Mircea Eliade - The History of Faith and Religious Ideas

During the 2nd century, the authority of the "Great Church" was seriously threatened by many crises, that being the moment when the first systematic theology appeared. Criticizing the heresy of gnostic sects, the Fathers ended by giving birth to orthodoxy. Basically, orthodoxy consisted in respecting the theology of the Old Testament. The Gnostic were labeled as heretics because they partially or totally rejected the principles of Hebraic philosophy. You were a good Christian only if you were sharing the believes of the Old Testament. In other words, man was virtually created as a God. "The history" is the period of time during which human beings learn to practice their liberty and how to become a saint, in fact they are doing their apprenticeship as Gods. Saint Paul magnifies the revival guaranteed by Jesus: "If someone is in Jesus, he is a new being ". For the Fathers (Priests), orthodoxy was tightly connected with the apostolic succession. The Apostles got their knowledge directly from Jesus and passed them over to the bishops and to their successors. "This way, dealing with a primitive, mobile Christianism, Rome succeed to statute a particular form named orthodoxy, which managed to overwhelm all the other tendencies, considered to be heretic."

Digest from Romanian press

The conflict between Romanian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy began in 1994; this was the moment when the Saint Synod from Bucharest paid attention to the requests made by the Romanians living across the Prut, in Republic Moldavia: they were asking for a church in which the divine service should be done in Romanian language. As a consequence, taking into account the present and the historical past, an important decision was taken: the ancient Bishopric of Basarabia was to be reactivated ( it was shut down in 1948 when the Soviet army invaded this territory following the Ribentrop - Molotov treaty ). It's headquarters was established in the Balti city. This is the point where the trouble began. The state authorities and the Russian Church which had on these territories a Bishopric with a headquarters at Chisinow did not officially admit the Romanians' request; the Moldavia Republic 's Parliament did not legitimate the Romanian Bishophric. The Romanian Patriarchy asked the Romanian authorities for diplomatic support. The conflict was transferred to the court of low. Now it is at the Supreme Court from Haag. Meantime the priest have been physically aggressed, the believers were forbidden to go to the churches where the religious services was performed in Romanian language - as we found out from the press.

An English version by Nora Parvu