Father Cleopa Ilie at the beginning of the communist regime

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the man who was the confessor of Moldavia and all of Romania at a time of great trials for the Romanian people. Raised spiritually under the protection of Abbot Ioanichie Moroi, who had the experience of Athonite life, Brother Constantine, later monk Cleopa Ilie, became one of the landmarks of Romanian spirituality at a time when Romanian monasticism needed to be revived and strengthened for the coming period.

From the time of his brief tenure of the Metropolitanate of Moldavia, Justinian Marina saw in Cleopa Ilie a good monastic administrator and abbot. Metropolitan Justinian’s election as Primate of the Romanian Orthodox Church followed at a time when the new political regime was bringing about profound changes in Romanian society. The Church could not ignore and accept all this, and Patriarch Justinian was involved in many moments that would mark the Church’s mission. It was during this period that the confessor Cleopa of Sihăstria faced the first challenges of the communist regime, which he overcame with humility and wisdom. The oral sources, recorded in the Patericul written by Father Ioanichie Bălan, tell us of Father Cleopa’s arrest by the Communist Securitate at the end of the spring of 1948, as he himself confessed:

“On the day of the Holy Emperors Constantine and Helen (21 May) I preached and said: ‘May God grant that our present leaders may be like the Holy Emperors, so that the Church may remember them forever!'” Then one of the people recorded me, and I didn’t even get to take off my robes, because a car came and told me to go with them. They took me to Tg. Neamț and they put me in a cellar with nothing but a cement bed. Then they interrogated me for five days, without food or water. Then they let me go”.

Shortly afterwards, the same source, but not in the Securitate documents, records how “a Christian benefactor secretly told him” to withdraw for a while, either in the mountains or elsewhere. Following the advice of his confessors, Father Cleopa went to the mountains for six months, to the area of the “Cuckoo’s Foot”, where he received what he needed from the brothers of the community and carried out his prayers. The period of retreat in the mountains lasted until “he was brought back to the monastery”, according to the spiritual sources, which at first sight implies that someone from a high ecclesiastical authority had intervened on his behalf.

We do not know who in the Church intervened on Father Cleopa’s behalf, but after that moment, in all the trials to which he was subjected, each time the communist authorities tried to arrest him, Father Cleopa was protected by Patriarch Justinian Marina, who in 1949 had given him the mission of reorganising the monastery of Slatina and of providing Romanian monasticism with living members of a high spiritual life.

(Adrian Nicolae Petcu – Ziarul Lumina)