Father Adrian Făgețeanu, the Confessor

As we know, Fr. Făgețeanu belonged to the group “Burning Bush” (…). I will not dwell on this phenomenon, since it is well known. The following account may seem dry to some, unable to convey the true dimension of the great confessor’s personality, as well as the sufferings he endured throughout his life. These things can be found in the few admirable interviews that Father Făgețeanu kindly granted. Here we have recourse to the frustrating document in the Securitate files, dangerous to interpret in many cases, but at the same time very necessary to clarify precise facts and dates.

Father Făgețeanu (his baptismal name was Alexandru) was born on 16 November 1912 in the commune of Deleni, near Cernăuți. The priesthood of his father, Mihai, set the young Alexandru on the holy path at an early age, but he was initially drawn to another path. After graduating from the Aron Pumnul Gymnasium in Cernăuți, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law at the University of Cernăuți in 1931. The student years were an extremely intense period for Făgețeanu in terms of political and cultural activism. He was a member of the national cultural association “Junimea” and participated in student congresses in Sibiu, Brașov and Craiova. At the same time, he felt increasingly close to the Legionary Movement (which was quite natural, given the area he came from), whose ideas he first came across, according to his own admission, when he was a high school student, in the magazine “Pământul strămoșesc”. He attended a Legionary Congress in Suceava in 1935, but did not become a member of the movement, one of the reasons being the military discipline imposed by the Legion, with which the young Făgețeanu did not agree.

Securitate agent

After graduating from university and spending some time at home, Alexandru Făgețeanu went to Fălticeni, where his uncle had an important position in the police force, to complete his legal training at the Baia Bar. He couldn’t adjust to life as a trainee lawyer, so he preferred to apply for one of the posts in the Ministry of the Interior. He was one of the first to succeed, applying for a post in the town of Fălticeni. He was a commissioner in the Administrative Office, then moved to the Judiciary, and in 1939 was appointed head of the Securitate Office, where he worked until 1941.

At that time, the Securitate Bureau had a strong political-police character, persecuting without exception all those who were considered dangerous to the security of the state or the existing regime. Among the most targeted were those suspected of communist activity. According to the confessions he was forced to make during the investigation, Făgețeanu, as head of the Securitate Bureau, had the following duties “to arrest and investigate all those who were active on the communist and workers’ line; to search all suspects; to raid and report daily on the state of mind and report monthly; to supervise and file those suspects within the radius of the Fălticeni police or those signalled by the higher authorities to come within our radius; to supervise the activities carried out by some elements of the former bourgeois parties”. As for “the persons persecuted by the Securitate for their communist and working-class activities were divided into two categories, i.e. some who had been convicted and others who had been condemned for communist activity but had not been convicted, so that these categories of suspects, knowing that they were being followed and that their homes were being searched, took the necessary measures so that the Securitate authorities would not find anything compromising on their persons”. It is no secret to those who know how the police operated between the wars that they used rather harsh methods and systematically controlled people suspected of various offences against social order. Alexandru Făgețeanu carried out his duties, as laid down in the order, in the same way as other agents did at that time: he investigated, carried out searches and brought those considered guilty to justice. These activities, which, we repeat, were by no means unique and were part of his official duties, could be a reason to reproach him from the point of view of what we now call human rights. At the time, his actions were not only interpreted from this point of view, but also exploited in different ways, depending on the context, so that the future monk was imprisoned again and again for the same act.

Although he remained a Legionary sympathiser, Alexandru Făgețeanu did not join the movement while he was a policeman, because his service obligations forbade it (during the Carlist dictatorship he could be dismissed from his post the next day if he was to be found out). But even after the establishment of the anti-Tonian-Legionary regime in September 1940, he did not want to do so, because others took over the leading positions in the Fălticeni police force on behalf of the Legionaries. Thus, a certain Emanoil Țagară was appointed by the legionaries as chief of the police in Fălticeni. In January 1941, he received a tip-off that rumours were spreading in Fălticeni that the Antonescu government had fallen and that Carol II had returned to power, and he ordered Făgețeanu to arrest and investigate eleven people, mostly Jews, known to be communist sympathisers.

Alexandru Făgețeanu did what he was ordered to do, investigating those arrested and preparing charges against some of them, but all this coincided with events related to the rebellion, which would later have fatal consequences.

On the front line

During the rebellion, he was ordered by the legionary sub-prefect to detain a number of policemen at the station, which led to his arrest and prosecution for “acts preparatory to rebellion”. For this he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by the military tribunal of the 4th Iasi Army Corps, in verdict 68 of 17 February 1941. He was imprisoned until June 1941, passing through the military prisons of A.C.A., Galata, Văcărești and Brașov. Following Antonescu’s famous decree allowing political opponents to escape from prison by fighting at the front, Făgețeanu chose to go to the front. He was seriously wounded at Stalingrad (almost killed) and returned to the country, where he was interned in the Târgu Jiu camp, from which he was released in 1943.

It seems that the traumatic experience he suffered at the front led Alexandru Făgețeanu to take the path of faith. Immediately after the liberation, he went to Cernăuți and enrolled in the Faculty of Theology. The monastery of Putna became the place where Alexandru Făgețeanu became monk Adrian. The period of his studies was not a carefree one. Faced with the Soviet invasion, the University of Cernăuți was evacuated and Făgețeanu retreated to Râmnicu Vâlcea, from where he would return to study when the new seat of the Faculty of Theology was established in Suceava. In the summer of 1945, the monk Adrian was arrested by the authorities for his work as a policeman and interned in the Slobozia-Ialomița camp, from where he was released in August 1946.

Anti-communist struggle in theology

When he returned to the university, he found it under siege by the communist “democratic” forces. It was during this difficult period that Făgețeanu joined the Legionary movement and, together with two other colleagues, founded a nest called “Reînvierea”, which proposed to fight against communism and opposed the calls of some Legionary leaders to find a modus vivendi with the new power. At the same time, it urged other students to join the anti-communist struggle. According to the testimony of a friend who was arrested in 1958, “at the Faculty of Theology in the city of Suceava, Făgețeanu Alexandru was the organiser of a religious-artistic team, personally taking care of the official authorisations to operate and go out into the field, on the grounds that he was fighting against sects, but according to his point of view, which he claimed was (sic!) to prevent students from going out into the field. This is reinforced by the fact that in the summer of 1946, around June, a delegation of students came from Iasi to found the democratic organisation (U.N.S.R.) in our faculty, Făgețeanu, before the meeting, gathered the students in a dormitory and for about two hours tried to convince them to fight against this organisation not to be founded. I remember that he suggested that no student should attend the meeting. But when he saw that he was not successful, he also attended the meeting, where he took the floor and demanded the re-establishment of the “Orthodox Academy” student association.

In the end, the “democratic organisation” was not established at this meeting. Another fellow student reported that Făgețeanu warned the other students that “if the communists remain in power, the theological faculty will be worthless and we must prevent the communists from coming to power”. So the young monk joined the Legionary Movement as a militant, not for profit in its moments of triumph, but when it was most difficult, fighting with the weapon of the word against the communist danger.

Under the influence of Sandu Tudor

In February 1947, after graduating in theology, Adrian Făgețeanu went to Bucharest to study philosophy. Lacking material means, he attended this faculty until June. At the university, he met Danciu Agenor, a young legionnaire who would later convert to Catholicism, with whom he had many discussions on the role of religion and the mission of priests and believers in resisting communism. The successive failures of the political struggle against communism had made Făgețeanu more and more convinced that only religion could be the element capable of ensuring the survival of the individual in an increasingly suffocating social environment, and these discussions strengthened his conviction. In June, having received the consent of Prior Vasile Vasilache to live in the monastery of Antim, Fr. Făgețeanu had the opportunity to attend the famous conferences of the “Burning Bush” and to meet Sandu Tudor, who was to exert an overwhelming influence on him. The future martyr found out about the young monk’s legionary past and told him that many students with legionary sympathies came to the conferences at Antim, anxious about the fate they had to assume. Sandu Tudor was convinced that “in order to continue the fight against the materialist conception, the methods used by the legionary movement on the organisational level are no longer useful, and the only possibility to fight against materialist conceptions is on the religious level, and within the Church the best preparation for such a fight can be done in monasticism”. As you can see, Sandu Tudor made the leap from the political to the spiritual level, asking everyone, regardless of their political choices, to arm themselves with the weapons of the Holy Spirit. This is how he dealt with those young legionaries mentioned above, telling them to leave politics and follow the way of God. It was a path that Făgețeanu would also follow with enthusiasm, and in July 1947 he participated in the retreat organised by Sandu Tudor in the monastery of Govora. Other participants were Virgil Stancovici, Valeriu Strainu, Andrei Scrima, Benedict Ghiuș, Sofian Boghiu and Felix Dubneac. The retreat lasted almost a month and consisted of spiritual exercises. Since March 1947, Fr. Făgețeanu had already received permission from the Metropolitanate of Bukovina to transfer to the monastery of Govora; after this experience, he decided to give up the faculty and settle in this monastery from 14 October 1947. Before that, he made one more trip to Suceava, where he met a former classmate who had become a teacher of religion and Romanian in a normal school. Before leaving, Father did not forget to ask his friend to educate the pupils, the future teachers, “in the spirit of the Christian religion”, a sign of his full acceptance of the spirit of the “Burning Bush”.

In Govora, he stayed with the great abbot Gherasim Bâca until March 1950, when he answered Sandu Tudor’s call to come to the Crasna hermitage, where the former journalist wanted to found a monastery of intellectual monks “to train them to fight against materialistic thinking”. Unfortunately, Sandu Tudor’s dream was brutally interrupted by the intervention of the Securitate, who arrested him in July 1950. The same fate befell Adrian Făgețeanu in December, who was first imprisoned in Făgăraș, from where he was transferred to Jilava after a month and a half.

Convicted of war crimes

To incriminate the two monks, old facts are brought out of mothballs and reinterpreted. In the case of Sandu Tudor, two allegedly democratic soldiers who had been punished by him during the war for being thieves were brought in as accusers, while in the case of Adrian Făgețeanu the issue of the 11 alleged communist sympathisers he had investigated at the time of the Legionaries’ rebellion was revived. Adrian Făgețeanu was sentenced on 31 March 1952, by criminal decision 1391, “for the act provided for and punished by the provisions of article 3, letters a, b, c, of decree 207/1948 on war crimes, in conjunction with article 4 of the same decree, to eight years’ hard labour and five years’ disqualification as a citizen, with confiscation of his property”.

From Jilava, in May 1952, Fr. Făgețeanu was transferred to the Canal, where he met several legionaries whom he encouraged to enter the monastery. In 1953 he was transferred to Aiud, and in June 1954 he returned to Făgăraș and was taken back to Jilava, from where he was released on 28 September 1956. The way in which his release was justified is astonishing. Thus, “by decision no. 766 of 22 March 1956, the Supreme Court of Justice – Criminal Chamber granted the appeal for supervision filed by the President of the Supreme Court and ordered the annulment of the criminal decision no. 1391/1952 of the former Bucharest Court, Section I, by which Făgețeanu Alexandru had been sentenced to eight years of hard labour for crimes against humanity, as provided for by art. 3 letters a, b and c of Decree No. 207/1948, and referred the case for retrial, the just qualification being that provided for by Art. 193, par. 1 of the Criminal Code”. It was therefore wrong to accuse Făgețeanu of mistreating citizens of Jewish nationality, and it was more correct to classify them as “progressive fighters” and to accuse the former policeman of acting against the workers’ movement! With sentence no. 1415/ 26 September 1956, the Military Tribunal of the Second Military Region, which heard the case “negligently”, acquitted the accused “on the grounds that his acts do not fulfil the constituent elements of the offence provided for in Article 193, para. 1 of the Penal Code, because the citizens in question were arrested in connection with the spreading of rumours about the fall of the Antonescu government and none of them belonged to the working class and had no connection with the labour movement”.

“This sentence was appealed against by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Second Military Region of Suceava, which was rejected by decision no. 414 of 2 November 1956 of the Supreme Tribunal – Military College, on the grounds that the factual situation envisaged by the Supreme Tribunal – Criminal College had changed and that none of those arrested had any connection with the Communist Party, the revolutionary movement or other progressive organisations”. We will return to these legal juggleries when we discuss the arrest of Father Făgețeanu in 1958.

Arrested again for participation in the “Burning Bush”

Released for the time being, he wanted to return to the Antim monastery, but the ban on staying in Bucharest prevented him from doing so. So he left and settled in the monastery of Lainici, a place that would play a special role in his life. During this time he made trips to the monasteries of Slatina and Rarău, as well as to Bucharest, where he made contact with old friends from the “Burning Bush” group and former prison companions who had decided to become monks. In the period leading up to his re-arrest, Fr. Făgețeanu worked to strengthen the faith and attract new people to monasticism, arguing that “all the pillories have been conquered, the only possibility to fight is within the Church” and that the “poison of materialism” must be prevented from spreading. An example of this is the discussion he had with the priest Moise Victor from the parish of Strunga, Iași County, to whom he repeated that the only way to fight materialism was through the Church, and recommended that he take a doctorate in theology “so that he could have an influence on other priests, through pastoral circles, in conferences and in the parish through preaching”.

Having met Sandu Tudor in Rarău, who had become Hieromonk Daniil, he persuaded Father Adrian to settle in the monastery of Slatina, where he never arrived because he was arrested on 25 February 1958 and taken to Suceava prison for investigation on suspicion of “an offence against the social order, an act provided for and punishable under Article 209, paragraph 1 of the Penal Code of the Republic of Poland”. His arrest was closely linked to the measures taken against former legionnaires in early 1958 (including Decree 89/17 February 1958). Făgețeanu had already been persecuted by the Securitate on the basis of the confessions of former colleagues from the Theological Faculty, who had already been arrested at the end of 1957, and was included in the database of legionaries to be arrested. It is ironic that, at the same time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was working on Făgețeanu’s case and found another way to arrest him, namely the introduction by the Prosecutor General of an appeal for supervision of sentence no. 1415 of 26 September 1956 and decision no. 414 of 2 November 1956. This gesture was justified by the fact that these courts had failed to call more witnesses to prove that the detainees were communists, and the urgent demand was made for the investigation of all those involved. After hearings on 20 and 27 February 1958, the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the P.R.R. granted the request for supervision and referred the case to the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Second Military Region “for further investigation”.

Becoming “leader of the rebellion” of Fălciteni

(In an interview, Father Făgețeanu confessed how, during the investigation, he had been beaten by a certain Blehan, the son of a church cantor, a fact that does not appear in the criminal file), without being aware of the prosecutor’s concerns. The episode of the 11th is lightly skipped and the continuity of Făgețeanu’s legionary activity throughout the period is insisted upon. In fact, the indictment of 16 March 1958, which concluded the investigation in Suceava, only mentions Făgețeanu’s participation in the rebellion in Fălticeni and his five-year sentence. Only on 20 March 1958, the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the 2nd Military Region sent an order to the Criminal Security Investigator of the M.A.I. Suceava Regional Directorate to complete the investigation of the 11 arrested, but to this day no one has bothered to interrogate those involved. The material coming from other regions and completing the file concerns the same question of the continuation of the legionary activity of Father Adrian, especially under the guise of religion (in the meantime, Gherasim Bâca, the abbot of Govora, and Veniamin Nicolae, the abbot of Polovragi, near Făgețeanu, were also investigated for the “legionary” activity carried out by him when he was active in Oltenia).

It was only in June, when the so-called “Burning Bush” conspiracy took shape, that Fr. Făgețeanu was sent to Bucharest and arrested along with Daniil Sandu Tudor and the others. Since the accusations were extremely flimsy, the solution was to blacken some of the members of the group excessively and to reflect their infamy on the others. One of those targeted was Father Adrian. Between 23 and 24 July, some of the 11 arrested were summoned to the Securitate office in Fălticeni and “asked” to tell what had happened. In statements that seemed to have been drawn from thin air, they all declared themselves to be great “progressive fighters” in order to justify their appeal for surveillance, even though they had fled from court in 1941 because they had vehemently denied being communists. But this was not enough, news came to light. Făgețeanu became the de facto leader of the uprising in Fălticeni, a bloodthirsty anti-Semite who was capable of fighting the garrison in order to execute the Jews.

As can be seen, the investigators emphasised both the anti-Semitic and anti-Communist dimensions of Făgețeanu’s alleged actions. It is impossible to determine from the 1958 criminal file what actually happened in the Fălticeni Security in January 1941. It is quite possible that these people suffered, but it was not this suffering that interested the Communists. They were forced to give testimony, not in order to obtain justice and to punish the guilty person fairly, but in order to make as much as possible of a person who was perceived as a danger to the Communist regime, who was convicted (reinvented) several times for the same act, which is contrary to any principle of law. This is yet another example of what communist ‘justice’ meant, which, as we have seen, applied the provisions of the law more than dialectically.

Another six years in prison

On the basis of these data, on 1 September 1958, Adrian Făgețeanu was presented with a new indictment, in which all the old charges disappeared as if by magic, and in which Article 209 was replaced by Article 193, on the grounds that “from the criminal investigation documents it emerges that between 1937 and 1940, as head of Fălticeni’s Securitate, the named person had followed, searched and arrested progressive people, whom he had beaten and silenced in order to make them denounce their links with workers’ organisations”. At the trial, however, the two charges were combined:

With sentence 125/1958, the Military Tribunal of the Second Military Region sentenced Făgețeanu Alexandru (Adrian) to “20 (twenty) years of hard labour and 10 (ten) years of civic degradation, for the offence under art. 209, para. 2, C.P., art. 58, paras. 2-5, C.P.” he was also sentenced to “20 (twenty) years of hard labour for the crime of intensive activity against the working class and the revolutionary movement, p.p. of art. 193/1, paragraph 2 C.P., by change of qualification, conf, art. 292 c.j.m., art. 193/1, para. 1 C.P. Conf. art. 25, para. 6, the total confiscation of the property is ordered”. In accordance with Article 101 of the Penal Code, Father Adrian was sentenced to 20 years of hard labour, 10 years of deprivation of civil rights and total confiscation of his property. This sentence became final with the rejection of the appeal, according to decision no. 42 of 21 January 1959 of the Supreme Court of Military Justice. He spent most of his years of imprisonment in Aiud, where, despite the tortures he was subjected to, he always carried God in his heart. Again, I do not insist on this point, but I invite those who are interested to look for Father’s interviews. He was released according to the decree of the Council of State of the P.R.R., no. 411/1964 and will try to return to monastic life.

His activities after 1964 are not clear from the various documents consulted. It seems that he worked in Turda and in the parish of Piatra Fântânii, Bistrița, and also in the monastery of Cheia in Prahova County. He found particular support from the monks of the Lainici monastery (closed in 1961 and reopened in 1970) and the Locurele hermitage, being a close friend of the abbots Caliopie Georgescu and Calinic Caravan. Later he returned to Bucharest, to the Antim Monastery, where he served for many years, surrounded by the love of thousands of faithful. In 2003 he retired to the Locurele hermitage on the top of the mountain, where he hoped to find the peace he had so little of in his life.

(George Enache – Rost Magazine, year IV, no. 42-43, August-September 2006, pp. 8-14)