Religion and post-communism: A chronicle of absurdity

Post-communism is a transitional period, usually referred to as “The Transition,” which should supposedly bring the former East-European nations into the realm of bourgeois-democratic society. What we rarely take into account, however, is the fact that people’s concepts of that period contain a retro-nostalgic element: the transit forward is really conceived as a motion backward, as the restoration of a status quo lost half a century before. The Transition is perceived in mythological categories: metaphorically speaking, as a return to the Golden Age of lost democratic values. This retro-utopian element grew particularly conspicuous in the attempts to restore to public space political figures (even monarchic ones) who survived the coup d’état as émigrés. Thus in 2001 voters in Bulgaria elected the former heir to the throne Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (usually referred to as The Tsar) prime minister after he promised them a miraculous improvement of living standards in 800 days. The question is can a society go back to a point before its development took a sudden turn? Does post-communism mean a restoration to a previous state, or it should be conceived as a different, previously untested, social pattern? From my standpoint of a literary scholar I propose a possible answer, telling the story of the adventures of religion in Bulgaria after 1989.

On the morning of 11 November 1989, Bulgarians woke up to find out they were Christians. For 45 years Christianity had been denounced, suppressed, and ridiculed as an unneeded remnant from the bourgeois world and, in Marx’s words, the “opium of the people.” Bulgarians had been monitored—lest they should go to church, have contacts with ecclesiastics, or read religious books. Anything reminiscent of the Bible was purged out of the literature textbooks. Tireless communist party agitators went from school to school and from college to college delivering lectures that ridiculed religious delusions. One might think, in a state where Christianity had been the state religion as early as the mid-ninth century, efforts of this kind would hardly prove efficient. It would, however, be wrong to think that way. In less than half a century the generations born after 1944 developed a sincere mistrust for religiousness, built, as it was, on the ability to believe in the absurd and the miraculous. Probably because it bore many of the characteristics of an organized church and because its ideology engulfed some features of Christian utopianism, communism brought up people with a reverence for science and rationalism. That was its way of eliminating the threat from competing ideologies like Christianity and, for instance, psychoanalysis. People from older generations, whose personalities had already been formed at the time of the 1944 coup, became so good at concealing their religious faith that it was often lost in the process. But even those who remained Christians as a rule did not bring their children up in the faith for fear it would hinder their social and professional development.

As for the church, its leadership became almost invisible, its functions shrank to the mere servicing of the existing temples, while religious education was separated from Academe and ghettoized. Agents of “State Security” infiltrated the clergy, levying the majority of the medium- and high-ranking clerics. At the end of the 1980s the meaning of “Christian” was: an elderly person who visits a church from time to time and knows the dates of religious holidays.

On 10 November 1989, the long-time head of both state and party in Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, was deposed. This had the effect of waving a magic wand and initiating many changes, the most visible and incredible ones among them being those in Bulgarians’ “religious” consciousness. Overnight, Christianity “was in.” It became a fad that flooded the streets where the nation, godless until recently, was rallying in protest. Suddenly the notions of “Christian” and “democrat” turned out to be synonyms. This became most apparent in the behavior of people who were involved in politics in the early 1990s. For anti-communists Christianity became an emblem of their desire to denounce the past 45 years, to change the course of time, and to restore the destroyed values of the pre-communist era, including God and King. To those who had been communists until recently (now self-renamed as socialists), Christianity turned into a fancy-ball costume, which they hastily slipped on to appear publically as reformed European socialists. Politicians left and right turned faith into a public masquerade. The entire government and all party leaders rushed to mass in the big churches of the capital; people who literally days ago had had no idea how this is done started diligently crossing themselves. A more absurd sight is rare to see: a communist passionately kissing icons, or the priest’s hand.

That, however, was only half the absurdity of the Christian comedy staged at the end of the twentieth century. Another section of the cast included the representatives of criminal business—Mafiosi, thugs, racketeers, and hirers of hit men. Like the politicians, they rushed to the churches, lighting candles and crossing themselves. Opening a new office, launching a new business, the conclusion of a good deal—all of those came to be accompanied by exuberant religious ceremonies. A few months later the office was blown up, and the partners before God turned enemies and murdered each other. A new religious practice sprang up. To atone for their sins and win grace and goodwill (mostly from other people) the nouveau-riche in Bulgaria started building chapels ¹ en masse. The first one to do so was a business-criminal “big shot,” Ilia Pavlov. Near the village where he was born he erected a temple to his namesake, St Elias. The saint was, however, of little help to him: a few years later Ilia Pavlov was shot dead by a sniper. Nevertheless, chapels adorned the courtyards of newly built mansions and estates; they were also built near the rich men’s office buildings, restaurants, and even near their casinos. Krustova Gora, a locality in the Rhodope Mountains, known, according to local legend, for its miracle-working healing power, mushroomed with a whole alley of chapels built by businessmen. Even more amazing than this is the fact that thousands of newly awakened Christians started coming to that place in droves, while the Orthodox Church set up a lively trade in consecrated objects. That reminds us to consider what happened to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church with the onset of democracy.

As early as the late 1980s the Union of Democratic Forces (the largest anticommunist organization) initiated a schism in the Orthodox Church. Six out of the fourteen metropolitans—almost half the members of the Holy Synod—denounced Patriarch Maxim for having been elected by a decision of the Politbureau of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Once again by government decree—a literal repetition of the communist interference in the life of the church—a second Holy Synod was created. On 1 June 1992, the karate team of the Bulgarian Army stormed the Synod Palace and expropriated the stamp, the archive, and the bank account numbers of the church. In 1996 the dissenters elected their own patriarch, 90-year-old Bishop Pimen. Bitter hostilities broke out between the two Synods, the complications of which, via television channels and the press, invaded on a daily basis each and every home. In 2003 the dissenters attempted to be registered and declared the only legal Synod by the courts, but by the end of 2004 the courts at all levels had denied them that registration. For the second time in his term of office Maxim was approved as patriarch by a state decree—in complete contradiction with canon law. In the summer of 2004 the conflict in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church turned into live action-theatre. The dissenters occupied 250 temples and monasteries; the police moved to drive them out but 50 priests in 30 churches refused to leave, erected barricades, and prepared for armed resistance. Eventually they left both the barricades and the state, asking for political asylum in the European Union, and immediately took Bulgaria to court in Strasbourg for having been deprived of their freedom of faith, claiming, among other things, damages worth 56 million euro. The troubles in the Bulgarian Church are not over yet. In 2010 the European Court ruled that the Bulgarian state cannot force the dissenters to stay under the administration of the old Synod. At this point, they have filed in another plea for registration and are threatening the state with a new lawsuit in Strasbourg.

Dissent, however, is not the greatest problem for either the Orthodox Church or the Christian faith in Bulgaria. The greatest problem concerns the clerics themselves—those who should be the spiritual shepherds of their flocks. On 17 January 2012, the Committee for Disclosing Documents and Announcing the Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army announced the results of its document verifications concerning members of decision-making bodies of religious communities. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church turned out to be the institution with the highest percentage of full-time and part-time collaborators with the State Security in the country, 73.3 per cent, or 11 of all 14 metropolitans. ² Three professors of theology were also proved to be active agents. One of them, Dimitar Kirov, is a devoted lecturer in ethical theology and shortly before the disclosure published a huge course book in Christian ethics. The most interesting case, however, is that of the Bulgarian patriarch.

Maxim died on 6 November 2012, at the age of 98, after he had been head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for 41 years—the longest rule of a patriarch in the whole history of the Orthodox Church. Though appointed by a decision of the communist party in 1971, he had never been recruited as an agent of State Security—there had simply been no need of that: as early as the 1940s Maxim had been a member of the communist party and an adherent to its ideology. In 41 years he never raised his voice in defense of Bulgarian Christians, never made an attempt to support the independence of the Bulgarian Church, nor did he ever initiate any action in support of poor or suffering people. The most remarkable features of his term were impersonality and servility to political power.

On the very next day after the patriarch’s funeral the Holy Synod fell out and split into two camps. The situation has become hopelessly entangled. Leaving out the eleven bishops who were informants, there are only three left from whom the new patriarch can be elected. Unfortunately two of them are not eligible: one is not over 50 years of age and the other has been a bishop for less than 5 years. Cyril—who was according to the documents disclosed by the Committee, agent Vladislav, recruited at the age of 22, a regularly paid informant—the metropolitan of Varna and Preslav, was elected acting interim patriarch with eight votes. The camp of his opponents is led by the bishop of Plovdiv, Nicolas, whose father was head of the Special Anti-terrorist Section at the Sixth Department of State Security. Though he is only 43, Nicolas makes no secret of his ambitions to succeed Maxim by initiating an amendment to Church Law to enable one to become a patriarch under the age of 50. He is actually the most popular high-ranking clergyman in Bulgaria, albeit his popularity is of a scandalous nature. Nicolas is an expert at public shows with an unexpected ending. Thus, in only a few years he has, in front of his congregation, declared the greatest hero in Bulgarian history—Vasil Levski—a criminal, J K Rowling a Satanist, and the Pope a heretic. It is probably along a similar line of thought that he thinks of himself as the Bulgarian patriarch.

Having surveyed the Bulgarian Orthodox Church ³ with respect to its prelates’ behavior, let me now turn to its presence in social life as a whole.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is the total absence of any position concerning the suffering of ordinary people. The two decades of transition brought about large-scale impoverishment, homelessness, and unemployment among Bulgarians. A quarter of them live below the poverty line; almost twenty per cent have emigrated since 1989. Some social phenomena previously unknown have become endemic—such as high levels of juvenile delinquency, human trafficking, and family disintegration. The church as an institution has reacted to none of these changes; it has never even organized a kitchen for the hungry or a shelter for homeless children. What it has done is specialize in totally meaningless gestures: publicly denouncing the Harry Potter books for inciting children to engage in practicing magic, noisily condemning homosexuality as a demonstration of “unnatural passion,” and attempting to ban in-vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood. No wonder there was a wave of sympathy in the media for those (few in number) modest rank and file priests from humble village parishes who, without any institutional support, set out to organize shelters for the poor and homeless. One of those priests is, for example, Father Ivan, who is raising over a hundred homeless children near the village of Novi Han, purely by public donations. At the same time metropolitan Cyril became known as the owner of a hybrid Lincoln model, one, in his own words, that only he and Barack Obama possess; metropolitan Nicolas on his part wears a Rolex in public worth thousands of euros. Objects of this kind can only have one source: gifts from shadowy business, though nobody can really say why. One possible explanation may be the restoration of a Byzantine church practice which had been forgotten in the last 600 years: bestowing the title of “archontes” upon outstanding donors to the church. The first man to be so designated after its reinstatement in 2006 is Slavi Binev—known as the owner of a night club in Sofia and later a right wing member of the European Parliament. At present a national campaign is under way for donations aimed at restoring the damaged murals of Alexander Nevski cathedral. Paradoxically, it has not occurred to anyone that the money should come from the politicians who like to make the sign of the cross in public in that very cathedral. By contrast, an ordinary villager, 98-year old Grandpa Dobri, donated 36,000 leva, ⁴ which he made from begging. In a similar manner he had previously donated another 50,000 leva to churches in other towns and villages.

Of course, Grandpa Dobry’s donations are exceptional in quantity, yet in Bulgaria there are many more ordinary honorable people who are real Christians. Their behavior never ends up on the silver screen or in the papers but it is extraordinary in its own way. And what is extraordinary about it is the ability to be a Christian not alongside but in spite of the church as an institution.

All this sheds some light on the changes in the overall picture of religious faiths and communities in Bulgaria after 1989. As early as the beginning of the 1990s the usual non-traditional denominations entered, such as Methodists, Adventists, and Baptists. After them followed a long train of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Buddhists, Moonies, Crishnaites, Scientologists, Satanists, etc. With the resurgence of Islam worldwide, Bulgaria has turned into a desirable terrain for implantation of its radical strains. At the moment there are 113 registered religious communities, and their number increases every year: from the White Brotherhood of the Bulgarian Teacher Petar Dunov to the Diamond Road of Buddhism, from the Church of Maria in the village of Karavelovo to the International Christian Church; there are also six Satanist sects among them, as well as an indefinite number of unregistered charismatic groups. What unites all their efforts is the struggle to fill the huge gap provoked by the behavior of the Orthodox Church. What lures Bulgarians to look for alternative routes to religious experience is the need to feel spiritually sheltered, to be part of an entity, where they can share both their joy and their sorrow with other people. Post-communist people are lonely beings: to say the least, they are lonely in a different way from those who never left capitalist society. Brought up to believe that all (working) people are brothers, having grown up in equality caused by the (universal) lack of material wealth, raised among the conservative principles of patriarchal family morality, today they suffer from nostalgia to belong to a community of some kind, for finding in it meaning for individual existence. The family, the state, and the church deny them that. Thus a post-communist person becomes more and more of a wanderer—not just a wanderer between countries and continents, but first and foremost in his soul.