The Sacralization of Social Assistance: The Specificity of the Romanian Orthodox Model Compared to Faith-Based Organizations in the Catholic or Protestant World: A Grounded Theory Analysis

Abstract

This article explores the specificity of social assistance conducted by the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) compared to Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) in the UK, USA, and France. The article is a secondary qualitative analysis of a circumscribed subset of the interview material assembled in a wider mixed-methods study on the professionalization of charity in the ROC, pursuing a different research question—the configurational specificity of the Orthodox model—than the parent study itself. Using Grounded Theory methodology on the corpus of nineteen interviews with clergy, social workers, and experts from Northeastern Romania, the analysis develops the category of the sacralization of social assistance—a configuration of practices and meanings in which the spiritual dimension is structurally integrated, sacramentally obligatory, and clerically authorized. While each of these features has been documented individually in Protestant and Catholic faith-based organizations, their joint configuration in the Romanian Orthodox case differs in degree and arrangement from patterns reported in the Western literature. A theoretically informed contrast with that literature highlights six dimensions along which the ROC configuration, as articulated by providers, diverges from the patterns most frequently reported in that literature: (1) the spiritual dimension is structurally integrated in ROC versus optional in UK/USA or institutionally absent in France; (2) leadership remains predominantly clerical versus secularly professionalized in the West; (3) the beneficiary is conceptualized as a living icon of Christ versus a person with civil rights; (4) the purpose of interventions is soteriological versus immanent social reintegration; (5) professionalization generates anxiety about secularization versus comfortable normalization; (6) volunteerism remains informal-communitarian versus formalized-systematic. The research proposes a dual-axis typology that differentiates between the presence and the nature of the spiritual dimension.

1. Introduction

1.1. Research Context and Relevance of the Topic

The international academic literature on faith-based organizations (FBOs) has developed extensively over the past three decades. In the United States, the welfare reform of the 1990s and the ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ initiative encouraged collaboration with religious organizations in delivering social services. In the United Kingdom, the ‘Big Society’ agenda similarly stimulated academic interest.

This literature exhibits, however, a pronounced geographical and confessional bias, as most studies focus on Protestant and secular contexts in North America and Western Europe, while Orthodox traditions remain dramatically underrepresented.

The Romanian Orthodox Church has historically been involved in social assistance through monastic and parish institutions. After 1989, the Church began reconstructing its institutional capacity for delivering social services, a process accelerated after 2000 when Romania began preparations for European integration.

The present work is a secondary analysis based on the recoding of interviews originally collected for research on the professionalization of social assistance offered within ROC social-assistance institutions. More precisely, the original study was a doctoral dissertation defended by the authors of this article at “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, organized around three objectives—(O1) to identify the specificity and meaning attributed to ROC social-philanthropic activity; (O2) to identify the stage and particularities of professionalization of ROC social services in the Iași Archdiocese; (O3) to clarify the priest’s roles in articulating philanthropy with professionalized social services—and around five hypotheses concerning the philanthropy/professionalization continuum, the addition of a spiritual dimension to lay professional values, the perception of professionalization as a risk of secularization, the conditioning of services on Christian affiliation, and the central role of the priest. It is important to underline that the underlying research was a mixed-methods sociological investigation devoted primarily to the professionalization of charity in the Romanian Orthodox Church. Its scope was substantially broader than that of the present article: it comprised qualitative interviews with 37 practitioners, structured non-participant observation at three residential centres, a 578-respondent provider survey and a 420-respondent beneficiary survey, and addressed organizational, financial, accreditational and personnel-related dimensions of ROC philanthropy. The present article does not reproduce or summarize that wider investigation. It addresses an adjacent but distinct research question—the configurational specificity of the Orthodox model vis-à-vis Western FBO patterns documented in the literature—that the parent study did not pursue as such, and it uses, as its primary empirical material, a circumscribed subset of the parent qualitative interviews. The methodological implications of this secondary use are discussed in Section 3.1.

1.2. Orthodox Doctrine and Fundamental Theological Differences Impacting Ecclesial Social Assistance Practice

Orthodoxy differs fundamentally from the Protestantism that generated the vast majority of the literature on FBOs in several distinct theological aspects: a robust sacramental theology that permeates all religious life; an anthropology of the person-in-relationship; the concept of theosis as ontological transformation; and an ecclesiology in which the Church is understood not as a voluntary organization but as the Body of Christ.

These theological differences may inform organizational models that differ from Protestant or secular ones in important respects, though, as the analysis below makes explicit, the difference is configurational rather than categorical.

1.3. Research Objectives and Questions

This research has two main objectives. The first is to develop an empirically grounded category about the specificity of social assistance in the Romanian Orthodox Church using Grounded Theory methodology. The second is to place this category in dialogue with patterns reported in the literature on Western FBOs in order to identify points of convergence, divergence, and refinement.

2. Theoretical Foundation and Literature Review

2.1. The Concept of Faith-Based Organizations

The concept of ‘faith-based organization’ has become central in the literature on religious social services, but its definition remains problematic. Bielefeld and Cleveland identify three main definitions (Bielefeld and Cleveland 2013, pp. 442–67). Sider and Unruh’s (2004) ten-dimensional framework is the most influential operationalization.

The very concept of “faith-based organization” presupposes a conceptual separation between “organization” (secular entity) and “faith” (added element)–a separation that may not be valid in contexts where the Church is understood as a sacramental reality, not a voluntary association (Cojocaru et al. 2011, pp. 65–83).

2.2. Influential Typologies and Their Limitations

The most influential typology is that of Sider and Unruh, which differentiates six types on a continuum from most religious to most secular: faith-permeated, faith-centered, faith-affiliated, faith-background, faith-secular partnership, and secular (Sider and Unruh 2004, pp. 109–34). This typology presents conceptual limitations for understanding Orthodox traditions: it assumes a single permeability axis and an inevitable trajectory toward secularization.

2.3. Empirical Patterns in the Literature on Western Organizations

The literature has identified several recurring patterns: tension between religious identity and professionalization (Johnsen et al. 2014), gradual secularization (Cnaan et al. 1999), functional differentiation (Sager 2011), and formalization of volunteerism (Harris et al. 2003). The French pattern is distinct due to laïcité (Gocmen 2013; Everett 2018).

Spiritually Integrated and Holistic Models in the Western Literature

A significant body of empirical work qualifies the picture of Western FBOs as predominantly secularized. Ethnographic studies document holistic framings in which feeding, shelter, and counselling are explicitly understood as ministry (Cloke et al. 2010; Bartkowski and Regis 2003); Catholic Worker houses and many Catholic Charities affiliates frame service provision in sacramental terms (Allahyari 2000; Wuthnow 2004) and Cnaan et al. (1999) show that congregations frequently understand outreach as an extension of liturgical or pastoral life. Acknowledging this literature sharpens the analytic question rather than weakening the contribution: if spiritually integrated practice exists in multiple traditions, what is distinctive about the Orthodox configuration? The empirical evidence that bears on this question comes from the larger study from which the present article is drawn. That study, whose primary aim was to investigate the professionalization of charity in the ROC rather than to compare ROC with Western models, included alongside the qualitative interviews a structured beneficiary survey of 420 respondents. We draw on those quantitative findings here as supplementary triangulating evidence—not as the empirical basis of this article, which remains the qualitative subset described in Section 3—to discipline the configurational claim made on the basis of provider interviews. The beneficiary survey reported that 71% of beneficiaries received no religious conditioning, 57% no required ritual participation, and 34% no catechetical activity at the moment of receiving aid, while providers nonetheless articulate the activity in liturgical, sacramental, and clerically authorized terms. These figures do not establish sacralization, which rests on the provider interviews; they constrain it, by showing that structural integration does not translate into an exclusionary conditioning of access. The operationalization of these survey items is specified in Section 3.4. This pattern—structural integration without exclusive conditioning of access—is rarely documented in the literature on the Sider–Unruh ‘faith-permeated’ type and is the configurational specificity that the article seeks to name.

2.4. The Need for an Orthodox Approach in Studies on Church-Provided Social Assistance

Orthodoxy is dramatically underrepresented in the FBO literature, despite being the major tradition in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, regions with distinct historical experiences (communism, Byzantine symphonia) that may shape organizational models in distinctive ways.

3. Methodology

3.1. Research Design and Justification for Grounded Theory

The research uses Grounded Theory in the variant developed by Strauss and Corbin (1998), supplemented by the procedural recommendations of Charmaz (2014).

Secondary analysis: scope and implications. The encompassing research was a mixed-methods sociological investigation of the professionalization of social-philanthropic activity in the Northeastern Romanian Orthodox Church. It pursued three objectives—(O1) to identify the specificity and meaning attributed to ROC social-philanthropic activity; (O2) to identify the stage and particularities of professionalization of ROC social services in the Northeastern region of Romania; (O3) to clarify the priest’s roles in articulating philanthropy with professionalized social services—and was structured around five hypotheses concerning the philanthropy/professionalization continuum, the addition of a spiritual dimension to lay professional values, the perception of professionalization as a risk of secularization, the conditioning of services on Christian affiliation, and the central role of the priest. Empirically, it comprised: 37 in-depth qualitative interviews with priests, social workers, and other actors; structured non-participant observation at three residential centres; a 578-respondent survey of providers; and a 420-respondent beneficiary survey. The present article is a secondary analysis pursuing a different research question—the configurational specificity of the Orthodox model vis-à-vis Western FBO patterns documented in the literature—that the larger study did not address as such. The article uses, as its primary empirical material, a circumscribed subset of the parent research qualitative interviews—the subset most directly relevant to the comparative configurational question. The other components of the aforementioned study (provider survey, beneficiary survey, structured observation, the remaining interviews) are not the empirical basis of this article; they enter the analysis only as background that supports source triangulation, with the beneficiary survey explicitly summarized in Section 7.3 as supplementary evidence on the question of religious conditioning of access. Two methodological implications follow. First, the sampling logic of the parent study was driven by the professionalization question, not by the comparison to Western FBOs; the present analysis benefits from the resulting variation in participant profiles but cannot claim that sampling was theoretically guided by the comparative question. Second, the article therefore restricts itself to claims the data plausibly sustain—claims about how providers organize and articulate practice in ways that, on contrast with the Western FBO literature, exhibit a particular configuration—and is explicit, in Section 5 and Section 7.3, that broader comparative claims would require equivalently sourced data from Western settings collected with the comparative question in mind.

3.2. Empirical Context and Justification for Selection

The research was conducted in Northeastern Romania. The empirical site of the parent study was the Iași Archdiocese, comprising 13 deaneries (3 of which had no accredited services at the time), 1221 parishes, and 94 monasteries and skites. The choice was theoretically motivated rather than statistically representative.

3.3. Participants and Theoretical Sampling

The article draws on nineteen interviews with priests (including monastic abbots), social workers employed in church institutions, institutional experts, and external observers. These nineteen interviews are a subset of the larger 37-interview qualitative corpus assembled in the parent study. The full corpus included 14 priests (of whom 2 monastic abbots), 15 social workers, and 8 institutional experts and external observers (including 2 affiliated with Catholic and Protestant organizations, used in the parent study for between-tradition triangulation), distributed across Iași (17), Neamț (14), and Botoșani (6) counties. The subset of nineteen interviews used in the present article was selected as those most directly relevant to the comparative configurational question. The remaining interviews from the parent corpus include material focused on financial, organizational, accreditational, and non-Orthodox comparative aspects that are central to the parent study but not to the analysis presented here. Sampling combined snowball recruitment with theoretical sampling driven by the original research question; the saturation claim operative in the present article is the saturation reached in the original analysis on the categories that this article integrates selectively (see Section 3.4).

3.4. Data Collection and Analytical Process

Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews (60–120 min). Interviews were audio-recorded with consent and transcribed verbatim. Recruitment combined institutional gatekeepers with snowball sampling. The interviews were originally conducted as part of a wider study on the professionalization of charity in the ROC, with an interview design suited to that overarching question; the present article is a secondary analysis that draws on the subset of the qualitative corpus most directly relevant to the comparative configurational question.

Three differentiated interview guides were used in the original study, each pre-tested on two informants per category: a 23-item guide for priests coordinating accredited social services; a 20-item guide for priests coordinating non-accredited philanthropic activities; and a 24-item guide for social workers. The guides were organized around twelve thematic axes covering the meaning of philanthropy, the charitable activity actually performed, the specificity of the coordinated social service, motivation for involvement, the main social problems faced by the community, the historical stages of the activity, main achievements and difficulties, decision-making and the persons involved, the existence of a dedicated organization and of employed social workers, the role and selection criteria for volunteers, the perceived need for professionalization, and the perceived risks associated with institutionalization and professionalization. The thematic structure was driven by the wider research question on professionalization. For the configurational question of the present article, the analytically most productive axes were the specificity of the service, motivation for involvement, decision-making, and risks of professionalization; other axes (financial sources, accreditation procedures, organizational structure) inform the study and the background of the article but are not central to the analysis presented here.

Following Strauss and Corbin (1998), the guides evolved iteratively as categories saturated. Theoretical saturation was assessed on three indicators (Charmaz 2014).

The original analytic process produced twelve axial categories: (1) the necessity of social-philanthropic activity; (2) the unfolding of philanthropic activity in the ROC; (3) financial and human-resource support; (4) the perspective of personnel involved in Orthodox philanthropy; (5) the ‘professionalization’ of charity; (6) accreditation and licensing; (7) charity and social-assistance organizations with a religious profile; (8) particularities of Christian-values social work; (9) priest–social worker collaboration; (10) professionalization versus secularization of Church social practice; (11) difficulties; (12) the meaning of professional success. The present article performs a focused selective recoding in which four of these axial categories from the parent analysis—the ones most directly relevant to the comparative configurational question (namely categories 4, 8, 9, and 10 in the list above)—are integrated under a single central code (sacralization). The remaining eight axial categories of the parent analysis are not subsumed in this article; they remain the analytic property of the parent study, which addressed them in its own terms.

The parent study also included two complementary components on which the present article does not perform new analysis but which enter as background and triangulating evidence: (i) structured non-participant observation conducted between 15 January and 15 February 2019, four hours per day, at three residential centres (Justin Pârvu Foundation—Petru Vodă; Saint Spiridon elderly residence at Petru Vodă monastery; Venerable Nazaria elderly residence at Văratic monastery), recorded in a structured observation log capturing both verbal and non-verbal elements; and (ii) a survey administered to 420 beneficiaries, summarized in Section 7.3 and used here as external evidence on the question of religious conditioning of access. Because this survey now does meaningful analytic work in the present article, its operationalization warrants brief specification. The beneficiary instrument was a self-administered questionnaire (twenty-seven items, completed in approximately fifteen to twenty minutes) distributed to recipients of ROC social-philanthropic services between December 2018 and February 2019. The three figures drawn upon here derive from three dichotomous retrospective items, each offering a yes/no response with an explicit non-response option: whether, in order to receive help or services, the beneficiary had been required to hold a particular religion (71% answered no); whether they had been required to participate more frequently in church rituals such as services or fasts (57% answered no); and whether religion had been spoken about while they received help (34% answered that it had not). These items measure the reported conditioning of access as recalled by beneficiaries; they are not measures of the qualitative texture of recipients’ experience, and the percentages should be read as an aggregate, retrospective, and self-reported picture rather than as observational data. Analytically, the figures function here as a negative ceiling—evidence of what the model does not do, namely condition access on religious affiliation or participation—and thus discipline, rather than establish, the configurational claim, whose positive content rests on the provider interviews. Both components were designed for the original objectives on the professionalization of charity rather than for the comparative question pursued in this article. We refer to them strictly as background and as triangulating evidence; we do not re-analyse them in this article, and the qualitative interview subset remains the primary empirical corpus of the analysis presented here.

Epistemic status of the data. Following Lamont and Molnár (2002) and Bail (2008) on symbolic and social boundaries, we treat participants’ contrastive references to ‘the West’ not as a reliable description of Western practice but as a form of boundary work through which Orthodox actors articulate and stabilize a distinctive identity.

3.5. Methodological Rigor and Ethical Considerations

Rigor was ensured through triangulation, demonstrated theoretical saturation, constant comparison, member checking, and a detailed audit trail. The research respected ethical standards: institutional ethical approval, written informed consent, and pseudonymization.

Positionality

The author is a sociologist with training in both sociology of religion and Orthodox theology, and with prior research and professional engagement with church-based social services in Romania. The parent research from which the corpus of the present article is drawn was designed as participatory action-research in the Lewinian tradition. The dual location facilitated access and theological literacy but introduced a risk of analytic over-identification, which was countered by attention to boundary work, by including secular social workers and public officials in the sample, and by cross-validating providers’ framings against the independent voice of the 420 beneficiaries surveyed in the parent study.

4. Results I: Grounded Theory Analysis

4.1. From Open Coding to Central Theory

The Grounded Theory analysis converged on a central category—the sacralization of social assistance—that integrates the recurrent properties of practice and discourse observed across the corpus. Specifically, the original analysis from which this article is drawn produced twelve axial categories. The present article performs a selective integration of four of these under sacralization. The other eight axial categories—concerning necessity, financial support, accreditation, organizational structure, difficulties, and the meaning of professional success—are present in the data and are treated in the parent study but are not subsumed under sacralization in this article.

To illustrate the analytic trajectory, three open codes generated in the first wave were grouped during axial coding into the intermediate category structural rituality. More precisely, the central category of the present article emerged as the selective-coding integration of four of the twelve axial categories of the parent study: ‘particularities of Christian-values social work’; ‘the perspective of personnel involved in Orthodox philanthropy’; ‘priest–social worker collaboration’; and ‘the professionalization of charity versus the secularization of Church social practice’. The five properties of sacralization are configurational refinements of these four axial categories under one selective code.

4.2. The Central Category: The Sacralization of Social Assistance

Sacralization differs from the mere ‘presence of a religious dimension’ as discussed in much of the Western FBO literature. It is not about adding religious elements to secular social services; it is about a configurational reorganization in which the ordering principle of the activity is liturgical and sacramental rather than professional-administrative.

We use sacralization as a category that captures both a set of organizational practices and the discursive and identitary work through which those practices are rendered coherent and defended. Importantly, the configurational claim is supported by independent evidence from the beneficiary survey of the parent study: while providers articulate the activity in liturgical, sacramental, and clerically authorized terms, beneficiaries report a striking absence of exclusive religious conditioning of access—71% report no conditioning on religious affiliation, 57% report no required ritual participation, and 34% report that religion was not spoken about while they received aid. These survey data are reported here strictly as supplementary triangulating evidence drawn from the wider investigation; the article does not re-analyse the survey, and the empirical centre of the analysis remains the qualitative interview subset.

A clergy participant explains:

“We do not do social assistance to which we add prayer. Prayer and the Holy Sacraments are the foundation, and everything else—food, shelter, counseling—are manifestations of the same sacramental act of healing the person in Christ.”

Sacralization is characterized by five distinctive properties: ontological priority of the spiritual, structural rituality, sacramental integration, soteriological orientation of outcomes, and a triadic helping relationship.

4.3. Dimensions of the Central Category

Sacralization manifests in three interdependent practical dimensions that structure all activity and provide coherence to the model:

The liturgical dimension: Social assistance is organically integrated into the liturgical rhythm of the Church, not functioning parallel to it. This integration manifests in multiple concrete ways. The distribution of material aid is synchronized with the Sunday Divine Liturgy, with beneficiaries are invited to first participate in the Liturgy, then receive aid in an adjacent space. A clergy member explains that “Sunday morning we have Liturgy at 8, then at 10 we distribute packages. It is no coincidence, we want them to receive spiritual nourishment first, then material.” Church fasts and feasts structure the types of assistance offered, as during Great Lent, aid for the poor and programs of spiritual restoration and recovery are intensified (Stăniloae 2013b), while feasts such as Pascha (the Resurrection of the Lord) or the Nativity of the Lord become moments of increased generosity.

The physical space for service delivery is sacralized through the constant presence of icons, lit candles, and the liturgical blessing of the environment. A participant describes: “Our social center functions as an extension of the altar. The table where the poor eat is sanctified like the Liturgy table, it is covered with a clean tablecloth, has an icon and candle, and the priest blesses the food before each meal.” This sacralization of space is not decorative but constitutes the spiritual environment in which healing (social therapy) takes place. Analytically, this is a reframing of the interactional setting: by saturating the site of delivery with liturgical markers, providers redefine the encounter from a bureaucratic transaction between a service and a client into a sacramental one between the Church and a person, and it is this redefinition of the situation—rather than the religious objects as such—that is sociologically consequential for how aid is given and received.

The pastoral dimension: All service providers, including professional social workers with secular degrees, are conceptualized as having a pastoral role, not just a technical-administrative one. This redefinition of the professional role involves three distinctive elements. The first is responsibility for the spiritual guidance of beneficiaries, as the social worker not only solves practical problems but spiritually accompanies the person in the process of transformation. The second element is moral authority derived from the provider’s personal spiritual life, with their legitimacy in counseling derives not only from diplomas but from their own visible spiritual struggle through fasting, prayer, and liturgical participation (Stăniloae 1981). A female social worker explains: “I learned counseling techniques at university, but here I learned that before technique you must yourself be in grace. My personal fasting, prayer, confession are essential for being able to help others. If I do not live in Christ, how can I lead others to Christ?”

The third element is spiritual discernment in diagnosis and intervention, with standard social problematization is complemented with spiritual discernment. A clergy member explains that “when someone comes with alcoholism, we see not only chemical dependency but the spiritual bonds that hold them captive. That is why confession and the prayer of absolution are essential, we free the person spiritually before working therapeutically.” This discernment does not deny the psychological or social reality of problems, but contextualizes them in a broader anthropology that includes the spiritual-demonic dimension. In social-scientific terms, this represents an extension of professional jurisdiction: the providers claim diagnostic and interventional authority over a domain—the spiritual condition of the person—that the secular social-work model brackets out, so that the boundary of legitimate competence is drawn around a wider object than in the professional templates with which they are otherwise asked to comply.

The communitarian-ecclesial dimension is understood in that beneficiaries are conceptualized not as individual clients of services but as members (actual or potential) of the liturgical community, the Body of Christ (Stăniloae 2013a). Interventions aim at progressive integration into the parish or monastic community through three main mechanisms. The first mechanism is regular liturgical participation, with beneficiaries are accompanied and encouraged to participate in the Sunday Divine Liturgy or feast day services, in Vespers, in feasts. The second mechanism is the development of informal relationships with other believers in the parish, as beneficiaries are introduced into the social network of the community, not kept separate as “service clients.” The third mechanism is the gradual assumption of community responsibilities, as they stabilize, former beneficiaries become volunteers who help other poor people, thus actively integrating into parish life.

A clergy member expresses the philosophy of this approach, stating that “we do not want to keep them dependent on aid. We want to integrate them into the family, the parish family, where they receive and give, have responsibilities and dignity. Our success is when the former beggar now himself gives to another person, when the former alcoholic is now a volunteer at the detoxification center.” This communitarian vision fundamentally contrasts with Western social service models that aim for individual autonomy and exit from the system, not integration into a permanent liturgical community. Sociologically, what is described here is a conversion of the beneficiary role into the provider role through reciprocity: inclusion is achieved not by exiting the service but by being absorbed into the community as a contributor, which inverts the directionality of the managerial model—where success is measured by the recipient’s departure—and locates success instead in durable membership and reciprocal obligation.

4.4. The Evolutionary Process of Sacralization

Sacralization is not static but an evolutionary process with identifiable stages. The initial stage is characterized by spontaneous philanthropic activism with little theoretical reflexivity, dominated by missionary enthusiasm mixed with improvisation and strong volunteerism. The awareness stage follows when contact with legislation and professional standards generates explicit reflection on the specificity of identity. The Church discursively formulates its own distinction from secular models and develops anxiety about the risk of secularization through professionalization.

The selective formalization stage involves instrumental acceptance of certain professionalization elements (documentation, evaluation, training) while maintaining the non-negotiability of the spiritual dimension. This stage is marked by productive tension between secular standards and theological identity. The maturation stage (still emerging) would involve sophisticated theoretical articulation of the model and capacity for strategic negotiation with authorities about the legitimacy of specificity.

The process is influenced by multiple contextual conditions such as legislative and financial pressure from the European environment, quality of theological leadership capable of sophisticated articulation, degree of exposure to alternative Western models, and internal training capacity for forming providers in the sacral model.

5. Results II: Comparative Analysis

This section places the empirically grounded categories generated in Section 4 into dialogue with patterns reported in the Western FBO literature. We are explicit about the asymmetry of the two sides of this dialogue: our ROC findings derive from primary interviews with practitioners in Northeastern Romania, whereas the Western patterns are reconstructed from published empirical studies (e.g., Cloke et al. 2010; Bartkowski and Regis 2003; Allahyari 2000; Johnsen et al. 2014). We further note that the present article is a secondary analysis of a subset of the qualitative corpus assembled in a larger mixed-methods study. The parent research was designed within the Sider and Unruh framework and concluded that the ROC corresponds to an atypical faith-permeated configuration. The configurational claim of the present article is therefore continuous with, and refines for a comparative purpose, a positioning that the underlying study had already grounded in the Sider–Unruh literature. It is important to note that the original research as a whole had a different and wider objective than the present article: it aimed to clarify the specificity of philanthropic and social-assistance activity in the ROC and to map the professionalization of charity in the Archdiocese of Iași, addressing organizational, financial, accreditational and personnel-related dimensions across both qualitative and quantitative components. The present article extracts only one strand of that wider investigation—the configurational specificity vs Western FBO models—and is therefore explicitly narrower in scope. The comparative claims developed here are made within that narrower scope. Throughout the subsections that follow, statements of the form ‘Western FBOs manifest X’ should be read as shorthand for the patterns most frequently reported in the studies reviewed here, not as exhaustive empirical generalizations about Western faith-based provision as a whole; the asymmetry of evidence between the two sides of the comparison makes this qualification necessary at each point of contrast.

5.1. The Dimension of Spiritual Assistance Within ROC Social Assistance

In the ROC, the spiritual dimension is articulated by providers as structurally integrated and largely non-negotiable. The beneficiary survey of the parent study qualifies this articulation in an analytically important way: structural integration coexists with an empirically weak conditioning of access on religious participation—71% of beneficiaries report no conditioning on religious affiliation, 57% no required ritual participation, and 34% report that religion was not spoken about while they received aid (see Section 3.4 for the operationalization and analytic status of these figures).

5.2. Leadership and Organizational Structure

The ROC manifests predominantly clerical leadership: clergy (priests, abbesses) remain ultimate decision-makers, authority is theologically grounded in ordination and pastoral status, and lay professionals have a consultative role. Western FBOs manifest professionalization and lay leadership: leadership passes to professionals with secular training, authority derives from technical competence not religious status, and clergy become optional spiritual consultants (Harris et al. 2003, pp. 93–112; Cnaan et al. 1999).

5.3. Conceptualization of the Beneficiary

In Orthodox anthropology, the beneficiary is a living icon of Christ (Stăniloae 2013a). Each person bears the divine image regardless of their condition, serving the poor is a liturgical act of encountering Christ, and the relationship has a sacramental dimension, not a contractual one. In Western models, the beneficiary is a person with civil rights (UK/USA), a client of services with procedural rights, a professional relationship based on secular ethical principles, and individual autonomy as a central value. In the French model, the beneficiary is a secular citizen, religious identity is private and irrelevant to service access, and the state guarantees equal treatment regardless of faith (Gocmen 2013, pp. 495–516).

5.4. Purpose of Interventions

The ROC manifests a transcendent soteriological purpose for its social activity, in which the goal is not limited to improving material conditions but aims at the salvation of the person through ecclesial integration into the Body of Christ. Social assistance is understood as an expression of the Church’s diakonia, oriented toward the ontological transformation of the person through grace, realized in a sacramental and communitarian context. In this framework, evaluating the effectiveness of social intervention is not reduced to material or quantitative indicators, but is primarily related to sacramental participation, integration into liturgical life, and the spiritual evolution of beneficiaries. Western FBOs manifest immanent purposes: social reintegration, empowerment, individual autonomy, and success is measured by verifiable material indicators (Fu et al. 2021, pp. 283–308; Sager 2011, pp. 201–10). The sociologically salient consequence of the soteriological framing is therefore not doctrinal but evaluative: it reconfigures the organization’s criteria of success, displacing the verifiable material indicators that govern accountability in the Western models with metrics of sacramental participation and communal integration, and this divergence in what counts as a successful outcome is what makes the two purposes organizationally, and not merely theologically, distinct.

5.5. The Professionalization Process

In the ROC there is conditional instrumental acceptance, as professionalization is accepted as a useful technical instrument, but generates constant anxiety about the risk of secularization and requires continuous theological vigilance to preserve identity. In Western FBOs there is comfortable normalization, with professionalization is assimilated without major tension, sometimes generating accepted gradual secularization (Johnsen et al. 2014, pp. 413–30).

5.6. Organization of Volunteerism

The ROC manifests informal and communitarian volunteerism, with recruitment through personal relationships in the community, minimal formal training, and explicitly religious motivation. Western FBOs manifest formalized and systematic volunteerism, characterized by structured recruitment programs, mandatory training, professional management, and motivation that may be a mix of religious and altruistic (Harris et al. 2003, pp. 93–112).

6. Theoretical Model

6.1. From Faith-Based Organization to Sacralization

The contribution of the present paper is configurational: we identify the joint articulation of features in the Orthodox case and we propose a language for naming similar configurations elsewhere. We do not claim that sacralization replaces the FBO concept or that the Orthodox case is categorically distinct from Western FBOs. This positioning is fully continuous with the conclusion of the underlying study, which classified the ROC as an atypical case of the Sider–Unruh ‘faith-permeated’ type—atypical precisely because structural integration is not accompanied by religious conditioning of access. It is important to be precise about the relationship between the two claims. The original study established the ROC as faith-permeated and atypically so, in answer to its own research question on professionalization. The present article does not re-establish that result; it inherits it as background and articulates its comparative implications. The novelty of the article is therefore configurational and comparative—naming, with reference to the Western FBO literature, the joint configuration of features that distinguishes the Orthodox case in degree and arrangement—rather than categorical.

6.2. Explanatory Factors for the Differences

The observed differences are explained by the convergence of several factors.

Theological factors include a distinct sacramental theology from the anthropological minimization of the person-in-relationship versus the individualism of the Protestant environment, and an ecclesiology of the Church as the Body of Christ rather than a voluntary association.

Historical factors include the legacy of Byzantine symphonia (organic state-Church cooperation) versus Protestant separation, the experience of communism which strengthened confessional identity through persecution, and the absence of the Reformation and Enlightenment which secularized social services in the West.

Institutional factors include the transitional stage of development with institutions in rapid reconstruction, intense pressure for Europeanization and compliance with external standards, and legislation perceived as externally imposed and culturally inadequate.

6.3. A New Dual-Axis Typology

Based on the analysis, we propose a dual-axis typology that introduces two distinct axes. The vertical axis measures the presence of the spiritual dimension (absent, optional-invitational, mandatory-integrated), while the horizontal axis measures the nature of the spiritual dimension (Protestant-individualistic, Catholic-institutional, Orthodox-sacramental). This typology allows more nuanced placement: French FBOs (absent on both axes), British/American FBOs (optional-invitational on the vertical, predominantly Protestant on the horizontal), ROC (mandatory-integrated on the vertical, Orthodox-sacramental on the horizontal).

7. Discussion

7.1. Theoretical Contributions

The principal theoretical contribution is a configurational refinement of FBO theory: from a single permeability axis to a dual axis that captures both the presence and the nature of the spiritual dimension. It is also the concept of the sacralization of social assistance, absent in Western literature, which offers an alternative to the “faith-based” paradigm. This suggests that differences between models may be of type, not just degree, challenging the implicit universalism of existing typologies.

The research contributes to the literature on multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000, pp. 1–29), demonstrating that the modernization of social services does not follow a single trajectory of secularization, but can generate distinct forms of organization that integrate technical modernity with cultural-theological particularisms.

7.2. Practical and Public Policy Implications

For the ROC, the research offers theoretical conceptualization of its own specificity that can inform strategies for negotiating professionalization without losing identity. For public authorities, the research suggests the need to recognize the legitimacy of alternative models, develop flexible standards that permit authentic diversity, and engage in genuine dialogue with religious organizations in policy development. At the European level, the research suggests the need for reflection on the extent to which directives and standards reflect secular assumptions inadequate for diverse religious contexts.

7.3. Study Limitations

The research has four main limitations. First, the geographical focus on the Northeast is purposeful but not representative. Second, and most importantly, the qualitative analysis on which this article is based draws on the perspective of service providers; beneficiaries are not part of the qualitative corpus. Third, the paper draws indirect comparisons with Western contexts on the basis of secondary literature. Fourth, the data describe a specific historical moment.

Beneficiaries’ perspective. We acknowledge the absence of beneficiaries’ voices in the qualitative corpus that grounds this article. This absence has both theoretical and ethical implications. Theoretically, the configurational claim concerns how providers organize and articulate practice; it does not adjudicate how those practices are experienced. Ethically, several practices we describe—particularly those connected to the sacramental dimension—are practices whose ethical valence cannot be settled without recipients’ accounts. We note, however, that the parent study did include a 420-beneficiary survey component that addressed precisely the question of religious conditioning of access. The survey results—reported in summary form in the response letter—are consistent with the configurational claim of this paper. We use those findings as supplementary triangulating evidence rather than as the empirical basis of any new analytic claim. A future qualitative study with beneficiaries—designed independently of providers, with explicit ethical attention to power asymmetries, and oriented to the comparative configurational question—would test whether the qualitative texture of beneficiaries’ experience corresponds to the wider survey’s aggregate picture, and is identified in Section 7.4 as the priority follow-up study for the line of inquiry opened by this article.

7.4. Directions for Future Research

Three complementary follow-up studies would address the limitations identified above. First, a qualitative study with beneficiaries—designed independently of providers and oriented to the configurational question rather than to the question of professionalization that guided the parent survey—would test whether the qualitative texture of beneficiaries’ experience corresponds to the parent survey’s aggregate picture. Second, a multi-region replication would test the geographical robustness of the configuration. Third, a directly comparative empirical study, with the same protocol administered in matched Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant settings, would allow the configurational claim of the present paper to be tested against equivalently sourced data.

8. Conclusions

This research explored the specificity of social assistance in the Romanian Orthodox Church using Grounded Theory and a theoretically informed dialogue with the Western FBO literature. The central finding is the category of the sacralization of social assistance—a configuration in which providers organize and articulate practice through the joint articulation of structural rituality, sacramental obligation, clerical authority, soteriological framing of outcomes, and a triadic helping relationship. The configurational specificity we describe is an analytically refined re-articulation, for a comparative purpose, of the conclusion of the primary parent study, which already characterized the ROC as an atypical case of the Sider–Unruh ‘faith-permeated’ type. As a secondary analysis, the present article does not duplicate the source investigation; it extracts from it the materials relevant to a question—the comparison with Western FBO models—that the parent study did not pursue, and offers them under a configurational rubric (sacralization) calibrated to that comparison.

The principal theoretical contribution of the paper is the configurational refinement of FBO theory: from a single permeability axis to a dual axis that captures both the presence and the nature of the spiritual dimension.