life in CL
Romania

Free to Be  
a People
The first secret meetings in an apartment in Bucharest; the Italian vacations for the children of the Cluj area; then, AVSI, the Tatal Nostru, and Cardinal Todea’s prophecy... This is the story of a friendship that blossomed during the tough years of the regime, and exploded suddenly after the 1989 revolution, a friendship capable of judging the whole of reality.

by Paolo Perego

“Who is the one who spoke first? How many people were connected, and in how many countries?” the boy asked Simona. “Why do you ask me?” “Because this evening, when I go home, I want to tell my mother everything I have seen.” It was in Bucharest, September 26th, and the Beginning Day in Romania had just ended. Cosmin is 19 years old, and it was the first time he took part in a gesture of the Movement.  He couldn’t manage it before, since he lived outside the city with his family. Now he is at the university and has moved. He has known Simona for years, since 1998 when, as an AVSI volunteer, she came to the hospital for HIV-positive children where he was admitted. “I don’t know what he understood of what Carrón said, but it’s only when you see–see! something exceptional that you want to tell everyone about it.”
And the Christ Event happens again, “now,” as the Christmas Poster says, quoting Fr. Giussani. Even in Romania. It is a strange coincidence with that Christmas 20 years ago, December 25, 1989, when the television news all over the world showed the bodies of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife immediately after their execution. It was the epilogue of the revolution that had exploded a few days earlier and led to the downfall of the Communist dictator in power since 1967. It was the only country in which the regime collapsed leaving the streets running with the blood of 2,000 dead, many of them young, who had written their own epigraph on the city walls: “We shall die, but as free people.” The Romanian regime, though separated from that of Russia, was no less an enemy to freedom, with a closed economy, bringing the countryside to its knees with rationing enforced in order to repay foreign debts, and a culture of suspicion in which you could trust no one, not even your own brothers–they were likely to denounce you to the secret police, the Securitate. Then there was the religious persecution, particularly hard on the Greek-Catholic Church, with bishops imprisoned, churches and monasteries confiscated and destroyed, and Christians harassed.
It was in this context, in the ’60s, that some members of CL from Switzerland, linked to the Study Center for Eastern Europe (CSEO), founded by Fr. Francesco Ricci, began visiting the country. Violeta Barbu, today lecturer of Economic History in the Romanian capital, told us, “I met them in Bucharest in 1986.” Then she was 32, and was active, along with her husband, in a group of dissenters. An Orthodox priest, expelled from the country after 20 years in prison, had put those Swiss people in contact with Violeta and Daniel. “They sent us postcards, saying, ‘The baby is to be born on April 20th–so we knew the day they would arrive. In 1987, they brought us The Religious Sense in French, and we began doing School of Community.”

Fr. Pop. Thus, the Movement was born in Bucharest, in that little apartment hidden from the spies. “The first time they came to see us, we knew nothing about them: ‘Communion and Liberation.’ The first time we were so frightened, and the second time we were so fascinated. We, too, wanted liberation, but in their company it was as if the meaning of that word was fulfilled. We truly discovered what we were longing for,” Violeta explained.
The whole story of the Movement in Romania is made of this, of relationships and encounters kept alive despite the distance. Today, Alberto Piatti is Secretary General of AVSI, one of the most important non-governmental organizations in the world working in the field of development. In the 1990s, he came across a Greek-Catholic priest, Fr. Pop. Until the previous year, he had been a dissident, persecuted in his country, and was now in Italy looking for tractors to help the Romanian peasants. Piatti met him, and was impressed by him. He followed him to Romania in December 1990. “The first fruits of that friendship were the vacations in Italy for children, particularly from Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, a town in the heart of Transylvania. For five years, from 1991 to 1995, more than 1,500 children were welcomed, through the Famiglie per l’accoglienza [Welcoming Families]association, during the summer period.”

Twenty in Timisoara. Today, some of those children, married with children themselves, along with some university students and some older people, form the greater part of the community of CL, over 100 people, divided between Bucharest and Cluj. At the head of the Movement since last summer is Mihai Simu, 31, of Cluj, a giant over 6½ feet tall. He works in information technology; he is a Roman Catholic, his wife is Orthodox, and they have a son. This “mixed” family is a paradigm for many other families among their friends.
The life of CL in Romania is marked by daily gestures, but by no means taken for granted–the School of Community, vacations together, the Fraternity retreats. Then there are the small miracles–this year, for the first time, the Beginning Day was organized in Timisoara, and a few weeks after that in Cluj and Bucharest. “It was a great surprise. In Timisoara there are only 2 people of the Movement, but there were more than 20 there to listen to Carrón, almost all of them university students,” Mihai told us.
In addition to Violeta, the historical leader of the community, Mihai is flanked in his new responsibility by the Italian Davide Biasoni, who visits the Romanian friends and follows them up. “I’ve been coming to see them for only a short time, about a year. Before me, along with Piatti, Guido Boldrin had followed the community since the early ’90s,” Biasoni explains. “What did I find in Romania? The years of the regime are not easily wiped out. There is still much diffidence in people, a certain scar that you cannot fail to see on their faces.” “What do you mean?”  “You get to Bucharest, in a beautiful square, and look up. You can hardly see the sky for all the electric cables crisscrossing each other. Here, at times, people’s humanity, though great, is like the sky in that square, covered up by something that spoils it.” We cheered ourselves up with a bottle of good whiskey that Davide brought the last time, in November. “Adrian, one of the community, had set to work looking for information about that bottle: how it is produced, how it is to be drunk,” says David, adding that Adrian is not merely curious, but wants to look deeply into everything before him, the whole of reality he comes across. “It is not a common attitude in this culture. He must have met something really grand to have changed so much.”

“Now, it’s up to you.” The life of the Community is directly intertwined with the presence of AVSI. Bianca, for example, is one of the young people met in the ’90s. She is an engineer, 37 years old, and since 1998 has been working for the Italian agency. She is from Bucharest. “It was 1994; I was a Christian, but not very practicing. I would take my grandmother to Mass… There happened to be a group of Italians visiting the parish. They were CL university students from Florence. What happened afterwards is that I never broke off with them.”
“But AVSI arrived later. I wasn’t working for them then,” Piatti recalls. “In 1994, the opportunity came up to collaborate in building a ward for AIDS-affected children in a Bucharest Hospital. It was then that we asked AVSI to intervene. The ward was inaugurated on May 2, 1995, and since then the presence of the association has grown. This was in part thanks to the birth, in 1996, of Fundatia Dezvoltarea Popoarelor, the local partner of the Italian parent–association. “I came to Romania in 1998, and I got to know Cosmin then,” said Simona Carobene, who now works for Fundatia. “Two years ago, AVSI began to pull out, since Romania is no longer a developing country, and the activities carried out by Fundatia in the educational field respond better to the new needs in the country.” This local NGO is present in several regions (Bucharest, Arad, Cluj, and Cojaska, a Rom village). Today, at the head of the foundation is Calim Pop, the son of that Greek-Catholic priest who began it all. “Where the regime was toughest–with the Greek-Catholics–there came the spark that gave rise to the adventure of the Movement in this country,” Piatti says. “The Romanian Cardinal, Alexandru Todea, was prophetic. I had the privilege of meeting him, after his 14 years in a labor camp. He said then, ‘They have exterminated the Church and its bishops; now it’s up to you lay people.’”
Today, the challenge for those “lay people,” for the Christians, is no longer the regime, but all the same the battle to be fought is a hard one, with the economic crisis, and the lack of trust in the political class, relatively young and unprepared to lead a country that has only just crossed the threshold of Europe… Here, people go to vote only because the State pays those who do so. Even the faith, as was the case under the regime, is lived as a private matter, in a private way. “It takes so little for the heart to wake up. It happened on the occasion of the presidential elections in December,” Mihai tells us. “The community began for the first time to judge the circumstances together. It has never happened before. And, among the thousand discussions and contrasting opinions, a judgment emerged.” A Movement of a people, of people who no longer think of themselves as alone, but as part of a history. Simona confirms this: “It seems something of little value, but it is the same impression made recently by the more than 2,000 people who went on the streets in Bucharest, to demonstrate against the construction of a building by a Turkish society, so close to the Cathedral of St. Joseph as to threaten its foundations.” A people–a Christian people.
But the Romanian members of CL had already realized that they belong to a people when they got out of the coach that brought them to Rimini in 1994 for the first time, to the Spiritual Exercises of the Adults. “Perhaps they didn’t understand very much what they were there for,” Piatti recalls, “But when the choir intoned the Tatal Nostru, the Our Father in Romanian, they began to weep in silence. ‘We never felt so much at home as we did here.’”