Legal Recognition and Recovery of Property: Contested restitution of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church Patrimony

Following its re-legalisation in 1989, the Romanian Greek Catholic Church after almost forty years of forced reunification with the Orthodox Church, attempted to react at several levels: at the material level, primarily property restitution, at the organisational level, in defining its structure, and at the dogmatic and ritual level, defining its liturgy. The Church chose to give priority to property restitution and started a campaign to this effect. This process, even though it is similar to other property restitution processes in Romania and in neighbouring countries, has specific features of its own: the official owner (the Romanian state) was not the user (the Orthodox Church) and many members of this Church did not favour systematic restitution of its properties. The paper, based on three case studies, focuses on the juridical and non-juridical arguments implemented both by the Greek Catholic and the Orthodox Church in order to resolve property issues. I focus on the arguments presented by both sides to justify their actions at critical moments, which might turn into violence. I stress the gap between juridical decision and its implementation, and show that court decisions do not systematically prevent violence. 1 This paper was presented at the Workshop “Religion and Civil Society in Eastern Europe” organised by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Cluj (Romania), 15-18 March 2004. It is a short version of the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation, “Accords et désaccords autour des biens ecclésisatiques” (Mahieu 2003). I am grateful to Chris Hann for inviting me and for his comments, to Alban Bensa, my PhD supervisor at the EHESS (Paris), to Elisabeth Claverie, Rose-Marie Lagrave, Paul Robert Magosci and Albert Piette, members of my PhD jury, and to Vintilă Mihailescu. I would like to thank Gabriela Coman, Iulia Haşdeu, Adina IonescuMuscel and Adriana Oprescu for their help during my fieldwork. I would also like to thank Chris Hann and Anja Peleikis for commenting on earlier versions of this paper. 2 Graduiertenkolleg Repräsentation-Rhetorik-Wissen, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). E-mail: [email protected].