Prodotto di estrema destra per il benessere: l’estrema destra rumena

>Not long before I arrived in Bucharest, the Romanian Orthodox Church opened the world’s biggest Orthodox cathedral, the Cathedral of National Salvation, right next to the world’s heaviest building, the vast Ceaușescu-era palace that now houses the Romanian parliament. I joined the queue to take a look inside, curious to see the world’s biggest Orthodox iconostasis and the world’s biggest display of church mosaic (six acres’ worth).

>I never made it: the online queue tracker, which reported a wait of two hours when I set out, gave six hours by the time I joined. Most of the enormous cost of the cathedral was borne by the Romanian government, but it didn’t seem to be getting any credit for it. A popular opinion is that the government steals whatever money it collects.

>I asked one of my neighbours in the queue, a sheep breeder from Constanța, whether he thought the building of the cathedral had been an absolute need or just a nice thing to do. ‘It was a necessary thing to do,’ he said, ‘because otherwise the money would have been stolen.’

>Why was it that those in power weren’t able to steal the money for the church, if they stole the money for everything else?

>’Maybe they’re afraid of God,’ he said.