Romanian Patriarch Mourned at Sumptuous Funeral

Thousands of Romanians joined Christian and Muslim clerics to bid farewell to the long-serving head of the country's Orthodox church at a sumptuous funeral on Friday.

Patriarch Teoctist died on Monday aged 92 due to heart complications after surgery.

In 1999 he invited the late Pope John Paul to Romania, the first time a Catholic Pope had visited a mainly Orthodox country in a trip aimed at narrowing the age-old split between the two churches.

Recalling the visit, Pope Benedict said in a statement:

"Both men were filled with a determination to write a new page in the history of our communities, overcoming a difficult past which still burdens us today, and looking forward with confidence to the day when the divisions among the followers of Christ will be overcome."

The patriarch's office said around 1,000 clerics, including more than 100 Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, Anglican and Muslim representatives from abroad, attended the funeral.

The coffin circled the patriarchal cathedral in downtown Bucharest before it was taken for burial in a crypt below. Teoctist was the Black Sea state's fifth patriarch.

The service was attended by Istanbul-based Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the church's senior bishop by ancient tradition. A military guard of honour fired a volley of shots after the service.

Unlike the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians lack a single leader and maintain a loose family of national churches, based mostly in Russia, Greece, Romania and the Balkans with diaspora churches scattered around the world.

Teoctist, born in 1915 in a family of 11 children, had been the head of the Orthodox Church, to which 87 percent of Romanians belong, since 1986.

One of his main projects was to build a "Cathedral of the Nation's Absolution". Like the vast Christ the Saviour cathedral in Moscow it was to be regarded as a symbol of rebirth after 50 years of communist repression.

But land and financing problems have delayed construction.

Teoctist was criticised for doing nothing to stop Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's destruction of dozens of churches and historians say the church had a subservient relationship with the pre-1989 communist regime.

A successor is expected to be elected after a 40-day mourning period. Most local media said Daniel, the Metropolitan of Moldova and Bucovina, was favourite to be appointed.