Father Arsenie Papacioc’s passage through time

Whoever opens the pages of the Paterikon may be surprised by the large number of “elements”, considered dangerous to society, who have retreated to the silence of the desert to lament their sins and find God. Were they all sincere in their quest, or was it a means of hiding their less than honourable past under the guise of religion? Could self-imposed asceticism ever make up for the mistakes of youth?

The Christian answer to these questions is well known, but it was far from convincing to the enemies of Christ’s religion. During the period when Romania was under the communist regime, the political power and the organs of repression were obsessed with the idea that the choice of some representatives of the old social order to retire to a monastery to worship the Lord was nothing more than either an escape from deserved punishment or a camouflage for hostile actions under the cloak of religion.

The Securitate’s special ‘attention’ was focused on former members and sympathisers of the Legionary Movement, who were considered the greatest danger to the communist ‘new order’.

Members of the Legion played a particularly important role in anti-communist resistance actions, but most often they collaborated with members and sympathisers of other political parties, all united by the same hatred of the Bolshevik enemy. However, the “legionary danger” became a hoax, a myth of monstrous proportions which, paradoxically, was a source of constant fear for the communist repressive organs, but also a means of tightening control over society. The reputation of the legionnaires’ good organisation, the solidarity that existed among them, the “fanaticism” misunderstood by many, made people fear that a well-coordinated resistance movement was possible at any time. At the same time, the Securitate used the label of fascist-terrorist organisation applied to the Legion to make being a former Legionnaire the greatest of all possible crimes. Once this label was attached to someone, it was a short walk to prison. It was enough for a group to have one person with a Legionnaire background for the suspicion of sympathy for Guardist ideas to spread to everyone. Often, by political order or for lack of anything else, the guards invented Legionnaire conspiracies to attract more people to prisons or camps or to justify their purpose.

Over time, legionnaireism became something monstrous, which fascinated some people precisely because of this black fame. For most people, it was a diffuse but extremely persistent danger. This mythical monster, created by the communist repressive services, proved its effectiveness even after the “revolution” of December 1989, when there were several well-orchestrated actions to draw attention to the “legionary danger” which, it was claimed, would have endangered the newly established power.

The devastating blow to Orthodox monasticism

In writing the history of the Legion after 1945, one must be careful not to superimpose the history of the organisation on that of the various individual fates of former Legionnaires, which were very different. Some retained their convictions to the end, others joined the victorious Communist camp in order to save themselves, and others, seeing the failure of the political path, chose to retreat into the spiritual. The number of Legionaries who entered the monasteries was quite large, and most of them were people of great moral and intellectual quality, who were totally committed to the life of the monastic orders. Of course they had anti-communist sentiments, but above all they were servants of God. They were enemies of communist power because, like many other priests and monks, they refused to accept Bolshevik atheism and stubbornly kept the flame of faith. The spiritual strength of the monasteries was a major concern for the security organs, which sought ways to limit their influence as much as possible. But religious influence was not a legal basis for closing monasteries. A vast conspiracy of legionaries in the monasteries was hatched to bring the Iron Guard back to power in Romania. It formed the basis of the famous Decree 410 of 1958. There were several cases in which the Securitate justified this claim, such as the Vladimirești case, the case of the Viforâta monastery and the case of “Teodorescu Alexandru and others”.

The latter case was a terrible blow to the Romanian Orthodox monastic elite, under the direct protection of Patriarch Justinian. The pretext for the arrests was that Alexandru Teodorescu (later Hieroschemamonk Daniil Sandu Tudor), together with other friends, was in fact giving Legionary training to young people under the guise of “Burning Bush” meditation meetings. This was completely false, as these meetings were purely religious and many of those arrested had little to do with the group founded by Sandu Tudor. But the fact that they knew each other and had met at some point was enough for the Securitate to arrest them. And to support the idea of a legionary conspiracy, they had no other argument than the legionary past of some of the group’s members. One of them was Father Arsenie Papacioc of the Slatina monastery.

For those who have a saccharine and self-satisfied view of Christianity, what I am about to present may seem like impiety. They see the priest or monk as a wax statue, an insensible man, not a man of flesh and blood, who has his sins but who, through asceticism, manages to overcome his passions and come closer to God. I will not dwell on this subject any further, but refer those who are curious to the writings of Silouan the Athonite, so that in what follows I can briefly present some aspects of the life of the great Romanian confessor, Father Arsenie Papacioc.

Anghel Papacioc was born on 13 August 1914 in the commune of Misleanu, Ialomița County. His father was a sanitary agent and, according to the Securitate records, which were meticulous about such details, he owned 12 hectares of arable land. After graduating from the School of Arts and Crafts in Bucharest in 1932, the young Papacioc became a member of the Legionary Movement, working in a nest in the town of Slobozia. In December 1933, he returned to Bucharest to take part in the Legionary camp at Bucureștii Noi, where the “Green House” – the headquarters of the movement – was built. Anghel Papacioc’s industriousness and skilfulness caught the attention of the Legionaries, and their confidence was confirmed by the diligence with which the young man from Ialomița participated in many other work camps. Father Papacioc’s youthful Legionnaireism was therefore not a gesture of opportunism or born of racial hatred, but was influenced by the positive dimension of the Legion’s message, which called on young people to build a better and fairer Romania with the sweat of their brow. The hard work, the spirit of organisation, the sacrifice for the common cause, qualities that we will find in Father Papacioc in a superior form in his life as a monk, will lead him to the rank of Legionary Inspector.

After his military service, Anghel Papacioc went to Brașov, where he took a job at the “Malaxa” arms factory, where his brother Radu worked as a foreman. In December 1938 he was arrested and interned in the famous Miercurea Ciuc camp, where, according to his confessions at the inquest, he spent his time praying and, being a skilled sculptor, making small crosses, trophies and icons. After his release from the camp in April 1940, he settled in Zărnești, where he worked as a lawyer’s secretary.

With the abdication of King Carol II and the establishment of the National-Legionary regime, Anghel Papacioc became the head of the Zărnești camp and, from October 1940, the mayor of Zărnești. Because of his position, he was one of the main targets of the repression ordered by Ion Antonescu after the uprising of January 1941. Together with many other members and sympathisers of the Legion, he was tried by the Brasov Military Tribunal and sentenced to 6 years in prison.

In August 1941, Papacioc applied for release from prison to go to the front. He was initially released and assigned to a military unit, but the decision was later reversed. Fearing that he would be arrested again, he and other comrades decided to leave the country and cross the border into Yugoslavia. In June 1942, he was caught by German patrols and handed over to Romanian border guards, who sent him to Brasov, where he was tried by a military tribunal for fraudulent border crossing and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. He was imprisoned in Aiud until September 1946, when he returned to his native village, but with the idea of leaving the world behind and becoming a monk.

To this end, in January 1947, he went to the monastery of Cozia, where Abbot Gherman Dineață welcomed him as a “brother”. Confessing to his confessor what he had done in his worldly life, the young “brother” left behind all the vanities of the world and dedicated his whole life to God. For a year and a half, Brother Papacioc carried out various tasks in the monastery of Cozia (cook, altar helper), and later, because of his qualities as an organiser, he was sent to manage the lands belonging to several monasteries in the Comanca-Caracal community. At the end of August 1948, he was sent to the hermitage of Cioclovina, belonging to the monastery of Tismana, where he stayed until January 1949, when, at his request, he went to the monastery of Sihăstria, where Archimandrite Ilie Cleopa was abbot. Here he stayed until September 1949, when he was sent to the Antim Monastery – Biblical Institute, to the sculpture workshop. He was ordained a monk under the name of Arsenie and served here until June 1950, when he moved to the Slatina Monastery, conceived by Patriarch Justinian as a great laboratory of Romanian monasticism. It was from here that he was arrested on the night of 13-14 June 1958 and sent to the Criminal Investigation Department of the M.A.I. in Bucharest. At the same time, a large number of leading personalities of Romanian spirituality were arrested and quickly subjected to harsh interrogations, as the Securitate hoped to find in their own confessions the grounds for conviction.

At the time of Father Papacioc’s arrest, the Securitate had only the files of the Antonescu regime against him, and nothing else. He was arrested for acts for which he had already been tried and served his sentence. Only in the communist system was it possible for a man to be arrested for a crime for which he had already paid. It was a sick obsession with the danger of the legions, a suspicion that the former member of the Iron Guard had changed his mind in the meantime, and at the same time a desire to give some substance to this fantasy.

From June to July, Father Arsenios was subjected to intensive interrogations, during which he was asked to give an account of all his political activities. He did not hesitate to admit his past political activities, honestly and neutrally, without boasting or trying to justify them in any way. One can see that for the father there is a time before and a time after entering the monastery. He does not hide his past, but neither does he proclaim it. He simply answers when asked. The investigators also wanted to know about his political activities after entering the monastery, about his links with the “Burning Bush” and with other representatives of the Church.

He replied briefly and clearly that all his activities were of a spiritual nature and had nothing to do with Legionary politics. He clearly states, and the testimony of the other defendants confirms what he says, that he believes that the Legionary organisation has committed a series of crimes and attacks in the past which are not permitted by the Church, and that the Iron Guard’s attempt to use the Church for political purposes is considered a great mistake. Father Papacioc also said this to Constantin Dumitru, a former legionnaire who was released from prison in 1956 when he expressed his wish to become a monk. Daniil Sandu Tudor, who was neither a member nor a sympathiser of the Legion, often said the same thing to former Legionaries who came to him for advice. For a Christian, these ideas are perfectly coherent and credible. The obtuse Securitate network turned this idea into a theory of camouflaging the Legionaries under a monastic mask because, hidden in monasteries, they could better act to overthrow the communist regime. People like Arsenie Papacioc or Daniil Sandu Tudor resisted the communist whirlwind, but on a higher spiritual level that the secretaries could not or did not want to understand.

Father Papacioc resisted the investigators, but others, under the infernal pressure, did not resist any longer and confessed to the great “crimes” they had committed, namely that in a private meeting they had spoken “spitefully” about the Communist regime, starting from the Geneva Conference, and had spoken of the need for greater freedom of expression, and on some occasions had given anti-Communist education to young people.

After some painful confrontations, Father Papacioc admitted that on some occasions he spoke in favour of greater freedom of expression and urged the young people who sought him to enter the monastery and not to listen to the atheistic exhortations of the regime. None of this, however, had anything to do with the Legionary conspiracy that the Securitate was desperately seeking. With nothing to accuse him of, the investigators put Father Papacioc on trial for the same charges for which he had already been convicted! Tried together with the other members of the “Teodorescu Alexandru” group, Father Arsenie was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for conspiracy against the social order by judgement 125 of 8 November 1958. He spent time in the prisons of Brasov, Aiud and Jilava and was released in 1964. In fact, “released” is just a way of saying it, because in his heart, Father Arsenie was and is a free man, and prison is just another place where he serves the Lord.

This is where Father Papacioc’s “life after the flesh” ends. More important, but even more difficult to write about, is his angelic life, which everyone who approaches him feels he shares.

(George Enache – Rost Magazine, issue 28 of June 2005)