THE ACTIVITY UNDER CENSORSHIP OF THE LORD'S ARMY WITHIN THE ROMANIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
THE ACTIVITY UNDER CENSORSHIP OF THE LORD'S ARMY WITHIN THE ROMANIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

Summary/Abstract: The movement of religious and moral revival of the Army of the Lord, which appeared in the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1923, at the initiative of the priest Iosif Trifa (1888-1938) from Sibiu, will exert a strong influence on the Orthodox Church. The relations with the ecclesiastical authority, the Archdiocese of Ardeal, represented at that time by the Metropolitan Dr. Nicolae Bălan, and the de facto founder of the movement, the priest Iosif Trifa, at first very good, cooled down with the extension of the movement's activity beyond the borders of the Archdiocese of Sibiu, and his acquisition of a personal printing house. A tense situation built up which, in 1935-1938, degenerated into a conflict with unforeseen consequences for the Army of the Lord. Under the communist regime, which regarded the movement as anti-sectarian and chauvinist, the civil sentence of the Court of Sibiu of 22 December 1949 dissolved the Army of the Lord as a society and eliminated it from the register of legal entities. The Army of the Lord continued to exist underground and manifested itself through isolated actions of members in various parishes in the country until 1990 when it was legally and canonically rehabilitated.

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