Strategies for the survival of religious discourse in communist Romania: a critical analysis of religious publicistic texts

Strategii de supraviețuire a discursului religios în România comunistă

Abstract

The religious official speech in communist Romania experienced an immense process of adaptation, through codification, under censorship and ideological pressures. The study analyzes strategies of dissimulation and resignification of the sacred content of religious journalistic texts published in the journal Mitropolia Moldovei și Sucevei through the communist period, with a focus on sermons, pastorals and circular letters. The study proposes a critical analysis from a contemporary perspective, with the tools of discourse theory notions and deixis pragmatics, in order to foreground how religious discourse made room for political power while retaining its identity value in a hostile setting. The study aims to reconstruct the nuanced interplay between religion, language and ideology, with a
clearer vision of cultural resistance through discourse in contemporary religious texts. The research emphasizes the use of deixis — personal (e.g., first-person plural pronouns like "we", "our church"), temporal (references to the present time or historical continuity), and spatial (references to the national or sacred space) — as strategies for consolidating communal religious identity. It also looks at the utilization of discourse connectors (e.g., "thus", "therefore", "as we know", "it is necessary") that structure and legitimize the argumentation within the possibilities offered by the political regime.