Confessor Constantin Voicescu in the communist dungeon
On 15 May 1948, by order of the Minister of the Interior, Securitate launched a large-scale campaign of arrests among the Legionnaires, according to the tables drawn up in the archives of the former bourgeois Security. However, in addition to the legionnaires known from the records of the former repressive bodies, the communist authorities felt that the time had come to install terror among those who represented the future of the country, i.e. the youth. The arrest of young students and high school students facilitated the regime’s measures to reform education along Stalinist lines, closing many schools and transforming others into a pattern designed to be permanently controlled and manipulated in the interests of the single party. Just because the regime’s “democratic ideas” had no place in the main Romanian schools, or because many young people were active in the youth organisations of the historical parties or other student associations, the theological faculties and academies were closed down on charges of “legionary activity”.
The immediate consequence of these Securitate operations was the closure of the theological faculties. Following the same scenario, arrests were made in many other colleges and universities. One such case is that of young Constantin Voicescu, a student at the Geography Faculty of the University of Bucharest in 1948.
Because of his links with other young people, some of whom were active in the Brotherhood of the Cross, he was arrested on 20 January 1949, investigated under extreme conditions and sentenced to 4 years’ hard labour by decree no. 538 of 15 April 1949 by the Bucharest Military Tribunal. After his appeal was rejected, the young Voicescu was sent to Pitești, where he began his re-education, orchestrated from the shadows by those in charge of the Communist regime. He contracted tuberculosis and in May 1950 was transferred to the sanatorium prison in Tg. Ocna.
Here he came into contact with Valeriu Gafencu and Ioan Ianolide, who had been sentenced for so-called activity in a banned political organisation, but who, since 1946, had shown a genuine Christian life, stripped of all political trappings. The young Voicescu learns from the Christian poems circulated in the prison and from the Gospel of John distributed on pieces of soapy board, and he practices the Jesus Prayer, as do his two friends, Gafencu and Ianolide.
At the end of his sentence, Voicescu received another 24 months of administrative detention, but was released on 14 June 1954. Free, he continued to search for the truth of the faith and to live it. He found a confessor in Benedict Ghiuș. He sought mystical literature from Professor Alexandru Mironescu, met Daniil Sandu Tudor and Arsenie Papacioc and received advice from Professor Dumitru Stăniloae, who urged him to study theology. He married and, after graduating from the Institute, set out on the path to the priesthood. However, after the Budapest Revolution and the withdrawal of the Soviet army, the regime was preparing for a new wave of arrests.
On 30 October 1958 he was arrested again and interrogated at the Ministry of the Interior. He was included in a group of 29 people accused of “forming a counter-revolutionary group”. Voicescu was considered by the repressive authorities to be the leader of a group of former Tg. Ocna, who, if at liberty, would have plotted against the regime through so-called legion meetings during his visits to the Antim and Plumbuita monasteries, to churches in Bucharest or on various occasions such as weddings, baptisms or funerals. He is accused of having received this initiative from Tg. Ocna from Ianolide and Gafencu with the aim of overthrowing the regime and bringing the Legionaries to power. During the trial, Voicescu refused to admit what he had said during the criminal investigation. However, by decree no. 844 of 28 August 1959, Constantin Voicescu was sentenced to hard labour for life by the Bucharest Military Tribunal.
Following the rejection of his appeal, Voicescu was transferred from Jilava to Aiud prison on 30 December 1959.
On 16 January 1963, his sentence was commuted to 25 years’ hard labour by a decision of a commission composed of representatives of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior.
He was released from Aiud on 25 June 1964.
(Adrian Nicolae Petcu – Ziarul Lumina)