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Mihăilescu Robert

About Mihăilescu Robert

Posts by Robert Mihăilescu:

Letter to my spiritual father

Last night I felt like I was passing out. I don’t know exactly where the disease came from, because most of my organs are affected. My life is slowly passing into eternal life. I had a restful night and woke up somewhat recovered, although a wave of death can be felt in my body. But my spirit is alive and awake.  I still have something to give to the world.  Self-giving is my joy. My mind is focused on myself. I feel that the world is a dream, a discovery and a miracle. It’s wonderful, this fragile and fleeting incarnation […]

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“Through his songs, Fănică Tumurug managed to maintain the morale of the Romanian officers in the camp”.

I had him as a camp comrade beyond the Arctic Circle. Through his songs, Fănică Tumurug managed to keep up the morale of the Romanian officers in the camp. After 23 August 1944, unknown persons began to wander around the camp recruiting volunteers for the “Tudor Vladimirescu” division. Ana Pauker, a Bolshevik Jewess, came to persuade us. Fănică Tumurug, with his soft and respectful voice, refused the proposal. Finally, Ana Pauker became angry and threatened all of us who had refused to join the army: “Here you will rot without ever seeing the house where you were born and the […]

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“In my life I have never met a more powerful personality than Fănică Tumurug”

In my life I have never met a more powerful and influential personality than the elder Fănică Tumurug. He was the one who pacified all the spirits, no matter how much they disagreed. Any quarrel or disagreement between prisoners was calmed by this man and the parties left him satisfied. I was with him most of the time he was alive. I’m a doctor by profession, but I couldn’t explain a strange phenomenon… When I was near him, I felt a kind of warmth of soul that enveloped me and gave me courage and an incredible clarity of mind, but […]

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A nation is worth as much as it has embodied from the Gospel

Beloved Romanian brethren everywhere, Father Raphael Noica said that “man is what remains after the Judgment of Christ, not after the judgments of men.” On a much larger scale, i.e. that of the nation from which we all draw, the professor and scholar Simion Mehedinți spoke a truth as brief as it is profound: “A nation is worth as much as it has embodied from the Gospel”. Therefore, in the perspective of eternity, the value of a people is no more and no less than what Christ has represented under the passage of time. At the Last Judgment, when all […]

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Who are the heroes and martyrs whom the Church honours today?

“Here we are returning home. Aiud is, in fact, our home. Here we are ourselves. I am convinced that there will come a time when it will be a title of national honour and nobility when someone will say: “My father was in Aiud too!”[1]… and today, on the feast of the Ascension of the Lord, the Romanian Orthodox Church celebrates and commemorates all the Romanian heroes, soldiers and fighters of all times and places, who sacrificed themselves on the battlefields, in camps and prisons for the defence of the homeland and the ancestral faith, for the unification of the […]

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The deeds of the new martyrs and confessors are a spiritual treasure to be carefully preserved and honoured by our Church

On February 10, 2013, the day of the Sobor of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, His Eminence Metropolitan Ilarion of Volokolamsk, Head of the Department of External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, celebrated Holy Mass in the Church of Our Lady of Joy of the Afflicted in Moscow. After Liturgy, His Eminence Metropolitan Ilarion delivered a sermon, saying in particular: Today we commemorate the Sobor of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, all those who were mutilated in the years of persecutions against the faith and the Church of Christ. It is a great occasion […]

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Let us learn the vocation of confession!

Joy, brothers! Today, on the Feast of the Annunciation, we celebrate three years of existence with you. Devotion to the new Christian martyrs and confessors has brought us closer to each other. Our friendship with them is a bridge of brotherhood between us too. Their example of life is the ferment that grows in us love of God, of saints and of our fellow men. And because their enormous sacrifice is of great benefit to the generations of today and tomorrow, God also has a plan for their glorification commensurate with this sacrifice. Three years ago I said that I […]

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Communism and the sexual revolution drove the love of country and nation out of the hearts of young people

Since I’ve been in the Church I’ve been watching to see if there’s anyone who talks about love of country and nation. Very seldom, and timidly, for fear of being disruptive, for fear of falling into embarrassment, or perhaps for fear of being labeled as chauvinistic nationalists. Few Christians and clergymen today have an open attitude to show their love for Romania and the Romanian people. Of course, the love of the nation is not trumpeted, but it must be proclaimed. Much is said about our relationship with God, the Church and its saints, but less about the fact that […]

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Christian literature colloquium in Bucharest | The most beautiful form of support for the morale of any of the prisoners was poetry, confessed Fr. Nicolae Bordașiu

The most beautiful form of support for the morale of any of the prisoners was poetry, confessed Fr. Nicolae Bordașiu, a former political prisoner, told the Christian Literature Colloquium held on Friday at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest. Fr. Nicolae spent seven years in hiding in the villages of Bihor, having been wanted by security for a 20-year prison sentence in absentia. Discovered and arrested in 1955, he spent years in prison in Timișoara, Jilava, Oradea and Aiud, and was a political prisoner from 1955 to 1964. Entitled “Poetry of Communist Prisons”, the event on 13 October 2017, now […]

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Love of nation and country is a virtue and you are not born with it

Happy birthday, dear ones! Today is Romania’s national day, and we found it helpful to talk about how we come to love our nation and country. First it’s good to define the two: Love of country is the love we show to all those to whom we genetically owe the characteristics of our body: mother and father, grandparents after mother and grandparents after father, great-grandparents after mother and great-grandparents after father, great-great-grandparents after mother and great-great-grandparents after father, and so on until the whole family tree is completed. It is in fact the love of our neighbour, driven by the […]

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Christianity and Fascism in the Vision of Nichifor Crainic

In a work that has caused quite a stir in Romanian public opinion, Religion and Nationalism. Ideology of the Romanian Orthodox Church under the Communist Regime (translation by Mariana Petrișor, Bucharest, 2000, 313 pp.), the author Olivier Gillet notes a certain anti-democratic tendency in the attitude of the main Romanian confession. According to the Belgian author, this is a serious handicap that prevents Romanian society from developing on a democratic, European basis. In his admittedly feeble search for links between interwar thinking and the ideas put forward during the years of national communism, Gillet naturally stops at Nichifor Crainic in […]

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Pages from the criminal case of Nichifor Crainic

Starting a discussion about the great Romanian Orthodox publicists and theologians of the interwar period always arouses great interest. At the same time, such a discussion is not easy to maintain due to the complex personality of the person concerned. In addition to the official literature, archival documents are needed to provide as complete a picture as possible. With the help of documents from the archives of the former Securitate, we would like to draw some unpublished information for the biography of the theologian, publicist and thinker Nichifor Crainic. We will begin our discussion after 23 August 1944, when Crainic’s […]

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University professor Ion V. Georgescu. A martyr and a legendary hero

In these reminiscences I dedicate a chapter to the university professor Ion V. Georgescu, as I knew him and what I was able to learn from him. Whenever I have the opportunity to talk about him, I am reminded of a piece of advice he gave me in 1962, before his departure, before his liberation. I really must begin with this advice, even though I have already told you, at the risk of repeating it. We were so close that we formed a unity of thought. Here is the advice he gave me, which has helped me a lot in […]

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“God has given me suffering and pain, but He has also given me the strength to overcome them”

Prom Queen – Out of love for her husband Michael, Lucreția Jurj fled to the mountains with the Apuseni partisans at the age of 21. After eight years of dramatic resistance in the wilds of the forests, the fugitives were betrayed and captured by the Securitate. The love story ended with a single bullet. Lucretia Jurj was born on 2 October 1928 in the village of Scărișoara Noua, Valea lui Mihai, Sălaj County. Her parents, Moors from Scărișoara Apusenilor, settled on the Hungarian border after the land reform of 1921. Many Moorish families were displaced at that time and were […]

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Nicodima Vasilache, a nun bearer of light in the communist darkness

The monastery of Tismana has given to our Church another flower of suffering that passed through the communist dungeons. She bears the name of the great Saint Nicodemus the Holy and was born on 23 April in Galati, daughter of Dumitru and Maria Hristu. She received the name Aneta in the sacrament of Holy Baptism and grew up in Galați at 209 Traian Street, where her father rented a building belonging to a bakery where he also worked. Her mother was a housewife. Later she took the monastic habit in Tismana, where she also fell asleep in the Lord in […]

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“I was an officer of the Romanian Royal Army and I could not miss the anti-communist armed struggle in the Vrancea’s Mountains”

This is not the first time I have appeared in public. I’ve done it before in one of the episodes of the series “Memorial of Pain”. Then I answered questions and talked about the prison where the communists threw me. As in every film, my words flew by and I don’t know how many of the viewers got the gist. This time I decided to put my biography down on paper, short and to the point, because words, even when spoken in a film, escape, while writing remains. I am doing this only at the insistence of my few remaining […]

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Radu Gyr – the uncrowned prince of metaphor

During my 14 years of imprisonment, 8 of which I spent in Aiud, at the risk of being discovered and punished by the prison guards, I learned, among other things, fifty-six poems conceived in “Zarca” by the uncrowned prince of metaphor, the poet Radu Demetrescu – Gyr. With the meticulous skill of a diamond polisher, he has created poems of undeniable lyrical and ethical beauty. I learned most of them through the walls of my cell. With nothing to lose (except their chains), the political prisoners forced the walls to obey them in hours of hardship, and the walls obeyed […]

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Mircea Vulcănescu, martyr for Christ during the communist regime

Mircea Vulcănescu was born into the family of the financial inspector Mihail Vulcănescu and Mărina, née Tonescu. He attended secondary school at the “Matei Basarab” gymnasium in Bucharest (1914-1916) and, during the refugee period in Moldova in the First World War, continued his education at the refugee gymnasium next to the National Gymnasium (1916-1917) and at the “Ștefan cel Mare” gymnasium in Iași. During this period, he also worked in the scout formations of the military census at the Central Post Office in Bucharest, as a telephone operator at the “Sfântul Spiridon” Epitropy Hospital în Iași and even as the […]

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With the poet Radu Gyr in his cell in Aiud

Radu Gyr was born on 15 March 1905 in the Mioritic lands of Muscel, in Câmpulung. Talented, he wrote poetry from the age of 10. At the age of 14 he wrote the dramatic poem “In the Mountains”. He graduated with honours from Carol I High School. He entered the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bucharest. He became an assistant and then a lecturer at the Department of Aesthetics and Literary Criticism under Professor Mihail Dragomirescu. He published several volumes, such as [Cerbul de lumină, Cununi uscate, Corabia cu tufănici, Poeme de guerra, Balade]. In 1945, the terrible chain […]

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I loved Sergiu Mandinescu for his purity and sincerity of feeling

Many of the secrets of Pitești were learned through the Morse code. I told those closest to me that I had been investigated in connection with my village priest, who was allegedly a legionary. I didn’t know this and had no way of confirming it… Time was passing slowly and I had to find something to do. It would have been foolish to organise or reorganise. I suspected that there were other Țurcanu in the room and I tried to identify them by their attitudes. They were more courageous, had more initiative, were more relaxed and less shy.  I approached […]

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