Pining for Trust

There are voices who claimed that one of the implications of the scandal related to the articles concerning Teoctist’s past was that they had affected the credibility of the church as an institution. "This is all we have at present. Will we soil this institution too?" is the discourse we could hear from Premier Adrian Nastase; this statement has been religiously spread in the most unexpected versions.
It is not very clear in what way the credibility of the church might be affected if one of its leaders commits major sins.
According to this logic, the corruption of a president might destroy the credit given to the constitutional regime, the republic, and, consequently, citizens would choose dictatorship as an alternative. As a matter of fact, they would choose another possible candidate for this position. In the democratic political system, their political convictions would not be affected by the corruption of a certain person.
The fact that after 1989, the church was spared the curiosity and the vigilance of the press does not mean that this institution is very different from what we can see in the rest of the society. It would be a naiveness to think that the people of the church are not involved in what the sociologists call "social exchanges". They do not live on Mount Athos, far from the vanity of the world – on the contrary, they interact continuously with many persons, who are not all churchgoers. In this case, we might wonder how the credit given to the church appears. On what is it based? Is performance the criterion of its capitalization?
It is very difficult to find an argument which might support the success of the church after 1989. After the guilt caused by the collaboration with the communist regime, the church did not manage to formulate another discourse for the post-communist period.
Those who are serving the church at present do what they did a hundred years ago, invoking the metaphysical and ethical constants in order to cure deficiencies of education and mentality. An example which indicates that the church does not manage to influence a secularized society is the number of abortions. The millions of abortions produced in Europe say a lot about its real influence on the behavior of the society.
One of the communism’s legacies, which still pesists, is the diffuse lack of trust, spread within all the social categories. A normal person has the the tendency of developing a trust-related behavior when he/she helps somebody else and expects the latter to help him/her in his turn. In the Romanians’ case, the lack of trust or the handicap of not having a normal relationship within the public sphere, i.e. outside the relatives’ sphere, is transformed into a form of "super-credit" given to something or somebody. This would explain the huge credit given to the church, confirmed by the polls.
The persistence of the lack of trust blocks the democracy’s development. Moreover, solidarity and social commitment are diminished because of this. With Romanians, the activity of the non-governmental organizations, which indicates a certain civic attitude, is extremely reduced in comparison with the occidental states. However, trust can be gained. The appearance of the trustworthy institutions is a mechanism which develops upwards, not the other way round. Then, what can we say about the Premier’s intention of treating this problem in an institutional way, since trust is systematically hoaxed by infringing commitments and contracts?
During the last years, the Executive (whatever its political color might have been), did not manage to keep the promises made in front of the IMF officials or to observe a certain public, electoral contract.
From an economic point of view, this phenomenon is so widely spread, that even
the contractual debts to the state of the state-owned enterprises are not observed. The same problem affects the guarantors of legality – the police and the Ministry of Justice – whose representatives do not observe their powers in a systematic way.
This means that the main social actors have not reached an agreement concerning the guiding principles of the society. Thus, the only institutions which benefit by credit from the population are the church and the army, i.e. the institutions which do not have a practical role and whose relationships are not contractual, but hypothetical. Under these circumstances, can’t we say that faith is mistaken for trust, since the latter can not be found anywhere?
(Mihai CHIPER)