The Tanacu Case: A Personal Reflection

In the heart of Romania, in the village of Tanacu, an event unfolded in 2005 that continues to challenge the moral conscience of Europe: the death of Irina Cornici, a young nun crucified during an exorcism ritual led by Orthodox priest Daniel Petru Corogeanu. At the time, the incident was dismissed as a tragic misstep born of religious fanaticism. Yet today, it demands a deeper, more troubled, more humane reexamination. I have gathered testimonies, listened to voices that found no space in courtrooms or on television screens. What emerges is a darker, more painful, more emblematic portrait of spiritual fragility in our age.

Irina was not merely a young woman diagnosed with mental illness, as the doctors claimed. She was a wounded soul, raised in orphanages, marked by abandonment and solitude. And in the monastery of Tanacu, where she sought refuge and redemption, she may instead have encountered a theatre of abuse. Some of the testimonies I have collected suggest that Irina was subjected to non-consensual sexual advances, veiled beneath spiritual zeal, sacred ritual, and monastic discipline. Her body—bound to a wooden cross, deprived of food and water—was not only the victim of an exorcism: it was the target of a violence that disguised torture as liturgy.

Father Corogeanu, who presented himself as a spiritual guide, acted with a cruelty that cannot be justified by faith or tradition. Yet he was sentenced to only a few years in prison, and many regarded him as a martyr. But I ask: who was truly the martyr in this story? Was it not Irina, crucified in the name of a God who did not speak to her, who did not save her, who did not defend her? Was it not she—the forgotten face of a religion that too often confuses power with grace?

The Tanacu case is not merely a chapter of criminal history. It is an open wound in the flesh of European spirituality. It symbolizes what happens when dogma suffocates compassion, when ritual becomes abuse, when silence shields the perpetrators and condemns the victims. Today, twenty years later, I call for a memory that is more just, more lucid, more courageous. Not to condemn faith, but to purify it. Not to destroy tradition, but to redeem it.

Irina Cornici must not be remembered as a madwoman possessed, but as a young woman betrayed by those who should have protected her. And if she was indeed the victim of sexual abuse, as some voices suggest, then her martyrdom takes on an even deeper meaning: that of a moral crucifixion, carried out in the heart of a Europe still struggling to distinguish the sacred from the sadistic.

May her memory interrogate us, unsettle us, convert us. For only in truth can redemption be born.

Doktor Lazarus