PETRESTI, Romania - A new Orthodox church in Romania's mountainous Transylvania features some strikingly untraditional icons -- portraying Pope John Paul, former U.S. President George Bush and ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
"The three should have been proposed for sanctification for changing the course of the history, like Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor who became a famous saint," argues Alexandru Coman, the priest in the village of Petresti.
"I wanted our church to illustrate three providential personalities of the past millennium," Coman, 53, whose church was consecrated on Sunday, told Reuters.
"They made a crucial contribution to demolishing the red plague of communism."
The three faces beaming down from a fresco inside the church porch are powerful symbols to Romanians still struggling to shake off the effects of half a century of particularly repressive communist rule, Coman said.
Beneath the painting, which depicts Bush and Gorbachev making speeches and the Pope, an inspiration to Poles throughout the 1980s, blessing the faithful, is a short text.
"When man shouted: Stop the world, I want to get off, God intervened through these three providential men to change it."
Coman, who has preached in Petresti since 1973, explained the significance of the message.
"It symbolises the desperate shouts of people living under the communists who could not bear the lies and harsh conditions any longer," he said, adding that the images had been copied from photos found on the Internet and in a papal souvenir album.
UNITING BELIEVERS
Work on the new church began in 1988 to meet the needs of a growing Orthodox community in a village previously served by a small stone church dating from 1849, when just 46 families lived in Petresti compared to some 700 today.
About 500 of these are Orthodox, Coman said, but the area, once populated by Germans, is home to a sizeable Protestant minority, as well as a small number of Roman Catholics.
In 1999, the Pope made a historic three-day trip to Romania, becoming the first Pontiff to visit a mainly Orthodox country.
He and Romania's Orthodox Patriarch Teoctist sat side by side in common prayer in a symbolic gesture designed to narrow the centuries-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
In a bid to unite the faiths in Petresti, which lies 350 km (230 miles) northwest of Bucharest, the church features other icons which make it unique in Romania, where communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu routinely raided religious property.
"We have painted various Catholic and Protestant prelates inside the church to make our believers understand they have to live like brothers with people of other denominations," Coman said. "It's a church of inter-confessional communion."
About 2,000 Orthodox priests, along with clerics of minority faiths were jailed under Romania's harsh communist-era regime.
Under Ceausescu, hundreds of churches throughout the country were bulldozed or moved out of sight to clear the way for mammoth public buildings, particularly in Bucharest.
The imposing new church in Petresti was built thanks to small but continuous contributions from residents, topped up by a $25,000 grant from the local authorities.
"We all gave something to build our new spiritual shelter," explained Mariana Oprean, a member of its congregation.
06:19 08-26-01
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