by CATALIN BOGDAN
Romanian Orthodox Church organization (as established in 2011) IMAGE/Wikipedia
A teenage girl ran away from home and disappeared without a trace for several days. Authorities and the press granted an unexpected publicity to the case, mobilising investigative energies and sparking a high amount of interest among the public. If hundreds of policemen were used to search every missing person throughout the entire country, with support from intelligence services and with the involvement of a prime minister, if newspapers and TV news bulletins granted so much publicity to each case, with dozens of live reports, our social sensitivity would be different.
But this case is an exception, whose reasons pertain to its specificity. The girl was a winner of school olympiads, which caters to the public’s empathy with the “good children” that spend their youth studying, a guarantee for both a successful future career and for rejecting the promiscuous deviations specific to this age. Among so many teenagers who take drugs, have a premature sexual life, even slide into petty criminality, are disrespectful with their parents or are a prolonged financial burden for their families, the ‘well-behaving’ students are treated as a different species, a minority, almost angelical, rather the symbol of a secularised ideal of ‘seriousness’ (which evokes Max Weber’s ascetic capitalist). The perspective is certainly reductionist, because teenage psychologies are generally very contradictory. Proof stands the very protagonist of this case, driven not by a wish for social accomplishment, but by a ‘spiritual’ one. Pushed by various influences – more or less religious – she tried to give her life a different course, aspiring to become a nun. After almost two millennia of monastic life, we should not be surprised by such intent, even if today’s world is a strongly secular one.
Let’s cast aside, for a moment, the protagonist of this story (about which not much has been learned, despite the media hysteria) and look to the public and its reactions. The attitudes were divers, but let’s analyse the most significant of them. Some were worried by the psychological abuses to which a child/teenager can be exposed to by confessors/priests, religion professors. Others jumped to defend the Church in the name of the values of the traditional Christian values, justifying the confession of teenagers, the spiritual authority of priests and of religious education. An active supporter of supplementary secularisation (meant to further reduce the influence of the Church in the public space), deputy Remus Cernea proposed that religion classes are replaced with ethics.
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It seems the portrait of a God-loving society, faithful to its religious values. But what are the perverted effects of this incredible cultural prestige of monasticism? There are no credible alternatives to a life animated by Christian pathos. What better could hope a teenage girl wishing for ‘spiritual growth’ than become nun? Because any other existential gestures are lower in this tendentious hierarchy of virtues. Accused of ‘protestant spirit,’ all those who remind that the texts of the Gospel are not aimed at monastics, but at a much more complex humanity than the one reduced to certain ascetic practices, are promptly rebuked in the name of a crushing dominant Orthodox culture. Orthodox believers – many of them – do not live only under the influence of this monastic culture, but their interior tensions are, more than once, existentially and intellectually sterilised. Thus, it is more than legitimate making a difference between the concepts of ‘ascetic and ‘monastic,’ so they no longer overlap in favour of the latter, as well as to significantly reduce the role of monasticism in the Orthodox culture. An extremely disputable role, if we have a lucid consideration of both the history of Church and the concrete reality of today.
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