The Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey
The Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey paid a landmark visit to communist Romania in June 1965. What was the head of the Church of England doing in a country where state atheism was official policy?
Cristina Mateescu, 03.04.2026, 14:00
The visit came at a time of renewed Cold War tensions and re-escalating rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, but as far as Romania was concerned, 1965 marked a shift in its relations with Moscow. After Stalin’s death, Romania had already begun to distance itself from the Soviet Union, and now, its brand new leader Nicolae Ceausescu took this even further. Romania began to seek closer ties with the West, including Great Britain.
Against this backdrop, the trip that the Archbishop of Canterbury paid to Romania in June 1965 may easily be interpreted as an example of religious diplomacy, building on the tradition of ecumenical dialogue already existing between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Church of England. Indeed, the visit took place on the 30th anniversary of the Bucharest Conference, a theological meeting hosted by the Romanian capital in 1935 in which the Romanian Orthodox Church recognised the Anglican orders. The following year, the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Miron Cristea, paid an official visit to London and met the Archbishop of Canterbury Gordon Lang.
This rapprochement was halted temporarily with the outbreak of the Second World War and the installation of the pro-Soviet regime in Romania, but it saw a new impetus in the 1960s, culminating with an exchange of top-level visits. One year after Archbishop Michael Ramsey travelled to Bucharest, the Romanian Orthodox patriarch, Justinian, visited Britain, where he was welcomed with great honours by Church of England officials and even received an audience with Queen Elizabeth II.
The communist press of the day gave little coverage to the Archbishop’s visit, so the surviving interview we found in Radio Romania’s archives is a rare record of his visit. In this interview, which you can listen to in this episode, Archbishop Ramsey is interviewed by a reporter from Radio Bucharest, as RRI was known at the time.
