Roebling, USA - THESE days Father Joseph Chereches, the 84-year-old Romanian Orthodox priest who has served the tiny parish of SS. Michael and Gabriel here for the last 20 years, spends much of his time in the network of vegetable gardens in small plots given over to his cultivation by his neighbors. He lovingly tends the tomatoes, bean plants native to Romania, and stands of the popular Romanian herb lovage. He bends his sturdy 5-foot-4-inch frame to tear away a dead leaf or pluck a bean pod that has been nibbled by rabbits in much the same way he did decades ago growing up on a farm in the village of Milas in northern Romania.
But he says his thoughts are not on those days. As he weeds his garden, he does not think about the six years he spent in a Communist prison in Romania before the church members sponsored his immigration here and he was granted political asylum. Nor does he mention the myriad saint's day services or the thousands of prayers for the dead he has said in the small brick church that shadows the gardens.
What he thinks about is the fact that the church and its parish hall are locked to him most weekdays. Father Chereches (pronounced Ker-uh-KESH) is banned from conducting services there as a result of a protracted dispute with some in the congregation who say he is authoritarian and accuse him of violating the sacred rite of confession. They want to oust him. He and his wife, Matilda (Eastern Orthodox clergy are allowed to marry), are currently under court order to vacate the parish house they helped build.
He also has supporters, who depict him as a godly and selfless servant of the region's Romanian Orthodox community, and with their help he is resisting the ouster attempts, saying that they will have to carry him out "in a wooden box."
The story of the church is a tangled tale that has snaked its way through state and local courts over the last three years, complicated by the intense passions of Old World vendettas, generational differences, anti-Semitism, allegations of the theft of church funds, and suspension of church members who are descendants of its founders.
It has awakened memories among Romanian-Americans of the ethnic tensions that beset the country from the Carpathian foothills to the Moldavian plains and that spurred waves of immigration over the last century. It has triggered incendiary charges of associations with the fascist Iron Guard of the Nazi occupation during World War II, and its successor, the Securitate, which handled the secret-police duties of the postwar Communist regime before the fall of the dictator, Nicolai Ceaucescu.
And because the church, since its founding in 1918, has seen itself as not only a spiritual home for its transplanted congregants, but as a cultural institution maintaining the Romanian language, history and orthodox traditions, the dispute has shaken a pillar of its members' lives. The church is an independent nonprofit corporation that for political reasons in the 1950's severed its ties to the Bucharest-based Romanian Orthodox Archepiscopate of America. Many of its members travel more than an hour from their homes in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey to attend its services.
While strife-riven churches are not uncommon and, as religious governance disputes go, this hardly rises to the level of the Great Schism, the problems at SS. Michael and Gabriel go to the heart of the life of an institution that serves as a religious, social and cultural experience for a group with one foot in the New World and another in the old country.
A Spiritual Bond to Roots
For one thing, it is the only Romanian Orthodox church in the state. And for its congregation, which now numbers between 70 and 120 registered members (over the past 87 years, it has waxed and waned between 12 and 170 depending on births, deaths and immigration waves from Eastern Europe between the 1920's and the 1990's), it is the only place where they can find religious services conducted only in Romanian. As a result, according to some of its older and younger members who were born in the United States, it is one of the few places where they can feel a physical and spiritual bond to their roots. Maria Charles, a 75-year-old Romanian-American member from Lindenwold, drove to the church on the recent saint's day of her namesake, as she has for years, to have Father Chereches say some prayers and light some candles. But because Father Chereches is banned from the church, he held the small service with a friend and Mrs. Chereches in the kitchen of his residence.
"First, I am old, and second, I am Christian," said Mrs. Charles in explaining her adherence to the practices of the Romanian Orthodox church. "It bothers me that I can't have this prayer and blessing in the church because I remember when we used to come in the middle of the week for a blessing from the priest and to light candles. They have a right to dislike him but I have a right to like him, too."
Mrs. Charles and other members such as Valerie Ilie, a former New York City Transit employee and resident of Clark, far to the north in Union County and the former president of the church board, said that Father Chereches was being attacked and ousted because three years ago he sought an audit of a church renovation project in which a number of air-conditioning units purchased from a contractor who was a longtime church member proved defective. But others, including Stefan Voj, a film editor and a member of the board that hired the priest in the late 1980's, insist that it was the priest's authoritarian ways that, after nearly 25 years, began to weigh on the congregation.
For example, Mr. Voj and others said that Father Chereches's blunt and brusque manner with congregants, especially on matters of faith and religion, was out of step with the attitudes of younger members of the church and particularly grated on them. He likened this attitude to the dictatorial ways of the rulers during the years of the Communist regime in Romania. Others such as John Iordache , the president of the current board, which has ordered the priest out of the church and his job, faulted him for neglecting his role as peacemaker among some of the congregation's famously warring family members.
He gives them platitudes from the old days rather than real counseling, Mr. Iordache said.
From Sanctuary to Courtroom
These issues have rarely found their way into the court battles over the last two years. Those battles usually involved the authority of the board to take certain actions, authority that two Superior Court judges have upheld. The problem has been that the swing from a board supporting the priest to one that did not has resulted in actions that nullify one another.
Along the way there have been other court actions on charges of trespass and assault; local judges, citing the separation of church and state, have declined to rule. But just last week a municipal judge in Florence did order the anti-Chereches faction to restore electric and gas service to the parish house after they had asked that it be shut off in an effort to force the priest to leave.
Both sides agree that the circulation of pages copied from a private diary that the priest kept and which was full of unflattering depictions of some church members as thieves, adulterers and alcoholics has poisoned relations even more. Mr. Voj said that some of the entries in the diary were from confessions that were to remain private and sacred, and that he and others have evidence that Father Chereches had made efforts to have the volume published in Romania.
But the priest insisted that the pages, which he said were taken from him by a once-trusted church member, were private, never intended for general publication and contained nothing from confessions he heard. The writings, some 500 pages, which minutely detail some events in the life of the church, were his therapy as a priest, he said, "a way of letting certain feelings out, of purging these feelings." He said he has no regrets about what he wrote.
"For 60 years as a priest I have only spoken and written what is the truth," he said in Romanian through an interpreter. "I do not regret what I wrote, and those affected don't like it because I told the truth. But I did my duty to myself by writing this diary."
What may have begun as a fight over how church funds had been spent or misspent and long-festering objections to an Old World priest's manner and style of ministering to the spirit, took on a poisonous air after some members of the church saw copies of pages from the diary. Even opponents such as Mr. Iordache, who found the priest's manner blunt and dictatorial, said that circulation of the pages "filled the cup, so to say" and emboldened others to come out against Father Chereches.
Since last November, the dispute has taken on a distinctively Old World flavor. Parishioners who once applauded Father Chereches for the six years he spent in prison under the Communist regime suddenly began to question his accounts, saying that it was only two years and that he was released early because he informed on other prisoners. Mr. Voj said that the priest once told him years ago that he had been a member of the fascist Iron Guard, an anti-Semitic and anti-monarchy group that was driven underground in the years before the Nazi occupation.
The opponents of the priest began to wonder among themselves and others in the congregation just how he managed to get a visa to leave Romania and travel to a relocation camp in Munich four years before the fall of Communism. Such visas, they figured, were given for a reason and usually only to those in favor with the regime.
The priest's supporters gave as good as they got. They questioned the anti-Communist credentials of some more-recent, educated and well-off immigrants among the congregation. There were whispers that they had thrived under Communism because they had cooperated with the regime to get educations and good jobs. Some of their fellow church members curiously began to resemble guards or interrogators in Communist prisons who someone from the old country recalled seeing meting out torture.
"These are some of the people who came here with the Red Book in their pocket and just the mask of liberty on their faces," said a defiant Father Chereches in an interview, referring to the book detailing the tenets of the Romanian Communist Party. "They are the same people who in prison told me that I would no longer work on the Sabbath, but work six days a week pounding rocks to build a canal."
Father Chereches adamantly denies that he was ever a member of the Iron Guard or said that he was in a conversation with Mr. Voj.
'Weirdly Familiar' Scenario
Gabriel Popescu, a professor at Ball State University and author of several books on Romania and the Romanian diaspora, said that the accusations and distrust emerging from SS. Michael and Gabriel sounded "weirdly familiar" and added that "there is a larger story in a gray area in Romanian history" behind it all. He said that the Iron Guard, which was notoriously anti-Semitic, had ceased to exist publicly before World War II, but rumors of their continued presence still fueled Romanian nightmares. In the years of the Cold War, he said, it was not uncommon for the Ceaucescu regime to allow priests to leave Romania to come to the United States to spy on Orthodox congregations here.
"It is difficult to prove because the files declassified after the fall of Communism are not complete," he said. "But it has been proven generally that this happened and there have been cases of people in prison who were celebrated as heroes turning out to have collaborated to avoid torture."
Mr. Popescu, who has no specific knowledge about Father Chereches and SS. Michael and Gabriel Church, said that given all of this history, the accusations flying around among church members are not without historical analogs. In the end, he said, they are accusations that are easy to make, but almost impossible to prove. But because they occur in the crucible of a place that is critical to the spiritual and social life of many Romanian-Americans of different generations, they are passionately held.
"They may not attend every Sunday," he said, "but the church is still the place where they can find out such simple things as how to mail a package back home as well as see their language and traditions kept alive. It serves an important social function."
Father Eugene Vaselescu, 47, the part-time assistant priest at SS. Michael and Gabriel, is caught between the warring factions. In the last three months since Father Chereches was officially voted out by the membership, it has fallen to him to conduct Sunday services. Father Chereches, barred from the pulpit, sits in the sanctuary in his vestments. There have been occasions, he conceded, when the older priest has defiantly displaced him. On those occasions, Father Vaselescu, who works full time during the week with a medical supply company, calmly stepped aside, deferring to Father Chereches despite the court order that bars him from conducting services.
"The image of this could somehow be distorted," he said of those occasions. "But I don't see it the way others do. I am the junior priest and he is the senior priest."
He said that he does not want to inflame passions at the church, and when he alludes to the dispute in his sermons he counsels all to put their pride aside and show forgiveness. He said that it appears that the problems grew out of "a misunderstanding" and then hardened somewhat because people could not forgive and Father Chereches, with his age and older, "harsher ways" and traditions, may not have been able to "employ a kind of spiritual aesthetics" necessary to tamp down the growing conflagration.
"I don't think he meant to hurt anybody, but sometimes you have to use more mellow words," he said. "But now some of the older people who are in conflict with him are in it because they have younger relatives in the church who require different things from the church and feel they aren't getting them."
Meanwhile Father Chereches putters in his garden, offering a visitor copious amounts of tomatoes and some fragrant sprigs of lovage, an essential ingredient in the borschtlike Romanian dish called ciorba. Mrs. Chereches sits in the kitchen turning the pages of a photo album that she has kept of events at the church over the years. She points to pictures of a happier time and occasionally sobs at the thought of where she and her husband will go if their opponents succeed in ousting them from the parish house and the church. But Father Chereches is adamant.
"We forgive them but they refuse our forgiveness," he said. "They want me to apologize and be sorry for being a good priest who tells them not to steal and lie. I should be sorry for this?"