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Authentic church calendars cannot be converted into electoral material, the Romanian Patriarchy draws attention, on Monday.
"The Romanian Patriarchy has learned with surprise that a political entity in electoral campaign has printed, for the purpose of offering to citizens as electoral material, (false) Christian-Orthodox calendars that contain not only a political symbol, but also liturgical and paradigmatic mistakes, omissions or erroneous entries of Romanian saints recently canonized and of religious holidays," shows a release sent to AGERPRES.
The quoted source mentions that "such an initiative concretized in the printing of electoral material masked as a Christian-Orthodox calendar constitutes a robbery of content, image and Christian-Orthodox symbol and infringes on Law No. 103/1992 regarding the exclusive rights of religious entities to produce items of worship (amended on January 29, 2001) according to which the Romanian Orthodox Church has the exclusive right to print Orthodox calendars and to sell/distribute them only in churches, monasteries and its own church stores."
The Patriarchy recalls that, in the perspective of the local and legislative elections of this year, the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church (BOR), starting from the positions expressed successively by the synodal decisions of February 13-14, 1996; February 23-25, 2000; February 12-13, 2004; March 5-7, 2008; and February 25, 2016, "has reiterated its appeal to political party leaders to not allow the recruiting of members from among the clergy and not to use for political purposes the persons, spaces, services and churchly symbols."
"The Romanian Patriarchy recommends Orthodox believers seek authentic orthodox calendars only in churches, monasteries and church stores, in order to have the safety that their text is the one approved annually by the Holy Synod of the BOR," shows the quoted release.
