ROMANIA:Romania is to expose leading Orthodox Church clerics who collaborated with the communist secret police, in an attempt to prevent any former spy succeeding Patriarch Teoctist, who died last week after 21 years in office.
The decision to name former Securitate collaborators in the church could prevent Romania suffering the same embarrassment as Poland did last year when, just hours before his inaugural Mass as archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus was forced to resign after admitting to having passed information to the communist security services.
Romania's Holy Synod will select candidates to succeed Teoctist, one of whom will be chosen by a church assembly in September.
"One of [ the candidates] will be the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and it would be a shame to discover later that he's a Securitate general," said Mircea Dinescu, a leading member of the Council for Studying the Securitate Archives.
The council will study the files of leading Orthodox priests and publish the names of anyone who is found to have collaborated with the Securitate, in a procedure that the church has long resisted.
Leading clerics, however, now say they welcome the investigation.
Teoctist died on July 30th at the age of 92, after suffering a heart attack in hospital following surgery.
He was widely criticised for being too soft on Romania's communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.
He briefly stepped down as patriarch after the dictator was toppled in 1989.
He returned to office just a few months later, however, and in 1999 he welcomed pope John Paul II to Romania, in the first visit by a pontiff to an Orthodox country since the Great Schism of 1054.
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