Father Florea Mureșan and the path of simplicity

“Father Florea Mureșan was a man of chosen humanity, with great authority, a man of prayer, work and sacrifice for Christ… In prison, in unbearable conditions, seeing that one dies today, another tomorrow, he promised that if he escaped alive, he would build an altar to the Lord. After two years of searching, he found a suitable place to build the altar he had promised, in the clearing on the hill of Breaza… He planted in me the love of Christ… Since 1990, as a true disciple, I have continued the work begun by Father Florea, rebuilding the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in the clearing of Breaza Hill… Father Florea’s dream came true, the altar was rebuilt” (protosinghel Gavriil Burzo, disciple of Father Florea Mureșan). 

Florea Muresanu was born on 8 July 1907 in the village of Ciubanca, Cluj County. His parents, Gheorghe and Maria, were poor, illiterate farmers who worked hard on the land they owned or in the homes of the wealthy, so that their four children, given to them by God, would be better able to bear the hardships of life.

Little Florea proved to be a clever bookworm and, at the urging of the village teacher, his parents enrolled him in the Andrei Muresanu Gymnasium in Dej. With the support of his family, working during the day, tutoring his wealthier classmates, and receiving scholarships year after year, Florea Mureșan managed to finish high school and in 1926 he enrolled at the Orthodox Theological Academy in Cluj, where he graduated magna cum laude. At the same time, he attended the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Cluj.

Priest, teacher, professor

The qualities of the young theologian were noticed by the leaders of the Romanian Patriarchate, who sent him on a scholarship to the University of Strasbourg. Unfortunately, the economic crisis has severely limited the financial resources of Romanian institutions. Like the future Bishop of Cluj, Fr. Teofil Herineanu, Florea Mureșan had to return to the country and become a priest in a poor mountain parish, Râșca de Sus, in the county of Cluj.

Florea’s outstanding achievements in this isolated parish in less than two years led Bishop Nicolae Ivan to call him to the cathedral of the Transylvanian metropolis as a priest from January 1934. At the same time, Father Mureșan was given the task of teaching religious and moral education at the vocational school in Cluj.

The successor of Bishop Nicolae Ivan, Father Nicolae Colan, continued to keep an eye on Florea Mureșan, who throughout all these years proved to be a worthy servant of the altar, a great teacher and a theologian who was constantly striving to perfect his formation. In this regard, it should be noted that between 1935 and 1938 Father Florea studied at the prestigious Faculty of Theology in Cernăuți, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree with a thesis on “Moral Obligation”. When he became Minister of National Education, Religious Affairs and the Arts, Bishop Nicolae Colan helped Father Mureșan to obtain a Humboldt scholarship to prepare his doctoral thesis in theology at the University of Berlin on “Moral Responsibility”.

Unfortunately, the outbreak of the Second World War once again prevented Father Mureșan from completing his studies abroad. In September 1939, Fr. Florea Mureșan returned as a priest to the Cathedral of Cluj and was appointed substitute professor at the Theological Academy.

In Cluj, occupied by the Hungarian Hortists

After the conquest of north-western Ardeal by Hortist Hungary, Father Mureșan chose to stay with Bishop Nicolae Colan in Cluj, where Romanians were considered second-class citizens. Despite the humiliations and dangers he faced, Father Florea became one of the pillars of the Romanian Resistance in occupied Ardeal through his many and varied services as a priest, teacher, man of letters and promoter of culture. He also helped to save the lives of some of the Jews condemned to the death camps.

In spite of particularly difficult times, he also finds the time to begin work on a new dissertation, entitled “Varlaam’s Cassia – a presentation in pictures: 1643-1943”. After the liberation of Cluj by the Romanian armies in 1944, one of his first concerns was to re-establish contact with the Faculty of Theology in Cernăuți, which had taken refuge in Suceava, in order to legally register for his doctorate and thus go beyond being a substitute professor at the Theological Academy of Cluj. Fr. Florea Mureșan finally received the title of Doctor of Theology on the 6th of November 1948, and his efforts in the academic sense were not in the least motivated by pride and the accumulation of titles, but showed the scrupulousness of this man, even in formal matters, to be in good standing where he worked.

The effigy of the “good Romanian”

After the years of Hortist occupation, the city of Cluj was confronted, on the one hand, with the aftershocks of the chauvinist “earthquake” and, on the other, with the increasingly bold and open actions of the communists to seize power. In all this complex and delicate context, the Orthodox in Cluj needed support to recover and reorganise. For this reason, in mid-1946, Bishop Nicolae Colan appointed Father Mureșan as protopope of Cluj. From that moment on, Father Mureșan became an important figure in the Transylvanian city, sought out and cultivated by all those who held opinions other than those of the Iredists or the Communists. He took part in the student strike of 1946. His house in Cluj became the meeting place of the literary circle led by Victor Papilian. Lucian Blaga, Ion Luca, Valeriu Anania, Zorica Lațcu, Valentin Raus and many others who continued to believe in the values considered by the communists to belong to the “old world” passed through his house. He maintained close relations with the Greek Catholic Romanians, who appreciated his intellectual qualities and his impeccable moral profile. It can be said that for many people in Cluj, Father Mureșanu became the image of the “good Romanian” of those years, who continued to defend spiritual and national values, who showed dignity in the face of increasing threats.

At the ecclesiastical level, Fr. Florea Mureșan supported the continuation and development of catechism activities for young people and adults, promoted Orthodox publicity and urged the faithful not to forget their past, publishing in 1946 the work “Churches and Priests of the Orthodox protopope office of Cluj”. In the years that followed, he chose to remain at the side of his bishop and to submit to the rigours of the Church’s cautious policy towards the communist regime, which had been fully established since 1948, as proposed by Patriarch Justinian and accepted by the majority of the hierarchy. Thus he became a member of the Ploughmen’s Front and an “activist” in the Civil Servants’ Union – Cults Section – Cluj. These enlistments were in fact orders given by Nicolae Colan to a trustworthy man who would not have returned from his new positions to become involved in the Church, as others unfortunately did at that time. Fr. Mureșan remained a disciplined soldier of the Church all these years, even if he personally was more inclined to the kind of approach to Church-State relations as Bishop Nicolae Popovici and others in the Church saw it. For this reason, all those who were in favour of a more open opposition of the Orthodox Church to the communist regime considered Father Mureșan as a basic element in a possible plan of action, and the Securitate agents immediately classified him as a “reactionary”.

First arrest and a covenant with God

It was therefore only a matter of time before the Orthodox protopope of Cluj was arrested. Florea Mureșanu’s arrest took place in 1952, in the context of the regime’s general policy of “re-education through labour” of “reactionaries” and the religious unrest in Cluj, which led, among other things, to the dissolution of the Theological Institute, which had been created in 1948 from the former Theological Academy. Father “only” escaped with a sentence of forced labour in Canal, where he spent a year. Released in the spring of 1953, he was not allowed to return to his parish (the famous church on the hill) and had to go to Maramureș, to the vacant parish of Suciu de Sus. It was here, in the hamlet of Breaza, that the priest fulfilled what he had promised God during his time in the canal, namely to build a place of prayer after his release, as a sign of praise and thanksgiving.

Second arrest and death in prison

Thus was born the “Holy Trinity” hermitage, consisting of a small wooden church and two kindergartens, where the priest lived a monastic life, as there was no parish house and his wife had left him. Father Florea Mureșan spent the next few years here, until he was arrested on the night of 11-12 June 1958. Arrested at the same time as other leaders of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Father Mureșanu’s imprisonment was part of the general policy of the Communist state to destroy the Orthodox ecclesiastical elite of the time. His “tainted” past of relations with “compromised” people (such as Bishop Nicolae Popovici, Fr. Ioan Iovan and the nuns of the Vladimirești convent), his attitude in the first years after the end of the war, to which were added the devotion with which he carried out his priestly mission in Suciu de Sus and his library full of “mystical” books, are the reasons for his arrest. Officially, Fr. Florea Mureșan was accused of espionage, undermining state authority and obstructing the “work” of collectivisation in the commune of Suciu de Sus. He was tried and sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.

He passed through several prisons, finally ending up in Aiud, where he died on 4 January 1963, his body lost among the thousands of corpses in the prison’s sinister mass grave.

An apology for simplicity

What has been said so far outlines something of who Father Florea Mureșanu was, but not enough. For some reason I was interested in the personality of this father, beyond his convictions and his death in communist prisons, and I tried to read more than the cold lines of a criminal record. One of the first works I had at hand was the beautiful collection of articles entitled “Grai și suflet românesc” (Romanian Language and Soul), edited by Father Professor Dorel Man. I have to admit that Florea Mureșanu’s writings did not particularly appeal to me when I first read them. They seemed to me to lack “sparkle” and, consequently, I found it incomprehensible that he had such a great influence in the ecclesiastical and cultural environment of Transylvania. That is, until I read the article “On Simplicity”. Here Father Mureșan says: “If we have something to say, we must write in such a way that we can be understood by everyone. We don’t have a surplus of thoughts to throw away. A thought that is not understood, a feeling that is not communicated in concentric circles, wider and wider, like the waves that form on the surface of deep water when someone awakens it with a stone thrown from the shore, is wasted energy. That is why every word must be exaggeratedly clear and simple, and… To the writing entered for the columns of this page – Romanian Grace and Soul – I have seldom had to add, but have always been forced to cut away… unnecessary preciousness that serves no other purpose than to complicate and obscure thought and feeling”.

Words and words

I believe that these lines, more than the stylistic choices of Father Mureșan, can be a key that helps us to decipher the way in which he conceived and carried out his work, as a priest and as a man of culture. In fact, when we re-read the Father’s interpretations of the Gospel pericopes from the perspective of “simplicity”, we see his concern to convey to the reader the essence of the passage in question, making the most of the biblical passages and adding as little as possible in his own words. The priest thus becomes not an oratorical or scholarly star, but a guide (or rather, a “simple” pointer) who, with God’s help, helps his brothers and sisters in the faith to grasp the meaning of the words of Scripture and of Christ, the revealed Word.

But in order to point out the right way, one must know it, understand it, identify with it. Florea Muresanu’s interior life was a constant search for God and His ways. One of the verses of his soul was Deuteronomy 4:29: “You will find Him if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul”. God calls us to Him, Father Mureșan says at one point, but we do not hear His voice because of the “empty noise of external concerns”: “To seek God, says Father Mureșan very beautifully, means first of all to be silent within ourselves. Man’s silence was the first prayer, the Father believes, and in his presence the Word was revealed to us. To know Him, Father Florea prays, meditates, studies, serves and makes himself a chosen vessel. 

And with the Word in him and with him, his words, even the simplest ones, take on meaning. Through them the Father spoke to people, inviting them to come to Christ, to God the Word, who “remains the same today, tomorrow and forever: source of life, rock of refuge, refreshing balm in the pain of suffering, and the only one who gives meaning not only to life here but also to death, because to die for Christ, for his Gospel, is not a loss but a gain”.

Books out of love for the nation

Elsewhere, Father Florea said: “If it seems to you that you have no purpose on this earth, love God, love your nation, and do only what this love commands you to do. Don’t worry about the rest. History is built on this foundation alone.” That is why man always has a purpose, in the divine and natural order. Love binds us to the land and to our fellow men, and the Word and the words that flow from it provide the coherence necessary for a meaningful existence. Loving his people, Father Mureșan was concerned that they should not forget the foundations on which they could build a true existence. And one of these foundations is the book, the book that gathers words, words that give meaning. It was not by chance that Father Florea fought for Romanians to read books that “build the soul”, convinced that even one book, just one book, could change the destiny of a nation.

Simplicity – essence – the way of God. This is the vision of Father Mureșan. A vision that is terribly “out of date” for today’s world, where the confusion of languages and meanings is at the top of the list. But Father Florea, from his books, draws the attention of those who have ears to hear: “If we really want a free, creative and perfect life, we must give ourselves to the One who can free us from the kingdom of evil, sin and death and give us the strength to do good. Let us surrender to the One who from eternity is the Master of freedom and truth”. Simple, isn’t it?

(Dr George Enache – Ziarul Lumina)