The speeches of priests during the beginning of school festivities shouldn’t be longer than five minutes. The decision was taken by the Moldovan Metropolitan Church’s Religious Education and Theological Studies Synod Division and communicated to all the diocese school inspectors, deanery methodology specialists, priests and religion teachers.

“We are informing you that priests participating in the September 1 school festivities must fit their blessings for the new school year within 4-5 minutes. This rule must be respected strictly, given the Ministry of Education’s decision that the festivity duration should be 45 minutes”, reads the notification.

Last week, a civic initiative group petitioned the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research to enforce the legal provisions regarding the secularity of public education and to ban religious services during festivities in public schools. The activists urged teachers not to accept religious manifestations in their schools.

The Ministry replied that it doesn’t have neither the right, nor the possibility to forbid this or to tell local communities, parents, students and school administrations how to run their festivities.