( Itar-Tass ) - Moldova's President Vladimir Voronin has refused to sign the law on religious faiths and returned it to parliament for refining.
He raised objections to the absence of mentioning of Eastern Orthodoxy as a religion traditional for this country and to the provision that offers simpler registration rules to religious sects, which furnishes them with loopholes for proselytizing, spokespeople for the national parliament said.
By reverting the law to parliament, Voronin heeded the calls from priests of the Moldovan Orthodox archdiocese, who urged him to refrain from signing the document that they sized up as the one "posing danger to Orthodoxy in this country."
The priests said, in part, the new legislative act does not draw any line between the traditional religious denomination and other denominations that have sprouted out in Moldova in recent years.
The other objection on the part of clerics was that the law does not make any difference between the mainstream religious faiths, on the one hand, and totalitarian, destructive, commercial, Satanic, and pseudo-religious cults, on the other.
Moldovan parliament passed the law on religious faiths May 11. The group of its designers included the parliamentary faction leader of the rightwing Christian Democratic People's Party, Vlad Cubreacow, who is also the secretary of the Bessarabian archdiocese of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate.
The latter branch of the Romanian Orthodox Church was set up with Cubreacow's active assistance but the authorities looked at this move with big apprehensions.
Cubreacow and his supporters advocate Moldova's reunion with the ethnically close Romania.
The Russian Orthodox Church believes that the Bessarabian diocese of the Moldovan Church is illegitimate, however, the country's government agencies had to issue official registration to it in 2002 following a decision of the European Court.