Catholic World News News Feature

The Calvary of Romania October 22, 2001

By Robert Royal

Christianity first came to Romania in 106 AD when the armies of the Roman Emperor Trajan conquered the region then known as Dacia, bringing the new faith with them. Though Romania, situated in Eastern Europe, naturally came under Slavic influence over the centuries--most importantly the Bulgarian invasions of the 6th and 7th centuries--it retained a deep connection to Latin civilization. Even today, almost two thousand years after the Roman conquest, Romanian is classified by linguists as a basically Romance language. Over the long history of Romanian Christianity, the population has divided into Orthodox, by far the largest denomination with about 87 percent of the population, Catholics at 6 percent, and Protestants with 5 percent. Though census figures in Romania are not entirely reliable, this means that in concrete terms there were about 1,560,000 Catholics in Romania before the advent of Communism in 1948. (By contrast, the Communist Party in Romania had no more than 1,000 members when a Marxist regime was imposed on the nation through internal machinations and Soviet pressure.) But after 50 years of one of the worst persecutions of the century, there were still over 500,000 Catholics in Romania. Romanian Catholics mostly fell into two large groupings. A Latin-rite Roman Catholic Church was located primarily in Timisora (a region whose Catholics were predominantly German by background) and Transylvania (an area of sizeable Hungarian Catholic concentrations). This Latin Church, though hard pressed, proved surprisingly resistant to the persecutions of Romanian Communism, perhaps owing to its distinctive ethnic composition. This was not true, unfortunately, for the Romanian Greek Catholic Church. As occurred in Ukraine under the Soviets, Romanian Communist authorities organized an illegitimate synod of this church, which no Romanian Catholic bishop, even under torture and other pressures, agreed to attend. The synod was forced to declare that it was the will of the faithful to become Orthodox, though Romanian Orthodoxy had been available as an option for anyone who wanted to convert for centuries. In October of 1948, the Greek Catholic Church was liquidated, her thousands of churches confiscated and converted to Orthodox use. The date was intended to rub in a point: it was the 250th anniversary of the Church's 1698 declaration of unity with the Vatican. The justification for this act was typical propaganda: the Greek Catholic bishops had "distanced themselves from the people to serve imperialist interests, obeying the Pope of Rome." There were six authentic Greek Catholic bishops in Romania at that point. All were arrested at the close of 1948. Five died in prison (Ion Suciu, Valerie Traian Fren_iu, Alexander Rusu, Vasile Aftenie, and Ion Bálan). The lone survivor, Bishop Juliu Hossu of Cluj-Gerla, spent the next 22 years in prison and under house arrest before he died, still under detention. Two bishops' secretaries were also imprisoned: the Abbe Alexander Rusu and the Abbe Foisor. But the sweep went much further. Security forces apprehended Vicar General Victor Macavieu of Blaj, Canons Victor and Nicholas Pop, Ion Moldovan, Dumitriu Neda, and Ion Folea, together with the theology professors Septimius Todoran and Eugenia Pop. The whole of the Bucharest chancery was arrested: Archpriest Liviu Chinezeu, the Abbes Ion Chertes and Mare Vasile, and many others. Elsewhere those detained clearly were chosen in order to decapitate the Catholic leadership: in the city of Cluj, Father Joseph Bal and Canon Dumitriu Manu, and in Oradea, Canon Julius Hir_ea; in Lugoj, Abbe Basile Teglasiu. Ion Ploscaru, consecrated a bishop in 1948, was also imprisoned the following year.

PRESSURE TO APOSTASIZE At the beginning, all the bishops were held in Dragoslavele, the summer residence of the Orthodox Patriarch. Patriarch Justinian visited them often and urged them to become Orthodox. The government put out propaganda that the bishops had gone on a "spiritual retreat." The regime needed at least one bishop to apostasize in order to claim that their unification of the Catholic Church with the Orthodox was licit. No bishop obliged them. When gentle persuasion failed, the bishops were separated and sent to different locations. By May 10, 1950 Vasile Aftenie, after suffering terrible tortures in the Vacaresti prison, went mad and died, even though he was a relatively young man and had been in good health. The fates of the other bishops were soon sealed in similar fashion. Of the clergy, 600 were imprisoned, about a third of them in the Soviet Union; only half survived. Pope Pius XII reacted to this slaughter with a moving statement in his March 27, 1952 Apostolic Letter Veritatem Facientes: "We desire to kiss the chains of those who, unjustly imprisoned, weep and are afflicted because of the attacks against religion, the ruin of sacred institutions, for the eternal salvation of their people, now in peril, more than for their own suffering and lost liberty." Unfortunately, about a quarter of the Romanian Greek Catholic clergy gave in and became formally Orthodox during the persecution, fearing repercussions on themselves and their families. Since there were ample opportunities prior to the advent of the Communist regime for these men to have become part of the majority Romanian Orthodox Church had they so wished, there is no reason to believe that even a single one of these allegedly "voluntary" conversions was sincere. (Many later recanted.) The means needed to convince them testify to that. One priest was thrown into a sewer full of rats for two days. He relented. Another was cast into a quagmire, with similar results. In the town of Oradea, a Father Tamian was subjected to torture by fire and electricity until he surrendered. In Sibiu, a Father Onofreiu miraculously survived being hanged when the rope broke. He still refused to accept Orthodoxy but was declared insane and released--temporarily. It is easy to understand why a quarter of the clergy, subjected to such treatment in so many different places, were not hardy enough to withstand it. But the Greek Catholic people did not acquiesce easily in this forced change. Bishop Ion Suciu of Oradea, prior to his arrest, appealed to his people for financial support after the government suspended payments to Catholic schoolteachers. The parishes responded vigorously: the bishop received more than he needed to keep his schools in operation. As the anti-Catholic attacks became stronger, so did the defense by lay people. When agents of the Securitate (the Romanian secret police) sought to arrest the entire Basilian monastery at Bixad, the local townspeople forced the security detail to withdraw. A few days later, however, 15 truckloads of agents returned and rounded up the remaining monks, holding the people at bay with machine guns. The monks were beaten and told to renounce the Pope. They refused. One of the Securitate group shouted: "These idiot monks care more about the Pope than God and the Church. Let's see if after they are shut up the Pope comes to save them." Orthodox priests, monks, and nuns were forcibly installed in this and other monasteries, convents, and churches. Wherever there were resisters, they were arrested and sent to jail. But the people often boycotted the new religious regime. The cathedrals at Blaj, Oradea, Cluj, Lugoj, were "reconsecrated" as Orthodox by collaborating Orthodox bishops. At Lugoj, the faithful had to be forced out. One of them, observing that the police were sealing the doors, cried out: "Seal all you want, gentlemen, the Jews too sealed Christ's tomb, but on the third day he arose."

THE ORTHODOX ROLE Needless to say, Orthodox doctrine does not permit forced conversion or confiscation of churches of a different denomination. Seventy-six brave Orthodox priests refused to take over confiscated churches and participate in this political and religious abuse of power. They were, in turn, arrested. And at least one Orthodox bishop who refused to collaborate with the puppet bishops, Bishop Nicolas Popovici, was arrested and died--perhaps after being poisoned--in 1958. But on the whole, the Orthodox leadership was responsible for no little injustice toward the Catholics. The Orthodox suffered themselves, however. The old Orthodox metropolitans, Mihálecescu and Criveanu, who were not sympathetic to Communism, were replaced by the government with "people's prelates." To achieve this end, the regime and those prelates slandered the old leaders and pressured church institutions to remove them. Metropolitan Mihálecescu himself probably died a martyr's death. After his replacement and exile to a monastery, where he was allowed only limited freedom, he appears to have been poisoned. Ironically, some of the Catholic figures who were marked to suffer had been generous towards the Orthodox when the situation had been reversed. From 1940 to 1944, Hungary occupied parts of Romania and Bishop Julius Hossu had defended the rights of Jews as well as the Orthodox, particularly the Orthodox Bishop of Cluj, Nicolae Colan. When the Communist regime came to power, however, this same Bishop Colan confiscated and reconsecrated the cathedral of the bishop who had been his benefactor. Understandably, events like these and others listed above would leave a deep rift between Orthodox and Catholics all during the Communist government and years into the post-Communist period. In Paris, the Romanian Archimandrite Stefan Lucaciu wrote the Pope to pray for abundant grace to be given to the persecuted Catholics. In another letter, he deplored the treatment of Greek and Roman Catholics in Romania, warning: "The religious opportunism which the Communist regime displays today will tomorrow turn furiously against the Orthodox Church, which it intends to transform shortly into a political platform for achieving its political aims." In fact, the Romanian government was soon persecuting all religious groups: Jews, Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants. One of the most moving accounts of this persecution from the period is Protestant pastor Richard Wurmbrand's widely acclaimed Tortured for Christ. The chief rabbi of Romania, Alexandru Safran, was summarily deposed and exiled. But because of the special social and religious place of Catholics in Romania, the anti-Catholic campaign was particularly virulent.

ENDURING FAITH Yet the harsh campaign was not wholly successful. In 1949, Stoian Stanciu, the Minister of Cults, complained in a public speech of pro-Catholic feelings among some intellectuals. "Pro-Catholic" in this context may have meant either actual support for the Church or a general sympathy for wronged Christians. In either case, some serious secular opposition to the government's religious policy clearly had endured. There was historical precedent for pro-Catholic leanings among Romanian intellectuals. I.C. Bratianu, Romania's leading democratic political figure in the 19th century, had converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. And Iuliu Maniu, the head of the National Peasant Party, the most important democratic and anti-Fascist politician in the nation, was a devout Greek Catholic (he died in the 1950s in a Communist prison). Among the Orthodox leadership, however, governmental pressure and long-standing belief that Greek Catholicism was illegitimate in Romania led to shameful acts by Christians against fellow Christians. The distinguished Romanian scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, expressed the sympathy of all Romanians at the time for their Catholic brothers and sisters, and lamented that "we have not heard that a single Orthodox bishop has publicly stated his disapproval of the violence." The Romanian Patriarch Justinian played a particularly unsavory role in this process. After the fall of Communism, his name was remembered with much fondness by Romanian Orthodox for his energetic efforts on behalf of the Orthodox Church. But Eliade pointed out that the Patriarch was playing with fire:

Today in the world, Christianity in its entirety is being attacked without mercy, it is attacked by those who long ago condemned it to death, and these same people are the ones who have given arms to Justinian…. Today or tomorrow the Orthodox bishops will join their brothers in prison and exile. They too will be martyrs, but after having been compromised and degraded in the eyes of all the faithful. Allowing that no one has the right to demand that another become a martyr, Eliade appealed to the bishops to recognize that without the willingness to become a martyr for the truth, the bishop's staff becomes mere wood and metal.

THE LATIN-RITE CHURCH Whatever historical rationalizations against the legitimacy of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church might be used by Orthodox leaders, they could not use the same arguments against the Latin-rite Roman Catholic Church in Romania. The Roman churches were mostly located in Transylvania and Moldavia, and they were linked with ethnic minorities which had historically bee in union with Rome since the 12th and 13th centuries. These churches were flourishing, with about 1,200,000 adherents before the advent of Communism. Yet their full rights could not be acknowledged without running the risk of opening up the claim that the Greek Catholic churches, too, deserved state recognition. Recognition for either Church was never a real possibility. Communist Party Secretary Gheorghiu-Dej announced peremptorily in February 1948 that the sole obstacle to "democracy" in Romania was the Catholic Church. He continued:

The new constitution of Romania will not allow Catholic citizens to be submissive to the directives of a foreign ruler; it will not allow Romanians to be tempted by the American golden calf, at whose feet the Vatican wants to bring its faithful. When the Roman Catholic churches insisted on official recognition, the Romanian Communist regime adopted a dual strategy of silencing them and encouraging a schismatic Roman Catholic Church subservient to the state, all under the legal cover of stopping "agents of imperialism" and protecting "state security." Two bishops were accused by name of anti-democratic attitudes: Aron Márton of Alba Julia in Transylvania and Anton Ducoviciu of Jassy in Moldavia. Covert means were introduced to weed out recalcitrant clergy. In June of 1949, Anton Bisoc, the Franciscan Superior, received a telegram, apparently from Bishop Ducoviciu, asking him to come to see him at once. Bisoc set out and was never seen again. His assistant, Father Herciu, went to look for him. He, too, disappeared without a trace. The message was clear: a recalcitrant Roman Church would be dealt with by the same means that had been applied to the Greek Catholics. Bishops Márton and Durcoviciu were soon under arrest. The other four Latin dioceses, with their bishops, had already been suppressed on a cunning legal technicality: the government required a diocese to have at least 750,000 faithful in order to be recognized--no problem for the Orthodox, but a virtual suppression order in all but a few Catholic centers. Ducoviciu was so mistreated in prison that when he was thrown naked into a cell, he was unrecognizable. A short while later he disappeared, never to be heard of again. Father Rafael Friedrich, a priest-prisoner who was passing by his cell, heard him groaning. Saying Laudatus Jesus Christus ("Praised be Jesus Christ") to let the bishop know he was a Catholic, the priest heard the reply: Hic Antonius moribundus ("Anthony is dying here"). By June of 1949, there were no Roman Catholic bishops active in Romania. Almost all churches were closed. Roman Catholics were specially marked as such on their identity cards. In the Iassy diocese, 106 parishes were occupied by militias. During one of the occupations at Faraoani, the militias and the people became embroiled in a fight. Shots were fired. One person lay dead and four badly wounded on the church steps. Similar scenes occurred elsewhere.

POLITICAL PRESSURES In 1950, all the Communist nations were using their churches to support the anti-nuclear movement centered around the Stockholm Appeal. In strict terms, opposition to nuclear war was something every Christian could support. But in fact, the appeal was turned into an ideological weapon against the West, and an international prop for the Soviet Union. The Romanian Roman Catholic Church held special importance in this propaganda campaign. If Church leaders could be induced the government, it could be plausibly argued that they had repudiated the Vatican and the allegedly pro-Western policy of the Holy See. The Romanian government transported about a hundred priests, lay people, and parish leaders of the Latin rite to a Congress at Targu-Mures to induce them to sign the Appeal and to accept the position within Romanian society that the government wanted them to occupy. They refused, but under extreme threats finally yielded. After that, they were told to get the approval of the vicars who had replaced the bishops as the leaders of several dioceses. This failed. But in the Church's weakened state, the government tried another ploy. It prepared a Church Statute--in effect a kind of concordat--that appeared to grant the Roman Church everything she wished: the document proclaimed that the Pope was the supreme moral and dogmatic head of the church, and that the bishops were sovereign in their own dioceses; it also incorporated government concessions on other contested points. The last article of the Statute, however, stipulated that the exercise of the earlier rights could only be carried out with government approval--effectively annulling everything that went before. Furthermore, contact with the Holy See could only be undertaken through the Ministries of Cults and Foreign Affairs. It was clear, even to the remaining Catholic leaders, that it would be impossible to sign such a document. In May 1950, the government made the final move. The Vicar General of Alba Julia, Louis Boga, was arrested. Marc Glasser, vicar of Iassy, was imprisoned, tortured, and died on May 25. The Romanian Communists also banned all contact with the Vatican (Even in the 1960s, no Romanian Catholic bishops were allowed to attend the Second Vatican Council, and priests were still being arrested.) The government began the break with the Vatican by expelling the papal nuncio, Archbishop Gerald O'Hara. O'Hara, who happened to be an American by birth, was branded a CIA spy and an agent of American imperialism. Under order from Pius XII, before leaving the country Archbishop O'Hara consecrated several bishops and apostolic administrators in secret. These men--Ioan Ploscaru, Ioan Dragomir, Ioan Cherte_, Julius Hir_ea, and Alexander Todea (who would later be named a cardinal)--faced tremendous challenges. Almost all survived the persecution, showing that Pius XII's strategy was successful. They provided a certain continuity for the Church when it re-emerged after the 1989 fall of Communism. Furthermore, before O'Hara was forced out, Latin and Greek rite Catholic bishops had issued a joint statement protesting to the government that, "Three million citizens are being treated as if they were enemies of the people." Two hundred priests were arrested under that charge. Although the government moved slowly against the Latin-rite Catholics for fear of provoking a reaction from the nations (Hungary, Germany, Croatia, Slovakia, and Bulgaria) from which these ethnic-minority Catholics were drawn, it moved steadily to eliminate Catholicism. Every one of the loyal Catholic priests listed with the nunciature wound up in prison.

SURVIVORS' TESTIMONY We may form some idea of the remarkably harsh treatment Catholic prisoners received in Romania from the accounts of those who survived to tell their own stories and those of their fellow internees. One of the most prominent among these, Father Tertullian Langa, Vicar General of the Cluj Diocese, was arrested in the earliest waves of repression in 1947. His crime, according to the judge who sentenced him, was simple: "There is no evidence against you, but since you are in prison, it is because you are guilty, guilty of having been arrested." Given the regime's understanding of justice, it is no surprise that he was only released 17 years later, after accumulating a wide range of experiences in the prisons. Like many who survived such injustices, Father Langa returned to freedom believing that "I was arrested in order to fulfill a plan intended to bring about the sanctification of my life." He was able to comfort and ultimately convert many fellow prisoners and learn something about the sufferings necessary to the Christian life: "Prison for me was the seminary that I had never experienced." And his 17 years there were "the most beautiful and productive years of my existence." Obviously a man who could speak in such terms is someone special, and the terrible things he witnessed on the way to reaching these conclusions make his declaration all the more remarkable. One of the most brutal punishments involved what the prisoners called the "marathon." This consisted of making prisoners run or march while a dog, specially trained to leap on them if they stopped moving, followed their every step. The ordeal would last so long that, at times, Father Langa began having hallucinations. During one episode, "I seemed to be walking on diamonds, but in fact the soles of my feet had become completely swollen. Then, I started to see, as if I were looking through the cell's walls, a beautiful garden, an orchard with apples. . . .Then I fell, unconscious, hitting my head on the wall." Naturally, the dog attacked and the pain revived him. He began running again without knowing what he was doing. "Later, the guard told me that I had been running and walking 59 hours straight. It seems unbelievable, but why would the guard lie?" In another sadistic exercise, the prisoners discovered that prison authorities had been ordered to kill them all by exposure to the cold. Their only defense against freezing to death was to keep warm by walking briskly without stopping. An Admiral Macellaru, the prisoner in the cell next to Langa's, stopped one day. Langa roused him and started him moving again. Macellaru resented being awoken from a beautiful dream: "I prayed to God, falling on my knees, to bring the moon into my room and he heard my prayer. He sent me the moon and I was in the process of eating it when you woke me." The next morning, Macellaru's body was carried away. His fellows believed that perhaps his dream was sent to him as a consolation, a Eucharistic symbol, before he left this world. Many others succumbed as well. Father Langa partly attributes his survival to the "spiritual masters" he was fortunate enough to know as a young man. These included Father Iosif Pop, Ion Miclea (a philosopher and friend of Jacques Maritain), and Msgr. Vladimir Ghika, all of whom became martyrs or confessors. Langa also provides information about some of the church leaders who disappeared early in the persecution. Vasile Aftenie, the Vicar General of Bucharest, was the first bishop-martyr in Romania. As usual, the Communist authorities tried to co-opt him, offering him the Orthodox episcopal see of Moldovia immediately, and with a promise to make him Orthodox Patriarch in Bucharest later, if he broke with Rome. Aftenie refused, saying, "Neither my nation nor my faith are for sale." The sequel was foreordained: "He was subsequently tortured to death. His body was disfigured, the dislocated arms were no longer connected to his trunk." Equally bold was Bishop Ion Suciu, an energetic young man, who, before his arrest, had publicly proclaimed at a speech in the Latin-rite Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Bucharest: "We must have the courage and dignity to be Christians in the very face of the Communism and atheism that have come." When the Soviet Procurator Vychinski learned of this pronouncement, he replied: "That mouth must be shut." The Romanian authorities quickly did just that. Another bishop, Liviu Chinezu, secretly ordained as bishop, died in 1955 in the Sighet Prison, a notoriously harsh institution which was the preferred place of detention for Romanian political and religious leaders. The Prison commandant, Vasile Ciolpan, apparently wished to make it seem that the bishop died of natural causes. He ordered the window in the bishop's cell to be left open in frigid mid-January weather. Chinezu froze to death. In a 5-year period, at 52 Sighet prisoners are known to have died, and probably many more unknown perished as well.