Statutul Cuviosului Daniil Sihastrul la mijlocul secolului al XVI-lea şi o posibilă semnificaţie

Venerable Daniel the Hermit, whom tradition has it as counselor of Prince Stephen the Great and spiritual father of the Voroneţ monastery, is the most popular “saintly man” for the Romanians. The current paper examines a series of occurrences of Venerable Daniel and of the Voroneţ Monastery in documents between the 15th and the 20th century. One notices that the characteristics associated to an officially canonized saint appear since the 14th of September 1548, the day of the reconsecration of the monastery, after a porch had been added to the church and the exterior painting of the church had been finished on the commission of Metropolitan Gregory Roşca. The author brings up arguments to support the hypothesis that, on the initiative of Metropolitan Gregory, Venerable Daniel was canonized on the 14th of September 1548 in a form that was possible at that time in the Moldavian Metropolia. Because the act of canonizing saints is associated to the autocephaly of a Church, the act of canonizing Venerable Daniel represents the affirmation at the middle of the 16th century of the status of the Moldavian Metropolia as an autocephalous Church. Subsequently the paper makes several considerations on the Voroneţ monastery as a centre of power and the contribution to this characteristic by Metropolitan Gregory, the monastery’s second founder.