Civil Society as Its Own Enemy: The First Romanian Christian-Democratic Attempt

In this paper, by presenting few political ideas of the bishop of Ramnic Noul-Severin, Bartolomeu St nescu (1875-1954), I am trying to portray how a social-Christian political vision has failed in the Romanian interwar period. In his case we are rather dealing with a transplantation of a doctrine named Social Christianity” and defined as an eclectic body of counter-revolutionary ideas implemented with liberal tools and born out of socialist sensibilities. Although important figure in the Romanian Orthodox Church and Senate, moreover as a public promoter of Social Christianity, the failure of his political project gives us the clues to understand why Christian-democracy has never been born in Romania, as for instance in Italy, along with the principles of subsidiarity, anti-statism, democracy, personalism or anti-communism. On the contrary, the political reading of the interwar ecclesiastical debates and events is due to prove that the society was incomplete modernized, eager for paternalism and authoritarianism and mostly under the siege of an organic nationalism which has expelled both liberal and Christian-democratic approaches.