You, my esteemed and devout readers who honour these lines with your attention, may well be wondering what connection priests could possibly have with machine guns – indeed, there are even jokes amongst the people on this subject. During 2018, as part of my television series called ‘5 Minutes of History’, I actually made an episode about the presence of Romanian Orthodox priests on the front lines of the First World War. And here is what I discovered whilst researching it.
Well, you may be surprised to learn that, when we entered the First World War in the summer of 1916, over 200 priests were mobilised alongside the troops. On the other hand, the situation was inherently complicated by the simple fact that Romanians lived on both sides of the Carpathians. In Transylvania, some of the Romanian Orthodox priests prayed for the success of the Romanian army, whilst others – whether out of conviction or fear of Austro-Hungarian rule – signed manifestos calling on the Romanians of Transylvania not to trust the Romanian army. Times were so turbulent back then, and the situation was so nuanced, that a historian today cannot pass a clear-cut judgement on these events – they must be analysed on a case-by-case basis, with only the consequences of those acts really mattering. Furthermore, it is very interesting that our very entry into the war, as it happened, carried a message in itself: 15 August 1916 – the day we entered the conflict, attacking the Austro-Hungarians in Transylvania – was the Feast of the Assumption, an important day for the hundreds of thousands of young men from the countryside who made up the bulk of the Romanian army, with 500,000 combat soldiers. Some of those priests who accompanied the Romanian army were to die heroically. And some of them even took up machine guns.
In fact, if we look back a little further, the links between the Romanian Army and the Church date back as far as 1850, when Prince Barbu Știrbei of Wallachia decreed that there should be one priest in each regiment in the garrisons of Bucharest, Craiova and Brăila 1. The first regulations for army chaplains appeared during the reign of King Carol I, in 1870 – and it is certain that we had chaplains amongst the soldiers both in the War of Independence of 1877 and in the Balkan War of 1913. Their role, as one can easily imagine, was to encourage the soldiers – and, in some cases, to ease their passing.
In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Little Romania had over 50 military chaplains, one for each garrison and even two chaplains where necessary, for the larger garrisons. In May 1915, the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church appointed Constantin Nazarie, the archpriest of Bucharest – who was also a professor at the Theological Institute in Bucharest – as head of all the priests in the army. He reorganised the army’s religious service by bringing together priests aged between 30 and 45 – chosen so that they would be slightly older than the soldiers, yet healthy enough to withstand the rigours of mobilisation.
In August 1916, the Romanian army, which had entered the Great War, comprised around 250 priests, under the coordination of Archpriest Nazarie and working in collaboration with the officers in command of the troops. In all fairness, it must be said that, on rare occasions – as might be expected when two institutions of such magnitude come together – this coexistence between priests and the military did create some problems. Some commanders complained, for example, that the soldiers – lads from the countryside – paid more heed to the priests accompanying the troops than to their own officers! Unfortunately, it must also be added that many outside observers – including General Henri Mathias Berthelot, head of the French military mission which assisted the Romanian army between the autumn of 1916 and the spring of 1918 – testified that some officers (those who had come from civilian life, educated city-dwellers) did not know how to behave towards their soldiers, treating them with neglect and an air of superiority. In contrast, the priests were – by virtue of their previous experience – far more empathetic, and, naturally, the soldiers became very attached to them in times of hardship.
On the other hand, these incidents should not be exaggerated. In most cases, relations between officers, priests and the troops were good. The mobilised priests followed the Romanian army to its refuge in Moldova, where the men of the Church gave true examples of self-sacrifice. Some priests died in the fighting itself or in hospitals ravaged by typhus, whilst others were taken prisoner by the enemy. One remarkable example is the priest Justin Șerbănescu, attached to the Army’s 4th.21 Ilfov Regiment – the next time you pass through the town of Azuga, remember that, in the autumn of 1916, during the retreat from the Prahova Valley, all the regiment’s officers fell in battle, and Father Șerbănescu took command of the soldiers and managed, for a brief moment, to repel the German offensive at Azuga.
After the First World War, 61 military chaplains were awarded Romanian or foreign decorations. In a study on the subject, the researcher Eugenia Paraschivescu shows that the Army Chaplaincy continued to exist until 1948, when, unfortunately, the communist regime then in power severed the link between the Army and the Church. But tradition proved stronger than fleeting political policies. The link was subsequently re-established in 1994 – when a religious assistance department was re-established within the Romanian Army.
And the moral of our story is a profound one: many of the countries caught up in the First World War were Christian nations and prayed to the same God. It must have been difficult for God to choose the victor – and so He left people to pay for their own sins. Gas, artillery, machine guns and the strategy of the alliances claimed millions of victims on both sides. What is certain is that the Romanian priests did their duty, even though our enemies were praying to the same Christian God.
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http://ccdbacau.ro/seminar1/lucrari/Paraschivescu_Eugenia.pdf