Chișinău, June 1, 2026
Photo: cotidianul.md
After 35 years of leading the Romanian Orthodox Church’s Metropolis of Bessarabia in Moldova, His Eminence Metropolitan Petru has requested to retire.
He submitted his request on May 27 “for reasons of age, health, and for the good of the Church,” the Metropolis reports.
His request will be presented for approval before the Holy Synod of the Romanian Church at its June 3–4 session. His Eminence Metropolitan Teofan of Iași has been appointed to oversee the Metropolis of Bessarabia until the election of a new Metropolitan.
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Met. Petru has been a polarizing figure in the modern history of Orthodoxy in Moldova. He began his ecclesiastical career in the Moscow Patriarchate, though after Moldova’s independence in 1991, he led a group of clergy into the Romanian Church to reestablish its Metropolis of Bessarabia that existed from 1918 to 1940.
The Romanian Church formally reestablished its Metropolis on September 14, 1992, with Bp. Petru at the head. He was elevated to the rank of Archbishop of Chişinău, Metropolitan of Bessarabia and Exarch of the Plains in 1995.
The Russian Church hadn’t canonically released Bp. Petru, and considered him suspended from December 1992 until April 1999. He then appealed to His Holiness Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow with a message of regret over the events of 1992 and a request to be canonically released, which the Russian Synod granted.
Thus, since the early 1990s, there have been two overlapping jurisdictions in Moldova, under the Russian and Romanian Churches. Moldovan authorities initially sided with the Russian Orthodox Church, and it wasn’t until 2004 that the Romanian Metropolis was legally registered in the country following a decision from the European Court of Human Rights.
However, in recent years, especially since the start of the war in Ukraine, the authorities have favored the Romanian Church’s Metropolis of Bessarabia, which has also become much bolder in recent years in declaring the Moscow Patriarchate’s Moldovan Orthodox Church to be non-canonical, taking in its clergy without releases, some of whom have been suspended or defrocked.
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