Briefly Reviewed: March 2026

Religions and Communism: André Scrima’s Ecumenical Activities Reflected in Securitate Files

By Iuliu-Marius Morariu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Pages: 188

Price: $129.99

Review Author: Inez Fitzgerald Storck

At first glance, Religions and Communism: André Scrima’s Ecumenical Activities Reflected in Securitate Files covers a rather restricted topic: the specific activities of one Romanian Orthodox priest as documented in the files of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police during the Communist era. Yet the book encompasses the fascinating life of the priest in question, Fr. André (or Andrei) Scrima, his intellectual and spiritual formation and apostolate, and his contacts with Catholics and others to promote Christian unity. Author Iuliu-Marius Morariu, a Romanian Orthodox priest and monk, has himself written on the question of unity among Christians, for example, in his Ecumenism, Primacy, Authority and Love: Faces of a Complex Theological Reality.

Scrima was born in Transylvania in 1925. His childhood was marked by the divorce of his parents when he was eight years old; his father was granted custody of him, and his mother custody of his sister. He experienced continual moves with his father, who in his work as a forester was transferred from one location to another. Both situations contributed to a sense of aloneness and melancholy, as he led a secluded life devoted to his studies and to reading. In 1941, after his father died of heart failure, he moved to Bucharest with his father’s second wife and his two half-sisters. He enrolled at the University of Bucharest, where he studied mathematical logic, philosophy, and Eastern religious thought. During this period, he experienced a religious conversion and participated in the Burning Bush movement, devoted to spiritual renewal and intellectual formation as a way to counter Communism. Scrima graduated from the Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Bucharest, was ordained a priest, and became a monk, spending time in several monasteries in Romania. He held various positions in these monasteries, serving as a professor, librarian, and, due to his linguistic abilities, translator.

During this period of his life, as well as later, Scrima avoided involvement in Romanian politics. He was not associated with the Iron Guard, which in the 1930s played an important role in Romanian politics. This fascist group, though it identified with the Orthodox Church, advocated violence and supported Hitler. The Securitate, in its many attempts to discredit Scrima, accused him of being a supporter during his youth. The recognition later accorded him for his scholarship and influence would have been gravely vitiated had he been linked to the Iron Guard. It must be noted that the secret police comprised a vast network of informers from all social classes, serving as a tool of one of the most repressive Communist regimes ever known.

Scrima had attracted the attention of the Securitate in his youth, but agents followed him more intensely when he refused to return to Romania after completing his doctoral studies at Banaras Hindu University in India. There he focused on the differences between Christianity and Hinduism from the perspective of hesychasm, a form of Christian mysticism involving prayer of the heart (of which a well-known example is the Jesus Prayer) and controlled breathing. The Securitate then pursued Scrima to Lebanon, where he served as the spiritual father of a monastery and taught at St. Joseph’s Catholic University and the Maronite Holy Spirit University, and to Paris, where in 1960 he became a French citizen. When Scrima visited Lebanon in 1970 and made known his opposition to the Israeli acquisition of territory after the Six Day War, a note in his police file accused him of supporting Arab terrorists.

While in Paris, Scrima met Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, who, impressed with the young priest, bestowed on him the honor of archimandrite and made him his delegate to Vatican II. Scrima was instrumental in arranging the meeting between Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem, at which they retracted their Churches’ mutual excommunications dating from 1054. While in France, Scrima gave numerous lectures on Eastern Orthodox spirituality and visited several Catholic monasteries in his efforts to promote unity between Orthodox and Catholics.

Scrima provided an interesting diagnosis of the Catholic Church in a 1957 missive to his spiritual director, a letter intercepted by the Securitate and found in its files. He had many Catholic contacts, including Dominicans Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, progressive theologians who were censured and later rehabilitated. Describing the crisis in the Church as a conflict between those who emphasize the “living community of believers” and the “rigid, sometimes intractable leadership of the Vatican,” Scrima observes that this “rigidity” comes with a benefit: “it imposes a control…, a period of verification and maturation, which prevents fantasy, improvisation, imposture.” Scrima also offers this image of the liturgy of the Saulchoir Dominican community in France, where he addressed the friars: “There were about 160 Dominicans, in their white and black robes, chanting rhythmically,” their gestures communicating something of their mystical experience. Other monasteries participated in the liturgical renewal in the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II, notably Maria Laach in Germany, where the beautiful Masses drew busloads of the faithful on Sundays. Services at these monasteries give a glimpse of an approach sadly not adopted in the reform of the Mass. It is not surprising that the liturgies of the renewal movement impressed Scrima, since, like Orthodox liturgies, they emphasized the transcendent.

As many as 12 secret police at once tracked Scrima in an effort to identify politically compromising activity in France and the countries he visited. For example, according to the observation of an agent in 1962 regarding Scrima’s trip to Turkey, “He currently has relations with different Romanian fugitives with whom he carries out an activity which is hostile to our country,” with no further details. He was suspected of fomenting anti-Communist sentiment among Romanian exiles in France, though Morariu indicates that they were “far from being so important or well organized as to represent a threat for Bucharest.” Scrima’s programs on Radio Free Europe were monitored; those who were found listening to them were penalized.

The records amassed in Securitate files and analyzed by Morariu provide a trajectory of the life of Fr. Scrima and his interreligious apostolate and give inside information on the lengths to which the Securitate went to compromise him.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: Convert Maker

By Cheryl C.D. Hughes

Publisher: Ignatius

Pages: 310

Price: $19.95

Review Author: Elizabeth Hanink

Having grown up largely without television, I never saw episodes of Fulton Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living when they originally aired. Watching them now, many seem quite campy. It might be his eyes with those prominent eyebrows, or maybe it’s the full regalia of a bishop, rarely seen today, that makes those early TV outings seem so odd. What is not campy is what Archbishop Sheen says. He is concise, articulate, and engaging. Most importantly, he is faithful to the Church and her teachings. That faithfulness continues to draw people to him and explains why his books remain in print and episodes of his television show are still available.

In his lifetime, Sheen was an extraordinarily effective evangelist. His gift of bringing people of varied backgrounds into the Church is the focus of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: Convert Maker, and author Cheryl C.D. Hughes provides a rich variety of stories to illustrate how he transformed the lives of Claire Booth Luce, writer, congresswoman, and ambassador; Heywood Broun, journalist; Louis Budenz, communist organizer; Fritz Kreisler, violinist and composer; and Virginia Mayo, actress. Unlike what the book’s title implies, Sheen never took credit for anyone’s conversion. Although he spent about ten hours a week giving personal instructions in the faith, Sheen maintained that he was merely an instrument of the Holy Spirit. Any success, any real conversion, was God’s doing.

Sheen was also an effective and popular fundraiser, and that talent brought him into multiple conflicts with his superior, the formidable Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York. Over the years, Sheen was estimated to have raised up to 70 percent of the money the American Church sent to the missions, close to $200 million. According to Hughes, as big as New York is, there was not enough room for two “larger-than-life, strong-willed prelates like Spellman and Sheen.” Money was at the root of their most serious disagreements. In 1955, when Sheen was the American director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, Spellman asked him for money to help in the recovery of post-war Europe, largely to prevent Protestant charitable efforts from gaining an advantage. Sheen declined. He said the funds had been donated by American Catholics for mission work. The dispute reached the Vatican, and to Spellman’s great humiliation, Pope Pius XII sided with Sheen. Soon after, powdered milk was the focus of another dispute. Cardinal Spellman claimed he had paid the government millions of dollars that he now wanted the Society for the Propagation of the Faith to cover. The milk had, in fact, been given free, and when presented with documentation, the Pope again sided with Sheen.

The resulting vendetta was quite public. Spellman ranted, “I will get even with you. It may take six months or ten years, but everyone will know what you are like.” He told seminarians at St. Joseph Seminary that Sheen was “the most disobedient priest in the country,” and “I want none of you to turn out like him.” The cardinal used his power to have Sheen barred from preaching a popular Lenten series at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Even worse, Spellman managed to get him barred from television. This loss of his primary platform for raising monies for the missions and the accompanying decline in popularity had a profound impact on Sheen.

Yet, according to his niece Jean Sheen Cunningham, who lived and traveled with him, Sheen never criticized Spellman, saying only to close family members, “Pray for me. The Cardinal is very hard on me.” Later, he reflected, “During those days when my life was backed up against the cross, I began to know and love it more.” Indeed, Sheen, who was as busy as any of us, never lacked time for prayer, including a daily holy hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament, daily Mass, and the Rosary, along with the Litany of Our Lady, in addition to the obligatory Divine Office.

Aside from Cardinal Spellman, Sheen had other adversaries. Hughes covers some of his missteps during his short tenure as bishop of Rochester, New York, and there were several. He was accused of being authoritarian with the seminary and the priests. His plans to hire a newly converted former rabbi and engage a Protestant minister to teach homiletics met opposition. The idea of women and laymen having some say in who might be admitted fell flat. No one liked it when he closed schools, nor did they approve when he raised the Confirmation age to 17. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam, despite being an ardent anti-communist, and his active support of the black community further antagonized many. But, unlike many public figures today, including prominent Catholics, he treated everyone with the utmost respect and charity.

Sheen was not perfect. He loved his celebrity, his finely tailored clothes, his Cadillacs (always on loan), the perks, and clerical titles. But he did not love these above God. He did not water down the faith or shy away from controversy, nor did he try to make Catholicism more suited to the times. As his cause for canonization advances despite suffering multiple setbacks, Hughes’s book provides a timely and interesting study of a most notable man.

Taking Religion Seriously

By Charles Murray

Publisher: Encounter Books

Pages: 152

Price: $29.99

Review Author: Preston R. Simpson

Charles Murray is a well-known and sometimes controversial political scientist who has stirred the sociopolitical pot with such works as Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (coauthored with Richard Herrnstein), and Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. His latest work, Taking Religion Seriously, is of a completely different nature but fits into an emerging genre of thoughtful public intellectuals and secular scholars who have investigated the claims of Christianity and found them persuasive to one degree or another. Readers have probably heard that public figures as diverse as Louise Perry, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, and Tom Holland have, within the past couple years, announced their conversion to Christianity or at least acknowledged it as the foundation of all the desirable aspects of Western culture. Even the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins referred to himself as a “cultural Christian” while still rejecting its supernatural claims.

Murray was raised in a nominally Christian home, but when he went away to college, he abandoned his faith (such as he had) because no one at Harvard in the early 1960s had any interest in religion. The attitude in most universities was, in the words of his second wife, “Smart people don’t believe that anymore.” This view was apparently reinforced on a visit home from college when he announced to his father that he no longer believed. To young Murray’s surprise, his father confessed that he didn’t believe either but had taken him to church as a child only because he thought it “was a good habit, a kind of discipline [that] reminded him of ways he could be a better person and fulfill his responsibilities.” Murray counts himself among the tribe of smart people and acknowledges that taking such things seriously or even investigating them with an open mind might cause him to “be thought credulous and foolish and get kicked out of the tribe.”

Despite those fears, it was Murray’s wife’s interest in and attendance at a Quaker service near their small village that eventually piqued his interest. As a lifelong scholar, he decided that “religion is something that should be taken seriously by nonbelievers and that can be taken seriously in the same way that Chinese history or plate tectonics can be taken seriously.” Thus began a multiyear investigation of the evidence for the existence of God and for the historical reliability of the New Testament.

Murray begins by addressing a question that confronts all of us from time to time in our day-to-day lives: trust in authority. Every one of us deals with areas of life where we do not possess detailed knowledge and must rely on others to guide us. Murray considers himself an expert in certain aspects of his field of political science, where he has spent a life of study, and he admits he is merely an educated and well-read layman in the topics he considers in this book. Indeed, a valuable feature is its extensive list of generally accessible works by others on all the issues he considers. They are not lumped into a bibliography at the end but are placed by topic, sometimes with Murray’s own brief comments, in small boxes within the text, in which he discusses the issue at hand. He includes references on ideas he has decided to reject, such as the multiverse theory, but which are nevertheless debated by others.

Next, Murray poses a simple but highly charged question: Why is there something rather than nothing? There ensues a brief review of the development of the Big Bang Theory, the anthropic principle, and related matters. This is followed by a chapter on paranormal phenomena, near-death experiences, and terminal lucidity, all of which are challenges to the idea that our brains are simply matter with no immaterial component that might be called a soul. Terminal lucidity is a term I had not encountered previously. It refers, in Murray’s words, to “a sudden return to self-awareness, memory, and lucid functioning of a person who suffers from a severe neurological disorder that has deprived them of their mental capacities.” When it occurs, “it is almost always followed by death within a day or so, with complete mental relapse in the interim.”

In Part II, Murray delves into the specific question of whether Christianity explains these phenomena. Here he found that his own scholarly work intersected with his religious investigations. In 2003 Murray published Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, in which he points out that advances in the arts and sciences tended to be concentrated in Christian Europe, and creativity, especially in art, declined in the late 19th century as societies became more secular. “All this led me to conclude,” he said, “that when religion no longer supplies a framework for thinking about the Good, True, and Beautiful, artists tend to make their work about their personal preferences, and those preferences tend to be banal or wrongheaded or both.”

Murray’s work was reinforced by Rodney Stark’s For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, published about the same time, which claims to show how Christianity led to the development of science in the West. The reason for this, in Stark’s words, was that “Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure awaiting human comprehension.”

A couple years after the publication of Human Accomplishment, Murray was introduced to C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece of apologetics, Mere Christianity, which has been so influential for many inquirers, including this humble reviewer. Lewis’s inquiry into the moral law and his case for the divinity of Christ had a profound effect on Murray. From this point, Murray proceeded to an investigation of the historicity of the Gospels, including their dating and authorship, among other questions. Later, he took on miracles (a topic also treated by Lewis in a separate book) and the Resurrection — the greatest miracle of them all. After evaluating the arguments, he concluded that the evidence favors early dates for the Gospels and the likelihood that they were written by eyewitnesses or people close to them, and that “the reasons to dismiss the resurrection run up against logical implausibilities.” The one area where Murray clearly deviates from orthodox Christianity is in his complete rejection of the Christmas narratives, which he dismisses as “beautiful fables.”

I cannot say that this book strengthened my faith, as I was already familiar with most of its arguments. But it is encouraging that yet another scholar is willing to come out of the secular closet and explain his thinking in a readable and logical manner comprehensible to any curious layman. As Murray comments, “Maybe God also needs a way to reach over-educated agnostics.” If you know any, this short but powerful book would make a thoughtful gift.

©2026 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.

To submit a Letter to the Editor, click here.