Constantin Sărbu – The living icon of priestly ministry
I was moved again in pairs with the writer Constantin Gane. Mr Gane came from a family of Moldavian boyars, now rather lost. He knew the thread of his family’s genealogy back to 1453, when Constantinople fell; he was older, since 1887, I think. He had played in the royal palace with Ferdinand and Queen Mary’s daughters. I found him extremely rheumatic and couldn’t walk to carry the cane.
“The boys,” he told me, “have arranged for me to go abroad. The date was fixed, 1948. But I put it off to see what I could do with my library. They left and I stayed and stayed. I couldn’t leave and was arrested”. He now regrets it.
When he arrived in Aiud, he opened the window at night and slept with it open – which led to the aggravation of his rheumatism. Later he was cheerful and pleasant. He didn’t complain. He bore the dungeon with manliness.
He wrote 13 books, two of which were awarded by the Romanian Academy: “Prin hârtoape și coclauri” and “Trecute vieți de Doamne și Domnițe”. He knew a lot. He had travelled extensively in the West and in Constantinople. He was a literary historian, a collector of documents.
He had travelled all over the country. Audiences with Queen Mary and King Charles II. Dined with Queen Helena and King Michael under Antonescu. So much news for me. More dinners with Princess Marta Bibescu.
But what I must mention is this message from Mr Gane: “I found on an old clock of a nobleman the following inscription: ‘I went to the monastery of Neamțului and saw heaven on earth. Abbot Paisios (Velicicovski) was enveloped in light, like Our Lord Jesus Christ at the Transfiguration, shining like the sun…”.
I spent several months with Mr Gane. Meeting him was useful for the many insights he gave me into the literary and political world. Orthodox and a good Romanian, a patriot, he returned from his travels abroad with a special devotion and sympathy for Saint Anthony of Padua. His acquaintance with him was pleasant and fruitful.
Although he was old, he was in good health, and if his rheumatism, untreated of course, had not become too pronounced, his good humour and robust body would have allowed him to live to see the liberation of 1964. But I learned that he had died two or three years before the liberation.
(Pr. Nicolae Grebenea – Memories from the darkness)
About Fr. Constantin Sârbu of Sapienței Church in the capital, who was a living icon of priestly ministry and Christian apostolate, it is almost impossible to find the right words and expressions to describe his ideal image of an Orthodox priest. However, we try to evoke his image by reproducing phrases and expressions from the obituary given by a priest at the funeral service.
“If someone had asked me: “Who is the hardest working priest in Bucharest? “I would have answered: “Priest Sârbu”.
“Who is the best liturgist?” – “Priest Sârbu”…. And so, to all the questions, “Who is the best, in all areas, spiritual and material? – “the answer would have been Father Sârbu. And … What was the reward for these merits? The Securitate had already “crowned” him with eight years of hard imprisonment, followed by two years of compulsory residence in the Bărăgan, after he had built a monumental church in Bariera Vergului (between 1942 and 1954) and created a model parish, and because he had continued the same efforts in Sapienței, they had also cut short his life by subversive means, in order to “transfer him more quickly to heaven”, because he was “too much of an embarrassment” to people on earth.
(Arch. Conf. Dr. Vasile Miron – The Resistance of the Orthodox Church to the Terrorist Pressures of the Atheist-Communist Regime)