His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel has celebrated today, 13 March 2010, the funeral service of Rev. Prof. Acad. Dr. Dumitru Popescu. To end with the funeral service, His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel delivered a speech to the mourning family and all those present, entitled A THEOLOGIAN, CREATOR OF SYNTHESIS AND PROMOTER OF DIALOGUE, which we render below.

A THEOLOGIAN, CREATOR OF SYNTHESIS AND PROMOTER OF DIALOGUE – Rev. Prof. Acad. Dr. Dumitru Popescu (1929 – 2010)

“It was with great sorrow in my soul that I learned about the passing away of Rev. Professor Academician Dr. Dumitru Popescu, a remarkable theologian, distinguished man of culture and of high morality.

God wanted to call him to Him during this period of ascension to the Resurrection, maybe just because his life, offered with great passion and self dedication to the service of the theologian education, has become an ascension of speaking of God in the light of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

We do want to bring homage to the personality of the late Rev. Acad. Dumitru Popescu, well known and appreciated both within the Romanian university theological environment and abroad.

Due to his great concern for the relationship between theology and culture, which has an essential importance for the mission of the Church in the contemporary world, Rev. Prof. Dumitru Popescu joins faithfulness to the contribution of his predecessors and to the Orthodox ecclesiastic experience with the permanent renewal of his theological address, paying attention to the present life of the Church and to the challenges of culture and science of our time. His large openness to the theologies of some other Churches, sometimes in a critical manner, has contributed to the promotion of the inter-Christian theological dialogues and, at the same time, to the affirmation of the specific features of the world and Romanian Orthodoxy.

What does particularize the didactic activity and theological work of Rev. Dumitru Popescu is the inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary dimension of the thematic address. One of the favourite dogmatic themes is the teaching on the Holy Trinity, which is permanently related to the ecclesiology, cosmology, anthropology and teaching on the Holy Sacraments.

The second favourite dogmatic theme is the Christological one, a fact proved not only through his many specialized works, but also through the fact that his treaty of dogmatics, published in 2005, was entitled Jesus Christ, the Pantocrator. In the field of Christology, the contribution of Rev. Prof. Dumitru Popescu can be summed up and defined through the development of a theology on Christ, the divine creator Logos, which fact would allow him to relate, in quite a new manner, the Christologic chapter to the anthropologic one.

The substantial contribution of Rev. Prof. Dumitru Popescu in the field of dogmatic theology is doubled by that in the field of fundamental theology or apologetics. Due to the fact that he was the first theologian to work out precious studies, after 1990, concerning the relation between religion and culture, religion and philosophy, religion and science, religion and art, he has initiated and developed a renewing trend in the Romanian theology, appreciated both by the Church and by society. The most conclusive argument in this regard is the fact that first the book Theology and Culture was awarded the prize of the Romanian Academy for 1993, and then the author was admitted as honorary member of the Romanian Academy.

Through his life and work, Rev. Prof. Dumitru Popescu will remain as a model of fidelity and service to Christ, our Lord, and to His Church, a bright inspiring model for the young generation, through his academic competence, through his tenacity, through his noble soul and through the way in which he succeeded, with wisdom and much love, in guiding and forming generations of students, servants of the holy altars or of the chairs of theology today.

His passion for the present theological synthesis, his scientific competence and vocation of worthy priest and distinguished professor made him a light column of the Romanian theology, and an example worthy of admiration.

We pray Christ, our Lord, Risen from the dead, to rest the soul of His servant, Rev. Professor Dumitru Popescu, in the never setting light of His Kingdom where the righteous ones shine, to comfort the mourning family and all those who are grieved today by his departure from us”.

May he be always remembered from generation to generation!




† DANIEL
Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church