Father Arsenios Boca and the Securitate men
Father placed the wooden table against the eastern wall, turning it into a small altar, on which he placed everything he had in the small bowl he had brought from his cell in the Brâncoveanu monastery. He lit a candle on a wooden candlestick with a match from the only box he had taken with him in the bowl. Next to it he placed the Holy Cross and the Holy Gospel.
Kneeling on the cold slab, Father immediately entered the world of great divine spirituality, thanking Almighty God for the outpouring of His grace on his human existence.
After a while, the officer on duty, accompanied by the warden, came to inspect the cell, opened the bean slot of Father Arsenios’ cell and saw him praying. When they opened the door of the cell immediately after they closed the bean slot, they were astonished and horrified to find it completely empty.
The more they looked at the empty cell, the more their whole being was disturbed. The guard, who came from a peasant background in the area, had goodness and mercy in his being. He was troubled because he had to keep a priest in prison who was a saint and who was always on his knees praying to the God Almighty.
The two men’s eyes widened in their sockets, while the blood that had gathered in their heads turned their figures into a blazing furnace, almost bursting through their skin. Both the officer and the guard shook their entire bodies as if to awaken from their worst nightmare. The closer they looked into the cell, the emptier it seemed. The darkest scenarios of arrest and interrogation by torture were already unfolding in their minds to reveal the whole operation of facilitating the escape of a prisoner under investigation.
Unable to comprehend this reality, they both leaned against the door to lock it, then, full of emotion, their hands trembling, they threw aside the bean slot, looking at each other in turn, increasingly confused, each of them feeling as if they had lost their minds. Gradually recovering from this terrible shock, they began to look one by one through the visor, unable to believe that their prisoner, Father Arsenios Boca, was sitting motionless on his knees, glued to the small table on which the candle was lit, with the Holy Gospel beside him.
Their mental and nervous state worsened when the cell was opened again and again, and once opened, the cell was empty but when they looked through the bean slot they could see Father Arsenios sitting in his cell. The stunned officer, realising that he was on the verge of madness, ordered the guard to come with him and, as if hypnotised, went to his commandant’s office near the gate of the prison. Meanwhile, another guard, alarmed by the commotion surrounding Father Arsenios’ cell, telephoned the Securitate commander at Făgăraș to come urgently.
The entire Securitate team went to the cell where Father was being held, certain that both the officer on duty and the guard were delirious, for reasons they would soon find out. On the way to the cell, the head of the security guards apostrophized the duty officer, accusing him of incompetence and mental instability, as well as being under the influence of a retrograde mysticism. Arriving at the problem cell, the head of security approached the door and, pushing aside the visor, saw Father Arsenie.
With a triumphant smile on his face, he scornfully addressed the guard and, above all, the duty officer, telling them that their future would be more than bleak because they had been involved in an action to confuse and mislead the security command, and that they would have to find out whose foreign service they belonged to.
The boisterous and proud arrival of the security chief was a unique spectacle. All the superiority and self-confidence of the newly appointed security commander deflated like a balloon punctured by a sharp object, as the duty officer, his face scrunched up in irritation, snatched the cell key from the guard’s hand and suddenly opened the door. The empty cell appeared in front of everyone, as reported by the duty officer, who called out to him out of the blue to tell him to which foreign service the commandant belonged. The next day, the commander of the Brașov security zone, a colonel, went to Fagaras, where a big scandal had broken out among the staff. The case had also reached the higher Party bodies that coordinate the whole area. They had come specifically to see “what nonsense some party cadres, insufficiently prepared and influenced by backward mystical currents, could come up with”.
A committee consisting of the chief physician of Brașov, the head of the regional party and the head of Securitate was convened in plenum to deal with the latest retrograde manifestations. Their investigation was the same as the previous one: they saw Father Arsenios through the bean slot and disappeared when the cell door was unlocked. Then, that was one of the few cases of great compromise and total silence on a phenomenon that the omniscient Marxist-Leninist Party could not explain.
By mutual agreement, in a context of total secrecy, a single decision was taken to release the monk-priest Arsenios Boca. This decision was the only one that could solve this inexplicable event.
(Dan Lucinescu – Father Arsenios Boca, a modern saint, Siaj Publishing House, 2009, pp. 53-55)