romania allies itself with Europe and the United States, but they still don’t understand the Romanian mentality, they are looking out for their own interests.
Do you think the Korean model is positive for Romania, considering they have had the same Communist experience, and they are still Communist now; Romania, when it was ruled by Ceausescu, was North Korea’s best friend. Why couldn’t Romania be South Korea’s best friend right now?


This is a very difficult question and there were books written that haven’t solved the problem yet. Romania obviously needs a model but, before that, it needs a vision. This vision implies a diagnosis of the existing situation and, at the same time, the settlement of a demonstrative scenario which would show where it should be, and a parallel scenario which could tell us where we’d like to be. We don’t know yet where we would like to be. A vision means 20 or 25 years, and the Government changes once in 4 years.

So, a strategy is longer than a regime and all the Governments that will come will not work in collaboration, they will destroy almost everything that the former Government has done before them. And there is another negative phenomenon: the party leaders, instead of staying in their parties, automatically become administration leaders.

But the party leaders aren’t real party leaders, they are great entrepreneurs, great capitalists of Romania. The capitalist joins a party in order to get into the Administration and to promote business for his firm’s sake. When this mixture exists, like an economic- politic- administrative oligarchy, represented by certain examples, like the vice- prime minister, who was Copos until now, a great entrepreneur and company owner, he entered the political world and continued to promote his own business.

We cannot call it vision, in these circumstances; there isn’t any self-control of the person or of the political class, so it can’t eliminate the people who go into politics to get rich. In this case, the vision is uncertain, because if you don’t have the vision, you can’t have the pattern, and a pattern needs a dynamic vision, which you approach in different ways, from the viewpoint of “driving forces”, action factors, agents, actors, budgets, periods, graphics, sums, measurable quantities; this pattern has to be shared by the ministers, by the civil society, and many times it has to go to a referendum.

In Romania, even if the referendum is written into the Constitution, nobody can apply it in a normal way, it can only be applied in rare situations and in an absurd way. Nevertheless, even if we need a pattern, we don’t have the possibility to apply it now, but, as soon as we enter the E.U., which needs us, because it will bring a new market, an important one, which has not been entirely taken by them. Products sold in Romania are mostly low quality and imported from Turkey, China or even local goods, but without an I.S.O. Once we join the E.U., there will be quality standards required, and those products will not sell anymore.

There will be foreign products on the market. So, the European Parliament will benefit also from some Romanian politicians, not only the Romanian market. If there are more politicians in the Popular Party than in the Social-democratic Party, a balance will take place at a European level and they will rule.

If there are more social democrats from Romania in the future parliament, social democracy will lead the future E.U. At a European level, they are equal and Romania will bring almost 40 politicians. Once we are in, the European parties will force the Romanian administration to adopt a pattern, and this will be very hard to find, because not even the E.U. has a pattern.

They are trying to introduce a European Constitution in which the European Committee has more power to impose on the states, because at the moment it’s not entirely correct. A lot of the obligations which are accepted at a European level are not applied everywhere.

What are we going to do? Are we following the Romanian pattern or the European pattern which doesn’t exist yet?

Even more, there is a will from the presidency to subordinate the people to American and English orientations, but basically American, which will create some problems with our future partners from the E.U., maybe, because the E.U. was built as a counterbalance to Japan and the U.S.A. The E.U. collaborates with the U.S.A. only militarily, but there are a lot of domains in which they compete and they will do it often in the future, because there will be a lack of resources.

Re the South-Korean pattern, Romania would be more privileged if it could undertake a South-Korean pattern, because, if we don’t take this, we will surely take a South American pattern, which is built on a separation, a polarization between the rich, small, leading class and the mass of poor people.

The South-Korean pattern, and I noticed it going to Korea, has a very well developed middle- class, which works hard and which has an entrepreneurial spirit and it is able to support a whole society, no matter if a big trust failed, if a great company or even the state has made a mistake, if it borrowed more than it could afford and it could develop into a general disaster, as happened in Asian countries, when the people donated their jewels to pay the debts. Why? In order to have two things: first, the citizen, as a small enterpreneur, knew that without a strong country he could not resist and, second, because he had a faith inherited from the Protestant spirit, mostly, but also from the Catholic one, which is not the same in Korea as in Europe; if it had been the same as in Europe, there would have been a strong dispute between the two confessions in Korea.

Chung: In our country, Confucianism, Catholicism and Buddhism are very well tolerated.

That means it is not the Catholicism from Europe, or maybe the Protestantism that had an influence upon Europe or maybe the Catholicism influenced the Protestantism in Korea.... I don’t know any details.

This South-Korean spirit is a more desirable one which can be applied in Romania, but a pattern needs the knowledge of all its characteristics by the ones who implement it. This implies a number of exchanges between deputies, science scholars, scholars, politicians from Romania and Korea. A lot of Romanians should go to work in Korea instead of Spain, to pick strawberries.

In Korea they should have a job in industry, not picking strawberries a few moths a year. In Korea they could work for years in high-technology industry and there could be mixed financial societies to support mutual initiatives, not only from Korea to Romania, but also Romania could invest in Korea and this would guarantee a bilateral development. If there is no bilateral commitment, we will have a very big external debt, with a low capacity of payment in the future and what is happening now would be repeated, the budgetary deficiency would increase from 0.5 to 3%, which is over the E.U. acceptance level.


Chung: You said that the lack of vision leads to the lack of pattern, which is correct. But the lack of vision is due to a lack of leadership. To be a good leader, you need creative thinking, a vision. Why do we lack leadership?

The lack of leadership is still true for the political class, for the economic department, but in my opinion they have made a few steps forward. In the economic department the leadership is more and more modern. Now, I’m working in a department which provides software products and I can see that the situation is better than a few years ago, the negotiations are very good, the contracts, the quality clauses, the maintenance are things that exist right now, but from the political point of view, nothing has changed, there are still the activists who lead, using their strings to manipulate things. They are the same people who moved from one party to another, considering their survival strategies. In consequence, until the political class is re-organized, we will have to wait for this generation to retire.

The Romanian society’s problem during transition is a cultural and moral one, at the same time, these are closely related one to the other. In Communist times, we can’t say that Romania benefited from a certain degree of culture, the schools worked, the education was compulsory, some masterpieces of Universal Literature were studied in the last years of the Communist regime, so the people had access to culture.

Unfortunately, the Romanian people lacked a pragmatic culture; the Romanian people were more cultural consumers and less producers, less users of the cultural concepts in their daily lives. In consequence, the Romanians’ way of living is upside-down in this transition period, it is contradictory because it lacks pattern, because there haven’t been any patterns for a long time, the first patterns that appeared were interesting, exciting, but in a few years it was shown that they were short-term, provisory, even dangerous patterns.

Other new patterns, often progressive and valuable are attacked by the press, by the governers and they are doubted; so, the Romanian way of living, the Romanian culture right now is quite disrupted, fussy, unstabilized and we cannot say culture, but cultures, there are different groups that share certain options, but they communicate less.

For example, there are ‘rocker’ groups who are already 50, who bought motorcycles, who live in their groups and they don’t care for others; there are groups of young people -“manelisti” , medium-level educated, who listen to cheap music, they use nasty words and they drink alcohol, they put on parties and they earn money from different illegalities, businesses in which someone is always tricked and loses; there are also groups of people who use the Internet, which brings IT on a higher level worldwide, and the information society; they are people who spend a lot of time in front of the computer, some of them for knowledge and for their profession, others to play, to chat, to find partners for different activities, from marriage to leisure and work.

There is another group, the so- called restaurant group, in which older people meet and criticize everything, without doing anything.

There are political organizations which have party members with a certain segregation, they meet officially; there are also Neo- Protestant cults from Romania which have the same segregation and I have the feeling that instead of preaching Jesus Christ, the people say “ We are so pure!”, “What a wonderful life we will have on the other side!” or “The others are so wrong and stupid because they don’t do the same!” and those are the people we don’t want to have any connections.

In consequence, there is a fragmentation of life in Romania and, unfortunately, the input is still more important than the output, people have started to have liabilities, to obtain credit only with their ID card, there are a lot who cannot pay the credit back; there are a lot of processes on this theme and a lot of people will lose their aquisitions because a lot of people hurried to get credit without having a strong business, a personal plan, as a person or as a family. This tendency is not a major problem, in fact, asking for credit means being well organized and more devoted to work in order to refund it. The credit is not only for input, it is also for investments. There are also European programs which gave money, the SAPARD program, for example, for agriculture, they offered a lot of money to some farmers. We can see that a lot of them have done a good job and their example will be followed by others.

Therefore, credit, in my opinion, is able to ensure an interesting future to the Romanian people if the civil society, the press, and the television know how to sustain this phenomenon in a reasonable way. We have to get rid of the idea of using credit for big houses, for expensive cars and for promoting examples such as Becali or Irinel Columbeanu, who is a fifty year old man who practically destroyed the life of a girl, an eighteen year old teenager, who will surely get divorced in the future. The people who appear in public with them do it only for notoriety and visibility. Visibility and output nowadays are characteristics which can’t be criticized per se, but when they are extreme, they become harmful.

The mass-media, instead of showing positive life models, as I saw in Korea, only show negative models, as for example Monica Gabor, presenting her as if it were the only chance for a girl from the provinces to come to Bucharest and to become an extremely important person for the country and maybe, in the near future, even a member of the European parliament. I can see this Monica Gabor representing Romania in Brussels in the near future.

Chung: How do you see our relationship?

My relationship with the reverend Hong Key Chung has had an extraordinary effect upon me because I couldn’t find in Orthodoxy any real support. I thought Jesus existed somewhere, I considered Him a value, I found Him in the books I had read, from the history of religions or from literature, I discovered Him somewhere and I had always related him to such values as fairness, honesty, goodness or love for humanity, values that we have to protect, not necessary for a better life, but for light in our lives. I am still not sure that life after death exists because I’m trying to do good things in this life, not only mean things. The good things that I’m doing are not for getting a reward, it seems normal to me to do good things. If it happens that I am “chosen” for eternal life, it is a very good thing for me, but this is not my purpose.

My encounter with reverend Chung and with other friars from this Presbyterian cult has strengthened my belief that this force exists, and it will finally save the world from self- destruction, this world that gives signs of lack of confidence between people, a lack of love, a will of parvenue, of gathering wealth and all the other elements of the material orientation of the individual, which can’t take long, no matter if Jesus would come in a day or in ten million years; even if some people say that there are signs He will come soon, I can’t see these signs. No matter when He comes, the Holy Bible, the Evangelist has to deserve a million years from now, not only a day or a hundred years, because it can only do good to the individual and to the group we belong to, as much as to the society as a whole.

The precise knowledge of the Bible through the studies I have made, studies I didn’t even know existed, groups of study with different ages, categories of population- young people, children- this close knowledge of the Sacred Book is a logical, spiritual way, not a simple reading and repeating as the Orthodox think and do; it organized me from a spiritual point of view, it helps me find a goal of my being and life.

I have already found for real, and this is what I appreciate about the brothers from here, they do not force you from the beginning to be a total believer, they understand your problems, your concerns and they help you in a very friendly and convivial way to see the problems you are confronting, they can help if you’re in trouble and they helped me to be more organized, to be closer to the moral values than the material ones, values I had never been so close to, but now I am sure, because sometimes I suffered that I couldn’t have what others have, but that’s over now.

It might be contrary to the capitalist spirit, but it is not the value itself that attracts me in working, but the work itself, I love working, creating, seeing a result and it has happened many times that my work has been speculated on by enterprises, I can’t say I have been exploited, it has been a mutual agreement when I have made a project and I had my own merit, which probably should have been rewarded better than it was, but I am not upset now as I used to be then, and this confidence in my own powers and the confidence that there is in other people who think the same makes me feel much better and more confident, wherever I am.

Chung: What was the impact upon you of the forum “ Christianity and society”, a forum that we made together?

The forum “ Christianity and society”, like many other activities initiated by people from abroad in Romania had a very important result: it gathered Romanians together and made them see each other face to face.

We, the Romanians, can never meet each other because we think we are not prepared, that we don’t know what to say, that we fight and always someone from outside has to come and show us: “Hey, Romanians, you are a clever, working, hospitable, friendly nation, why don’t you be friendly to one another and not only to foreign people?” Even our king, the first Romanian king, Charles the 1st, who wasn’t Romanian, he was brought from Germany, did a very good job for Romania.

Now that we are at a time when we classify on television the greatest Romanians ever, Charles the 1st is still considered by a lot of Romanians the greatest Romanian ever, together with Wonder-Boy, a manele Gypsy singer, together with Gigi Becali and with Irinel Columbeanu…so, this forum, “Christianity and society”, made us see each other face to face, first.

Secondly, we succeeded in discovering how many there are of us who know things about religion, different aspects of the religious life, how many believe, Orthodox and especially Protestants, how many teachers are in this field we had not known.

The people who are interested are young students, because there were 50- 70 young people who participated in these meetings. Therefore we discovered ourselves, the Romanians.

Thirdly, the methodology of organization of this kind of event has been transmitted. This event had all the modern tools of presentation of information, of an interactive debate of certain elements and of the finalization of some conclusions in such a way that you have to give your best while you are there, and when you leave the place you have to leave it with a strong idea. The organization of some conferences and of some workshops, the final evaluation based on a questionnaire, the audio- video tools used, all these represented a very modern way of presenting things, therefore the atmosphere was very open and it was much appreciated by the students.

The presence of some lecturers from the Protestant countries was at a very high- level, many of them having economic jobs in different institutions, some of them even in state administration; they gave certitude to the participants that you can be an important person in a state, an important entrepreneur and to preach the Word of God at the same time, in a reasonable way. In consequence, the conference played a very important role.