Why trust is not a problem which can be solved by resorting to institutional instruments There are voices who claimed that one of the implications of the scandal related to the articles concerning Teoctist's past was that they had affected the credibility of the church as an institution. "This is all we have at present. Will we soil this institution too?" is the discourse we could hear from Premier Adrian Nastase; this statement has been religiously spread in the most unexpected versions. It is not very clear in what way the credibility of the church might be affected if one of its leaders commits major sins. According to this logic, the corruption of a president might destroy the credit given to the constitutional regime, the republic, and, consequently, citizens would choose dictatorship as an alternative. As a matter of fact, they would choose another possible candidate for this position. In the democratic political system, their political convictions would not be affected by the corruption of a certain person. The fact that after 1989, the church was spared the curiosity and the vigilance of the press does not mean that this institution is very different from what we can see in the rest of the society. It would be a naiveness to think that the people of the church are not involved in what the sociologists call "social exchanges". They do not live on Mount Athos, far from the vanity of the world - on the contrary, they interact continuously with many persons, who are not all churchgoers. In this case, we might wonder how the credit given to the church appears. On what is it based? Is performance the criterion of its capitalization? It is very difficult to find an argument which might support the success of the church after 1989. After the guilt caused by the collaboration with the communist regime, the church did not manage to formulate another discourse for the p