Moldova

Moldova is overwhelmingly Orthodox and unusually observant by European standards, and its religious life is organised around a question that is not theological at all: whether Moldova is Romanian.

The territory between the Prut and the Dniester was part of the Principality of Moldavia, annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812, returned to Romania after the First World War, taken by the Soviet Union in 1940 and made a separate republic. Each of those transfers moved the church with it. Soviet policy reinforced the separation deliberately, promoting the idea of a distinct Moldovan language and identity and subordinating the church to Moscow.

Today two Orthodox jurisdictions claim the same territory. The Metropolis of Chisinau and All Moldova is under the Moscow Patriarchate and holds most parishes and most clergy. The Metropolis of Bessarabia, revived in 1992, is under the Romanian Orthodox Church and holds a minority. The division is not doctrinal. Both are canonical Orthodox bodies in communion with one another; the argument is about which national church the parishes of Moldova belong to, which is the same argument that runs through Moldovan politics.

Since 2022 the balance has shifted, with parishes transferring from the Moscow jurisdiction to the Romanian one and clergy citing the position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the war in Ukraine as their reason.

Alongside the Orthodox majority there are Old Believer communities descended from refugees of the seventeenth century Russian schism, evangelical churches with a significant presence, and a Gagauz population in the south, Orthodox Christians who speak a Turkic language.

When the Metropolis of Bessarabia was revived in 1992 the Moldovan government refused to register it. The stated reasons shifted over the years: that it was not a new church but a schismatic offshoot of an already registered one, that recognition would raise territorial questions, that the state should not intervene in an internal Orthodox dispute. The practical effect of non registration was severe, because an unregistered body in Moldova had no legal personality, could not own or rent property, could not employ clergy, could not receive donations and could not seek the protection of the courts if its members were harassed.

The church took the refusal to Strasbourg, and in 2001 the European Court of Human Rights decided against Moldova. The reasoning is what made the case a standard citation. The state had argued it was protecting public order and the territorial integrity of the country. The Court held that the duty of the state under Article 9 is one of neutrality and impartiality, that this duty is incompatible with any power to assess the legitimacy of religious beliefs or the means by which they are expressed, and that where a community is denied legal personality it is denied the ability to exercise the right at all. It also observed that a state may not decide, in place of a religious community, which body is the true one.

The judgment reaches well beyond Moldova. It is the case cited whenever a government in the region declines to register a competing church, and it has been applied to disputes in Bulgaria, Romania, North Macedonia and elsewhere. The registration was granted after the ruling.