Romania’s​‍​‌‍​‍‌ New Mega-Cathedral Reminds Us That Civilisational Rebirth Is Always Possible

In a century marked by a suffocating sense of rootlessness, Romanians decided to build. The vast Orthodox People’s Salvation Cathedral that rises over Bucharest was inaugurated by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Patriarch Daniel of Romania on October 25th. The now largest Orthodox temple in the world doesn’t just crown the city’s skyline; it also offers catharsis to a people that suffered much in the 20th century. The Cathedral isn’t a monument to nostalgia, but to defiance—a reminder that nations can surpass even the harshest traumas of war, totalitarian brutality, and revolution. 

In Romania, communism waged war on God for fifty long years. As had previously happened in Russia, churches were blown up or transformed into warehouses; priests were taken to jails or shot, and the believers were ridiculed as backward relics of a feudal past finally ended by the inexorable advance of the red tide. When the Warsaw Pact cracked, however, Romanians were still holding candles in their hands. Their revolution was certainly motivated by the palpable realisation that their model of society did not work, but it was also, more profoundly, inspired by a desire for national renewal. That nobler, more substantive side of the transformative events of 1989 was still lacking a fitting memorial. It has now gained it.

In Western Europe, the war on religion began earlier—its crimes occurred longer ago, and the horror they involved seems, therefore, less poignant. Yet it was Western Europe and the French Revolution that set the tune for what the communists would later globalise—one and a half centuries before the monasteries of Russia, Romania, or Bulgaria were emptied and demolished, the Jacobins looted and destroyed Cluny; in Spain, the liberal régime of Mendizábal closed and auctioned off hundreds of ecclesiastical properties. Yuste, where Emperor Charles V had lived, died, and was originally buried before being reinterred in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, was made a factory. Only in the 20th century did General Franco save the illustrious building from such ignominious treatment. In Portugal, the once grandiose Monastery of Tibães, heart of the Benedictine Order in the Portuguese Empire, was transformed into a pigsty. Such barbarity was the fruit of what is still taught to European children as having been a Siècle des Lumières—the Enlightenment. 

Europe’s systematic destruction of religion was hailed by generations of intellectuals as the victory of reason over the scourge of obscurantism and superstition. Instead, it was civilisational suicide. The Romanian project is a break from this. It affirms that successful modernisation can only occur in harmony with a people’s spiritual roots. The cathedral’s name, dedicating itself to the “Salvation of the People,” is not random. Instead, it binds the civic and the divine together, thus pointing out that national rebirth and Christian renewal go hand in hand.

Expectedly, detractors from abroad have described the cathedral as an expensive, outdated project, even as a “nationalist” fantasy. However, such criticisms reveal more about the rotten mindset that enables them than about Romania or, indeed, the newly founded church. At a time when Berlin spends an estimated yearly €25 billion on the ‘refugees’ it has settled in German land against the wishes and interests of the German people, Romania investing a modest €270 million in beauty and transcendence is surely not all that intolerable. 

The cathedral is a tangible symbol of the civilisational comeback engulfing Europe. Like Budapest rebuilding itself from the ashes of the Second World War and communist occupation under the magnificent National Hauszmann Program, or Poland reconstructing Warsaw’s beautiful Saxon Palace, so too is the new temple a cry of national defiance. It is the statement of a people that wants to live, to recover from its sorrows, and carry on. This is a lesson and an example.

Indeed, Romania’s reaffirmation of its Christian roots is a not-so-subtle reminder that Central and Eastern Europe isn’t interested in bowing to Brussels’ increasingly frantic demands of ideological conformity. It is a vindication of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s vision of Europe as grounded on “Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian values”. 

The liberal authoritarians who have come to run our Europe will no doubt decry the new temple as a “reactionary” project. It is they, however, who are actually reacting to Europe’s renewed craving for its roots with a flurry of sanctions, threats, censorship, and arrests. Though Romanians were deprived of their chosen conservative leader, Calin Georgescu, by the machinations of Brussels, the cultural revolution that is underway cannot and will not be kept at bay forever. The project was largely publicly funded; humble peasants and Cluj students made contributions of what little they had. It was that communal sacrifice rather than the magnificence of its domes which imparts the building with its moral authority.

When the bells of the People’s Salvation Cathedral ring out over Bucharest, they will not only be doing so for a nation—they will ring for a continent that once saw itself primarily as a Respublica Christiana. It is a reminder that cultural rebirth is always possible, even after the bitterest of blows. Decay and defeat are not predetermined. Europe can have a future—if Europeans fight for it.