After a severe surgical intervention, Marshall Mac Luhan needed to say: in the reanimation hall

there are no atheists. The East-European countries have passed, after the second World War, through a
trauma- the communist dictatorship – which equals to a disfiguring surgical intervention. We are trying
to bring ourselves home. As for the transition period, it is a huge reanimation hall, where atheists
shouldn't exist. Nevertheless, busy to retrieve in a short period of time the essential deeds of the
'normality', we behave carelessly with what is supposed to be the foundation of our effort: the religious
dimension. Obviously, we regained our right of affirming our belief without reserve and of practicing it
without prohibition. Public divine services have increased, any serious newspaper has now a religious
section, and even politicians have discovered the elective virtues of piety. Still, belief is not a prior
reflection topic. We have other worries: the economical reformation, the Euro-Atlantic integration,
access into UE.
In Romania, there is a conception (from Eminescu to Eugen Lovinescu) which makes the
orthodox tradition responsible for a certain historical delay of the country, for a certain opaqueness to
the Occident. It could be said that, besides other obstacles made to make our way to a homogeneous
modernity harder, we have to consider the confessional obstacle, too. Orthodoxy would encourage
passivities, idleness, conservatism, while Catholicism , needless to say -in the shadow of Max Weber -
about Protestantism , would strengthen offensive virtues: initiative, construction, enterprise.
Speculations about a religious 'boundary' implicitly imposed to Europe are made, not just once, that
the Eastern Catholicism countries are imbibed, while countries from Eastern Orthodoxy are rejected. In
my view, this conception is false and prejudicial from both sides. It dramatizes a discrimination rather
imaginary than real. Orthodoxy didn't lead to excluding Greece from the European community (how
could it do it, since Europe is, in a way, a Greek 'invention'?..). On the other side, unorthodox countries
such as Slovenia or Slovakia or Baltic Countries are, like Romania, on the waiting list. I can make a
long list of dedicated, dynamic and liberal orthodox personalities, and other list of retractile, meditative
and conservative catholic personalities. Not the frontier between the Catholicism and Orthodoxy is the
real crack of future Europe, but the frontier between polemic spirit and peace spirit. On the one side,
inflexible intolerance, on the other side, understanding and reconciliation. Not the orthodoxy is an
obstacle for Romania, but the orthodoxy which can not relate to other confessions and religions only
apologetic and frown. Not Catholicism is the one that excludes us, but the Catholicism that
misunderstands or simply ignores eastern Christianity. Unfortunately, I have met enough orthodox
people who read the western theology only to confute it, and I have met Catholics or protestants who
don't confute orthodox theology only for not reading it! But there was a time in Europe wasn't divided
in two, as there was a time when Romania was not in the situation of integrating in Europe for the only
reason that it was a part of it. I have no doubt that those times will return..