Viaţa şi practica religioasă a comunităţii creştin penticostale din Cluj-Napoca în perioada dictaturii comuniste
The Pentecostal Christian Community in Cluj-Napoca: Its Life and Religious Practice during the Communist Dictatorship

Summary/Abstract: Inside communist propaganda of Romania, whose target was convincing people that it was bringer of freedom and democracy, religion represented a very difficult wall to break although apparently it seemed easy to eliminate. In our study we tried to capture and present the life and practice of a Pentecostal Christian community (the conversion motivation, the baptism, the religious programme), underlining the way in which communism tried to create an impression of freedom imposing at the same time its Maxist-Leninist doctrine concerning religion. In fact, its purpose was that of atheising the masses, and eliminating religious cults. This study is concentrated upon the Pentecostal Christian Community of Cluj-Napoca, Someşeni, becoming a life history, since it allows us to follow individual and collective evolution through different geographical areas and different social categories. Thus, we used oral investigation, interviewing subjects that had directly experienced these events, our resort to specialized literature being burdened by the lack of studies in this area. As for the witnesses we interviewed, they are members of the Pentecostal Christian Community, people that are able to present the past of a "long time ago world". More than "past memoirs" they bring out to light moments that would have been either misknown or truly ignored by the society. "The lived history" brings the past out front, together with its truths expressed by the interviewees' subjective points of view. Only enumerating events is not enough in order to understand the way the pentecoital Christian community behaves. More than that, these events have to be connected to their spiritual significance since world has a certain order and hides a certain sense in the Pentecostal Christian point of view; all these with God representing "the place" where sense happens.

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