Confessing God in the Romanian Communist Prisons: The Saga of Father Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa—An Exercise of Spiritual Admiration

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to make known the personality of one of the most famous Orthodox priests, Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa, who publicly opposed the communist authorities in Romania at the cost of losing his freedom, while the vast majority of his colleagues preferred silence, and some of whom went even further, becoming collaborators of the new political regime. I will use the descriptive method to highlight the profile of an authentic confessor of the Christian faith in times of persecution and marginalization of those who wanted to remain faithful to the tradition into which they were born. In the first part, I will refer to the suffering he endured in communist prisons in his youth (1948–1964) for the ‘guilt’ of conspiring against the ‘social order’, a label given to all those who opposed the dictatorship. The terrible beatings, the sufferings which they were subjected to daily, the diseases, and the malnutrition made even the strongest lose their faith and transform themselves from victims into executioners. We will see how all of this affected the hero of these lines and how he managed to come to his senses, to rediscover his own Christian identity, even when he was on the edge of the abyss, on the border between life and death. In the second part, I will show how God, the One who saved him from the brink of suicide and strengthened him in faith during the years spent in the Romanian gulag, will transform him from a simple priest into a symbol of resistance to communist atheism. When the demolition of churches in Bucharest began, he publicly protested through seven sermons delivered to students during the seven weeks of Easter Lent, despite opposition from both the state and the Church. The latter, instead of defending him when he was sentenced to imprisonment, disowned him and excluded him from the ranks of the clergy.

1. The Beginning of Communist Terror in Romania

As is known, at the end of World War II, the communist regime was installed in Romania with the help and under the direct leadership and coordination of Soviet Russia. All democratic parties and institutions were outlawed, and their leaders, from all social categories—especially those with a higher education or students who were considered a potential danger to the new regime—were thrown into prison for imaginary crimes. They were already convicted before entering the courtroom because it was not about a real trial, but a sham. Prosecutors invented facts that never existed, lawyers were afraid to defend their clients, and judges handed down sentences not according to the truth, but according to orders received from the communist leaders, who considered all those who did not think like them ‘enemies of the people’ (Deletant 2026; Frunză 1999; Cioroianu 2007).

One social category was specifically targeted because by its very mission it opposed the communist ideology, namely the priesthood, who did not worship the communist leader—who embodied for his comrades the ideal of the supreme leader, whose thinking could not be challenged by anyone—but God. Such an affront could not be overlooked. Therefore, the priests were the most vulnerable and most exposed to atheist communist repressions. Even more so if they had been part of the traditional historical parties (liberal and democratic), or if they had joined the nationalist legionary movement.

Many young people who had had legionary sympathies during the interwar period, being attracted by the religious component of this party, whose beginnings were linked to the promotion of a Christian sentimentality intended to strengthen national unity, but who left it when—at least through a radical faction—the party in question assumed a fascist policy, alien to the initial ideals, were arrested and thrown into prisons awaiting extermination. It was only necessary for someone to say that a certain person had engaged in legionary politics or had any connection with legionary sympathizers, or had just met one of them by chance, for him to be arrested and, after a summary trial, sentenced to hard years in prison.

Thus begins the saga of the future priest Gheorghe, then a young medical student in Bucharest, who would spend a large part of his life in communist prisons simply because he wanted to live freely and profess his Christian faith without any restrictions.

2. The Years of His Youth, His Legionary ‘Sympathies’, and the Hell of Communist Prisons

Father Gheorghe was born in 1925, in a small town (Mahmudia) in Tulcea County, in the Danube Delta, into a large family (11 children), he being the youngest of the brothers and the only one who his parents, some faithful peasants, sent to become an erudite (Stan 2024, p. 205). Although it seems strange today, at that time very few children from the rural area went to school. Most of them stayed at home to help their parents with household chores, to work the land, to take care of the animals, and, when they reached the right age, to get married and start a family there. He himself confessed at one point that, until he attended the ‘Spiru Haret’ high school in the city of Tulcea, he had never left the village where he was born. Therefore, he came from a simple social environment, in which people lived according to the old traditions of their ancestors. Their life was centered on their relationship with God. Attending Holy Liturgy every Sunday was an integral part of their existence. They did not have much, but they enjoyed the moments they spent together. They had large families, and the children lived in nature and worked side by side with their parents. Respect between generations was visible and maintained the unity and stability of a family and the entire community.

Although they were materially poor, they were spiritually rich, because, without being able to define the moral principles that were the basis of their lives, they lived them concretely, according to the will of God to Whom they submitted with humility and gratitude, the principles being responsibility, diligence, honesty, fair calculation or prudence, generosity and, last but not least, prayer, the spirit of sacrifice and Christian solidarity manifested especially towards the elderly and those in suffering and need.

All this was discovered by the young Gheorghe within the movement called the ‘Frățiile de Cruce [Brotherhood of the Cross]’, which attracted young people, especially those in a constant search for themselves, like a magnet. Their youthful enthusiasm made them not notice the limits of faith, not notice the slide towards a sectarian ideology, in which a pseudo-religious policy apparently cultivated love for God and for their fellow men, but sacrificed the latter if they did not respect (or opposed) their nationalist ideology. It is true that most were attracted by the religious-moral component of the party’s policy (Mânăstirea Diaconești 2007, pp. 29–30; Manea 2020, pp. 76–77). Therefore, many remained at the stage of sympathizers and took a step back when they noticed their moral slippage; others, although they had officially joined this organization, did not activate in the true sense of the word, as happened to the young Gheorghe (Valică and Chirilă 2011, p. 83).

Attracted by the mirage of a more intense spiritual experience, but in accordance with the moral principles he had learned as a young child in his parents’ home, Gheorghe joined the movement ‘The Brotherhood of the Cross’ during high school in 1940 (Rădulescu 2012, p. 52), when Romania and the Legionary Movement were on the side of the Axis, at the beginning of World War II. This decision would follow him like a shadow his whole life because it would constitute the main accusation that would be brought against him both during the communist regime, until December 1989, and later on.

After graduating from high school, which coincided with the end of the war and the installation of the communist regime in Romania, he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest (Mânăstirea Diaconești 2007, p. 34). It was a turbulent period for everyone because no one had any certainty of tomorrow. This was especially the case for those who had had connections with the royal house in the past, or with the old parties, who were part of the world of landowners, large industrialists or the local bourgeoisie, the elite of the intelligentsia, or for students, considered the most dangerous for the ‘new’ communist society, in which freedom of thought was suppressed. Anyone could be arrested at any time just by a simple denunciation.

This is what happened to the young Gheorghe, who was arrested on 21 May 1948, simply for the fact that he had hosted in his dorm room a friend, the head of the movement ‘Brotherhoods of the Cross’, from Tulcea, just because they had been high school classmates. He was investigated by the Securitate (the Romanian Political Police) for several months and, following a trial in which the defense was almost non-existent, he was accused of ‘plotting against state security’ (Rădulescu 2012, p. 53) and initially sentenced to 8 years in prison, but which would turn into 15.

He was sent to Pitești, one of the most terrifying prisons, where humiliation, beatings, and torture were part of a so-called re-education program, designed to defeat even the strongest resistance (Mânăstirea Diaconești 2007, pp. 40–41). All those who arrived there, sooner or later, lost hope and ended up confessing to deeds they had never committed, not even in their minds; daily terror, hunger, and cold ensured even the bravest of prisoners did what was asked of them by the guards and their superiors, transforming themselves into true executioners of their brothers in suffering. At first there was resistance from the prisoners, but as time passed, it weakened, because the suffering was so great that even prayer had no power, and captives felt like they were collapsing, haunted by the thought of suicide (Bacu 2011; Ierunca 2013, pp. 34–54; Ioniță 2016; Hossu 2020).

Gheorghe himself confesses that he had a period of decline in which his soul was emptied of God and he sank into darkness. He had become an instrument of evil without realizing it. He was acting on the criminal orders of the system. He had become, without his will, a tool used by his torturers and those of his colleagues. His faith had weakened and his conscience dulled (Mânăstirea Diaconești 2014, pp. 141–44). He was so terrified that even his instinct for self-preservation no longer worked and he began to wish for death, rather than to go through the hell he lived in every day. But, as we will see, God had another plan for him.

It took him two years to regain his faith, which would never leave him again and which would help him transform fear and suffering into martyrdom and joy. The policy of communist prisons was to destroy the souls of those imprisoned, which was a satanic work, aimed at dehumanizing people and turning them into slaves. In Pitești, it was the work of the devil who was supposed to take possession of him and his brothers in suffering. It was a war between good and evil that, in the end, was won by God, because it brought him out of despair into the proximity of people who seemed to be touched by the aura of holiness. He could probably never have imagined that in such difficult times he would meet people who would change his life forever and open the eyes of his heart to see God’s love in its pure, sacrificial, and merciful state. He would understand that the time of his wandering was over and that he must follow his path, which could only be that of the truth, that is, of his unlimited faith in Christ and in His power to change destinies, to change lives. With the help of faith, he became the man he was before entering prison (Voinea 1996).

Therefore, when the interests of the communists changed and, within the framework of a staged trial, in 1954, they wanted to renounce everything that the phenomenon of re-education in Pitești meant, blaming the legionnaires (who made up the majority of the prisoners) for all the crimes and all the horrors that happened there, young Gheorghe decided to tell the truth, to speak about the real culprits, namely the communist authorities (Mânăstirea Diaconești 2007, p. 59; Deletant 1995, p. 40; Ierunca 2013, p. 66). It was a crazy courage that brought him additional years of imprisonment, but which restored his sense of freedom, enlightened his conscience, and made him stronger in the face of any danger.

After his 1954 confession, prison lost its coercive significance, at least on a mental level, and transformed into a kind of purgatory in which he washed away his sins. It became a school of prayer in which he rediscovered God and His image in his cellmates, a school not only of the spirit but also of the mind. Nothing would be the same again. The fearful, insecure young man, faced with the uncertainty of the future, would transform into a strong man, a true confessor of Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, dead and resurrected, in times of persecution similar to the persecutions of the pagan emperors of the first Christian centuries.

Other feared prisons in communist Romania would be his residence in the following years, but also a place of prayer and Christian solidarity. He would be moved one by one to Gherla, Jilava, and Aiud. At the second one (Jilava) he had a special regime. He was ‘housed’ in an extermination section, called Casimca, located 7 meters underground, in a tiny cell, without light and without air (Stan 2024, p. 208). Here he had one of his most profound spiritual experiences, when, strengthened by the power of the Holy Spirit, he cut a vein, collected the blood that flowed into a jug (dixie) to offer the red blood cells to a cellmate, terminally ill with tuberculosis (Stroescu-Stănișoară 2006–2007, p. 8). It was a gesture that was difficult to understand for the other prisoners, but it best reflects the state of spiritual ‘weightlessness’ in which he found himself, his moral and religious commandments being above any doubt. A crazy gesture in front of people, but absolutely natural in front of God. He was released in 1963, when—through a series of successive decrees—a general amnesty took place but being considered a threat to the regime, he was closely monitored and repeatedly questioned (Stan 2024, p. 208; Popescu 2010, p. 43).

3. A Conditional Freedom and an Uncertain Future

After his release from prison, he was sent under forced residence to a forgotten village in the Bărăgan plain, forced to live in a dilapidated house without any utilities. He was an outcast, a man with no future, closely watched by the Securitate (the Romanian Political Police), far from his family and without any hope of integration into society. He started working at the state farm and waited for things to settle down in the country to try to find a way in life. He prayed to God in his solitude imposed by the authorities, and He, as always, answered. At some point, he was allowed to return to his family, to Mahmudia, and a little later even to become a student again in Bucharest, at the Faculty of Philology.

Even though it seemed that his life was going in the right direction, he was unhappy because, during his detention, when he no longer saw any hope, when he thought that his life would end there, he made a promise to God that, if he were to escape, he would become a priest. And it seemed that his promise would remain an unfulfilled dream, if he had not benefited from the help of His Holiness, Justinian Marina, the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church (1948–1977). Patriarch Justinian managed, despite the numerous accusations brought against him, especially by those who interpreted history unilaterally, without taking into account all the elements that made up the totalitarian universe in Romania, not only to protect the Church as a whole, but also to recover numerous young or less young people who had been thrown into prison simply for the fact that they directly or indirectly opposed communist policy, especially those who were part of the clergy or were practicing Christians. He welcomed the ‘outcast’ Gheorghe with brotherly love and helped him to enroll in the Faculty of Theology (Stroescu-Stănișoară 2006–2007, p. 8; Stan 2024, p. 209).

At the end of his studies, Gheorghe was ordained a priest and appointed teacher at the Theological Seminary (Stan 2024, p. 209). Here, he discovered his vocation, becoming one of the most beloved teachers, both due to his intellectual qualities but especially his human ones. Although pursued by the Securitate, he did not give up the principles that guided him all his life, moral uprightness in turbulent and dangerous times and freedom of expression that he identified in the Church with liberation from sin and with death in Christ, and in society with the ‘struggle of ideas’ (Calciu-Dumitreasa 1996, p. 41).

4. The Power of Confessing Christ in Dangerous Times

On the evening of 4 March 1977, the most devastating earthquake in Romanian history occurred, and the most affected city was Bucharest, the country’s capital. Over 1500 people died, dozens of apartment buildings collapsed, thousands of other buildings (homes, hospitals, schools, kindergartens, historical monuments) were seriously damaged, many of which were later demolished because they were no longer safe. A state of emergency was immediately declared, and numerous firefighters and soldiers from all over the country were mobilized to search for survivors, repair damaged buildings, and demolish those that posed a real danger.

Among them were several churches, but they were not a priority for the communists. On the contrary, it was the opportunity they had been waiting for to begin their systematic demolition in order to change the face of the city and build the famous People’s House (Casa Poporului). Thus, under the pretext of rebuilding the infrastructure of the city of Bucharest, the communist authorities began to demolish churches, especially in the central area, which were interfering with their plans to systematize and reconfigure the major boulevards, from which any religious monument or area with a religious purpose was to disappear permanently. In a country with an atheist leadership, the Church was to appear as a marginalized institution, with an almost invisible activity (Stan 2024, p. 210).

By removing places of worship from the streetscape, the aim was actually the de-Christianization of the population, especially the younger generation. The communists relied on the lack of reaction from the officials of the Romanian Orthodox Church, which had already been advised that it should limit their activities only to current religious services, and not oppose the directives coming from the central or local communist authorities, especially since, just a few weeks after the earthquake, Patriarch Justinian, the only one who had managed to withstand them, passed away.

Therefore, there was a power vacuum at the level of the Church leadership. The new patriarch, Justin Moisescu (1977–1986), would only be enthroned in June and, despite his exceptional theological training (for which he deserves all consideration), he had neither the pastoral vocation nor the authority in his relationship with the representatives of the communist power that his predecessor had had. Consequently, difficult days were ahead for the Church and for Christians who either did not know what was happening or were blasé, being convinced that any action of resistance would send them directly to prison. Moreover, in the period immediately following the earthquake and throughout 1977, we cannot find a record of any protest action from the Orthodox Church. It seemed that no one dared to denounce the criminal actions of destruction of Christian monuments and altars in Bucharest. And perhaps nothing would have happened, although discontent was growing among the clergy who helplessly witnessed the demolition of their churches, convinced that the culprits would be punished at some point by God, if one of them had not had the courage to publicly protest and stigmatize these measures. And it was not an anonymous person, but someone who had gone through the hell of communist prisons, a survivor of the Romanian gulag (Tudorache 2020, pp. 127–72), a practicing confessor of the word of the Gospel of Christ, namely Father Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa (Rădulescu 2012, p. 57).

5. Alone Against the Demolition of Churches and the 10-Year Prison Sentence

On the fateful night of 4/5 March 1977, when, following the earthquake, a wing of the Theological Seminary boarding school collapsed, he was the only one of the teachers who came immediately and, together with several of his students, worked with his bare hands saving the seminarians who had been buried under the rubble (Stan 2024, p. 210). This gesture would never be forgotten by those to whom he was a mentor and teacher, and when he organized a group of prayer and reading and interpretation of the Holy Scripture, his popularity became greater, being considered a true spiritual father for all.

A very special bond was created between Father Gheorghe and his students, which would cause great headaches for the church leadership, already accustomed to tacit cohabitation with the communist authorities who supervised all their activities from the shadows, the Seminary being one of the institutions targeted in this regard. Therefore, nothing that Father Gheorghe did, together with his students, was a secret, neither for the Church nor for the communists, who were moving further with their plans.

Faced with these iniquities committed before everyone’s eyes by the totalitarian power and the guilty silence of the higher church leadership, especially when it was found out that a restaurant would be built on the site of the old Enea Church1, in the center of Bucharest, demolished shortly after the earthquake (a true sacrilege in the Orthodox tradition), Father Gheorghe rebelled and initiated, during the Easter fast of 1978, the cycle of seven sermons, which would definitively change his life and return him to the status of prisoner and persona non grata in the Church in which he grew up and which he served with love and sacrifice until the end of his life (Petrescu 2004, p. 204; Stan and Turcescu 2007, p. 76).

6. Seven Words to Young People or ‘The Voice of One Who Does Not Cry in the Wilderness’

Father Gheorghe’s protest took the elders of the Church by surprise, who, instead of supporting him and showing solidarity with him, tried to stop him. Father Gheorghe took this gesture for himself by listening to a voice he heard inside him. It was the voice of Christ that he would follow, as he would tell the young people who would be with him to do. He had entered a path that led again to suffering, but also to salvation.

He decided to give seven sermons, in the form of a few words addressed to the young, as he himself called them, because they were delivered to seminarians and students every Wednesday evening of the seven weeks of the Holy Lent. Their theme was clear, namely the free and fearless confession of faith in Jesus Christ, as the title of each of them shows: The Call (1), Let’s Build Churches (2), Heaven and Earth (3), Faith and Friendship (4), Priesthood and Human Suffering (5), About Death and Resurrection (6), and Forgiveness (7). It is easy to understand that all of these represented a firm response given to the atheistic communist ideology, which denied and condemned any reference to divinity (Mânăstirea Diaconești 2007, pp. 79–81). His sermons came as a thunderbolt for the Church leadership, which tried to stop him, because it did not want to attract more pressure on him, but Father Gheorghe was unyielding, even in the face of threats of death or exclusion from education and the priesthood.

At first, his ‘words’ were spoken in the ‘Radu Vodă’ Church, the chapel of the Theological Seminary, and when its doors were closed he was forced to address the increasingly large audience, formed now mainly by polytechnic students, from the porch. Then the entrance gates to the space intended for the church were also closed, blocking access to the audience, but the students jumped over the fences, and the seminarians went out through the windows of the school hostel, the father speaking to them from the church steps. In the end, it is not known on whose orders they were allowed back into the church, where he delivered his last sermon, the seventh (Mânăstirea Diaconești 2007, p. 83).

This was, however, only the calm before the storm, because Father Gheorghe was excluded from Theological Seminary, pursued and harassed by the Securitate, arrested again in 1979 (10 March), and even threatened with the death penalty. The threat was only meant to scare him because the international political situation was completely different from a few decades previously, when he had been thrown into prison after a summary trial and forgotten by the world. His sermons had reached the ears of the most important opponents of Romanian communism abroad, published and sent to the most important forums dedicated to affirming freedom of expression, which created immense pressure on the communist leadership in Bucharest, who no longer wanted such ‘publicity’ (Stroescu-Stănișoară 2006–2007, p. 9; Rădulescu 2012, pp. 58–65; Manea 2020, pp. 79–94).

He received a 10-year sentence, of which he served only five, being released on 21 August 1984, after an extraordinary campaign in his favor supported by numerous dissidents and cultural figures from abroad, which reached the White House (Valică and Chirilă 2011, p. 92). However, the Securitate, which limited his movements and those of his wife and his son, placed him under strict surveillance. Finally, after a ‘negotiation’ of the communist power in Romania with American officials, he was forced to go into exile overseas (Deletant 1995, p. 89).

7. Exile in America and the Bitter Taste of Returning to Romania

After his release from prison, Father Gheorghe, still being threatened, harassed, and monitored day and night by the Securitate, as I mentioned above, received another blow from where he would not have expected it. The leadership of the Church, who should have defended him against communist aggression, excluded him from the ranks of priests, defrocking him (Stan 2024, p. 204; Stan and Turcescu 2007, p. 76). Gheorghe and his family were then deprived of any support and terrorized. They had no friends, and no hope. But, in the midst of this desperate situation, Gheorghe received unexpected news from the American embassy. A representative of this institution visited him and told him that everything was arranged and that he had permission to leave Romania. Although this had not been his plan, he decided to go into an indefinite, but necessary, exile (Stan and Turcescu 2007, p. 77).

Arriving in America represented contact with a new world, another language, another culture, another mentality, and it was not easy for him. The feelings were contradictory because he did not know what to expect and also what others expected of him. America offered him freedom and honorary citizenship and he was received at the White House as a hero (Manea 2020, p. 80). But it did not provide him with any material help. He had to manage on his own. He had a family, he had responsibilities, and therefore he began the long road of survival. He worked as a missionary priest within the ‘Vatra Romaneasca’ Diocese, a church institution distinct from the Romanian Patriarchate; he preached in various monasteries and churches; he held conferences, gave interviews, and wrote articles. But he also worked as a construction worker, either as a carpenter, or as a bricklayer, or as a simple laborer carrying heavy bags of cement on his back, despite his numerous medical conditions acquired during his detention (Stan 2024, p. 214). It was not easy, but he was a free man, a freedom for which he had sacrificed the most beautiful years of his youth and adulthood.

He initiated pilgrimages with believers to various monasteries and churches. He gathered around him numerous Christians from all corners of the country who had come, years before, to live the ‘American dream’. He brought to faith countless souls lost or alienated from God, and was a father both to the Orthodox who came to him in increasing numbers, and also to the converts who were now finding their way to salvation.

In 1988, he took over the ‘Holy Cross’ church in Washington, which he managed to organize into a strong community, into a welcoming home for all those who wanted to discover the Light of Christ that he had felt himself in the hell of communist prisons and that he rediscovered again and again through the power of the Holy Spirit, Whom he invoked every day and at the beginning of each work.

However, he experienced the anguish of separation from his own people, being forced to serve God far from his country and to face the enduring suspicion that came from a fragile intercommunication with the Romanians in the diaspora, because the policy of disinformation had been exported by the Securitate to America, as well. His life in communist prisons, although it was like an open book, was always the subject of discussions and false interpretations, which sometimes made him feel a stranger wherever he went. He was surrounded by disciples who believed in the spiritual meaning of his sufferings, but also by circumspect and distrustful people who were easier to manipulate, ready at any time to question the truths he was telling. Those who knew him well enough knew, however, that one of the most important traits of his personality was precisely the ‘natural courage of complete sincerity’, which caused him more discomfort than joy, even in the world of exile of which he was a part for 21 years (Stroescu-Stănișoară 2006–2007, p. 9).

8. An Exercise of Healing the Spiritual Wounds

Father Gheorghe returned to Romania after the bloody revolution of December 1989 with the hope that the achievement of freedom would produce a major change in people’s mentalities. However, he was confronted with the cruel reality of rejection by the very Church he had served and which had disowned him, leaving him prey to the communist atheists. He thought he had returned home, but he was received as a stranger. He came with an open heart, with the sincere thought of reconciliation with those who had abandoned him, convinced that only love and forgiveness can renew friendships that had been destroyed by the fear of arrests, by the desire of some to preserve their privileges, by various human weaknesses. It seems, though, that those who did not have the courage to assume their faith during the communist persecution were not prepared to forgive him, preferring to ignore him, as if his sufferings did not exist, But he did not condemn them because he had gone through the hell of loneliness, which, he said, makes man incapable of enjoying the spiritual blessings of this world (Calciu-Dumitreasa 2009, p. 37).

He did not want to lose what he had gained with so much effort and suffering, namely the power of forgiveness through love. It is true that he was somehow recognized afresh by young Christian students, who were curious to know and listen to him, inviting him to conferences, to dialogues, asking him to tell them how to follow Christ, but this happened much later. But he was left with a bitter taste that his brothers in faith, his fellow priests, did not receive him with the same love that he had for them. He discovered a disoriented world, which was searching for its identity, now being the target of other challenges, other temptations, where vices are more powerful than faith, where hope is replaced by doubt, where the mind has frozen and the heart has hardened. He wanted to move mountains, as Christ the Savior said, and he found himself in the middle of a crowd that no longer differentiated between truth and falsehood, between light and darkness. It was a great disappointment for him.

In the midst of social storms unleashed by unknown but well-organized forces, after participating in a funeral for the dead in University Square, in February 1990, Gheorghe was forced to leave the country and return to America. Romania was not ready to receive its heroes. Manipulation, denunciation, half-truths, and the fear that their presence would shake the foundations of the new political class formed by people who had collaborated with the communist regime in the past made them remain unknown to the general public. The Church, for their part, was in no hurry to readmit to their ranks those who, for one reason or another, were excluded or considered persona not grata, because they had chosen, willingly or not, to continue protesting against the communist dictatorship either in the country, going through the ordeal of prisons, or abroad, where they had self-exiled at a providential moment in their lives, as happened with another great wronged person in history, André Scrima, although their biographies only intersect in their love for Christ and the Church.2 Scrima did not know the Romanian gulag; he left the country just a few days before the members of the group the Burning Bush were arrested for mystical conspiracy and ‘plotting against the social order’, which gave rise to a series of legends around him that followed him throughout his life. His absence from the country for several decades transformed him into a kind of almost unreal character, towards whom most people do not know how to position themselves. The suspicions of his former colleagues kept him away from Church public opinion, remaining until the end of his life surrounded by a mysterious aura, unclear even after death (Stan 2024, pp. 215–21).

The same thing happened with Father Gheorghe, whom some considered a greater danger than during the communist era because he could expose people in important ‘positions’ in the Church leadership structures (Stan 2024, p. 221). He had no intention of doing this, but then no one knew what his intentions were. Returning to America, he continued his pastoral and missionary work among the Romanians there, but from then on he divided his life between his two homelands, returning to his native country frequently, sometimes several times a year. He visited his beloved places, found fellow prisoners, or former ‘friends’, now more open to dialogue, forgave his accusers, and reconciled with those who had abandoned him in difficult times. He understood human weaknesses and, to the surprise of many, closed within himself the wound caused by the hierarchs of the Church who had rejected him for fear of communist persecution. He spoke in his conferences about the need for Christian unity and solidarity around the local bishop. He loved and forgave all those who betrayed the Church of Christ.

Moreover, overtaken by the sufferings endured throughout his life, when he was lying on his bed at the Military Hospital in Bucharest, after a difficult operation, he received a visit from Patriarch Teoctist (1986–2007), who prayed with him, and gave him his blessing and the icon of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was a gesture that closed a painful chapter in the life of Father Gheorghe through which his soul found peace before leaving for the eternal world.

He died in Virginia (America), at the hospital in Fairfax, on a great feast day, the ‘Entrance of the Virgin Mary into the Church’, on 21 November 2006, at the age of 81. The funeral service took place there, but later his mortal remains were brought to his homeland and buried in the cemetery of the ‘Petru Vodă’ monastery (Stan 2024, p. 214; Manea 2020, p. 78).

9. Conclusions

Father Gheorghe was a confessor of the Orthodox faith in times of persecution, a symbol of the fight against the communist dictatorship in Romania, a man of profound moral uprightness that arouses both respect and admiration. From his youth, he came into collision with the criminal policy of the new totalitarian regime that aimed to annihilate any opposition by eliminating from public life the intelligentsia, people of culture, and students, all those who could not be easily deceived and manipulated.

He first became acquainted with the terror of communist prisons in 1948, at only 23 years old, having to face hunger, cold, terrible beatings, and daily humiliation, but, despite a brief period of decline, he defeated them through faith. After 15 years of suffering, he was released, following the general amnesty decree of 1963.

When the operation to demolish churches in Bucharest was launched in 1978, he was the only priest who protested publicly, without fear, assuming an apostolic mission, which resulted in a new conviction. But he received the sentence with a clear conscience, being convinced of the justice of his attitude. After several years of hard imprisonment, Father Gheorghe was released under the pressure of international public opinion, as mentioned above. Pursued and harassed by the Securitate, he was forced to go into exile in America, but his heart remained at home. After the fall of the communist regime in Romania, he returned to his homeland several times, trying to put his experience at the service of the recovery of the moral life of his compatriots, but he felt that there was no longer a place for him.

The Church never truly recovered him (Stan 2024, p. 218), and the political changes transformed him from a hero of the anti-communist resistance into an unpopular character because of his nationalist-Christian principles that came into direct conflict with the values of an increasingly secularized Europe. He felt like a stranger in his own country, viewed with suspicion and distrust, as a representative of a world that no one needed any more. He lived in troubled times, devoting his life to the confession of the truth, regardless of the consequences. Therefore, we are convinced that God placed him among His holy confessors, even though people did not fully understand him and did not respect his faith.