27 January 2013

First Romanian Orthodox Church in Africa

Orthodox priest and blogger Khanya recently filed a firsthand report (with photos) on the founding of the First Romanian Orthodox Church in Africa. In the distant background of the first photo you can see the recently built Midrand Nizamiye Mosque, the first Turkish mosque in South Africa and "the largest religious complex in the southern hemisphere."

Here's a bit of the text of his report (with a few typos corrected).
Archbishop Damaskinos of Johannesburg and Pretoria and Bishop Petronius of Zalău in the Sălaj County of Romania laid the foundation stone of St Andrew’s Romanian Orthodox Church in Midrand, Gauteng. It is the first Romanian Orthodox Church in Africa.

In 2001 Father Mihai (Mircea) Corpodean came to be a priest for the Romanian community, but since they had no church of their own, and the Church of St Nicholas in Brixton had just lost its priest, the bishop at that time, Metropolitan Seraphim, asked Fr Mihai to become parish priest at St Nicholas. St Nicholas was started as a multiethic parish, and welcomed the Romanian community, and we still use some Romanian in services there.

It took the Romanian community quite a long time to find a suitable piece of land, and in 2008 Fr Mihai moved to New Zealand, and Fr Razvan Tatu came to replace him, and began holding Romanian service at St George’s Hotel near Oilfantsfontein.
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3 comments:

  1. The Sanity Inspector4:35 PM

    That's remarkable, not least because I thought that Romanians were Catholic.

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  2. John Cowan6:10 PM

    The overwhelming majority of Romanians are Orthodox, members of the autocephalous Romanian Orthodox Church, which is larger than any other Orthodox church except the Russian Orthodox Church. They are the only Orthodox Church populated principally by speakers of a Romance language.

    The Romanian Church is in communion with Constantinople, but administratively independent of it. There is also a much smaller Romanian Catholic church in communion with and subordinate to Rome.

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  3. Anonymous1:40 AM

    We, romanians are 98% christians (highest percentage in Europe) and 85% orthodox. Second largest orthodox church in the world after the Russian Orthodox Church.

    ReplyDelete