THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GREEK-CATHOLIC DISCOURSE OF IDENTITY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY

The Greek-Catholic Church in Romania has been forced to face a set of major challenges in the last 25 years: the institutional and administrative reorganization after its return to a legal existence; the relation to the Romanian state and the Romanian Orthodox Church; but also the relation to its own community of believers confronted with the evolutions specific to the post-modern world. The Romanian Uniate Church was, and in a sense still is, also faced with the need to find a satisfactory answer to the question: how much should it go back in time in order to tie again the line of its discourse of identity?; how much should it go back in time in order to be able to find those links that would define in a natural way the characteristics of its own confessional identity? Back to 1948? To 1848? Back to the roots from 1700? This dilemma, correlated to the aspects of the confessional, social and political context of the last decades, has determined the way in which the discourse of identity of the Greek-Catholic Church has been built, its constitutive elements, but also its relation to the historical process of construction of a specific own Tradition, clearly individualized in the Romanian spiritual environment. This paper aims to analyze this process of constitution of a Uniate confessional discourse of identity, its themes and symbols, as well as the position of the Greek-Catholic Church towards: the other Romanian churches; the Roman-Catholic Church; the Romanian society facing the influences of specific phenomenon like globalization and secularization. But also towards its own Tradition.