Father Ioan Sabău – Man of God

In western Transylvania, in the villages of Hunedoara and Alba counties, the name of Father Ioan Săbău is pronounced by the Orthodox faithful with a piety that makes them raise their eyes to heaven: “Man of God!” At the venerable age of 87, he left behind numerous churches, built or renovated from scratch, and in the lives of those he shepherded, the memory of a fearless defender of the faith. The hard years he spent in Communist prisons did not deter him from the path that fate had chosen for him.

The good Father Săbău does not like to talk about himself. He is not a monk, but humility and modesty are laws for the servants of God. He doesn’t seem to have done anything special, just his duty as an Orthodox priest, as he understood it. He now lives in the village of Folt, in the county of Hunedoara, where he was born. In the small church, filled with the smell of myrrh and icons, the story he tells me seems like a litany from ancient times. A fairy tale into which the writer’s skilful pen has poured the fruits of his own imagination. You can hardly accept that what you are listening to is life. There is too much suffering in it. Perhaps too much light, too much divine support. And yet the story I hear in the little country church is the true story of a martyred priest, a man who knew how to overcome the terrible trials of life with humility and boundless faith in God.

Flying exercises

“I was born into a poor family and my father died when I was only ten years old. I saw myself a little child alone in the world and I needed to get some kind of support, some kind of wings. It was the fear of God. My mother used to say that was the most precious thing in life. Although it was very difficult for her, she didn’t take me out of school, because that was my father’s wish on his deathbed. I had to work hard to get a scholarship so that I could support myself. When I finished high school, the headmaster, Aron Demian, saw that I was good and somewhat militant and advised my grandfather to join the army. My grandfather didn’t want to hear it and said I should study theology. The only theological college that gave state scholarships was the one in Cernăuți. I managed to get a scholarship there and graduated in 1935.

My grandparents had died and my mother was left with the household. She told me to go back home and not to wait for a job because I would have to take more exams and she was having a hard time on her own. Academies in Transylvania were not allowed to issue bachelor’s degrees, so only graduates from Bucharest, Chișinău and Cernăuți were recruited as religion teachers. But I felt attracted to the priesthood, perhaps because I had been singing in the church pews since I was five or six years old. I married a girl from Bukovina. We were both poor. I went in audience to Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan to ask him for a parish. He had a certain reluctance towards the graduates from Cernăuți, because in one year all the students from Sibiu had fled to Cernăuți, driven away by the high fees and excessive rigour in Sibiu. Metropolitan Bălan told me: “I have only a few parishes for students from Sibiu. I don’t have any vacancies at your level, at the level of those in Cernăuți! I had seen the list of vacancies before I went to him and I said, “I saw that you have many vacancies”. “Yes,” he replied, “but nobody goes there.” “Give me one of them.” He was surprised. “Which one shall I give you?” “The one that is more widowed,” I said. And so it was. He put his finger on one and said: “There hasn’t been a priest here for 50 years.”

It was Ceru-Băcăinți (now in the county of Alba – ed.), a village scattered on a few hills, with scattered houses and a lot of problems. Sympathy for the priest was natural, after so long without one in the village. People began to like me and I tried to bring something new to their spiritual life. During Lent I began to celebrate Liturgy every day. Many people came, some even arrived at four in the morning and walked for two or three hours…”.

The harassment

“Meanwhile, an emergency arose: in a village near Folt, in Renghet, near Geoagiu, there were moral problems: there were many concubines. People stopped getting married in church because the priest was charging marriage fees to those who had divorced and wanted to remarry. And then they protested and lived together. They sent me there to sort it out. There were about 40 cohabitants whom I persuaded to marry religiously. I also married an 80-year-old blind man to his old lady. I didn’t take anyone with me so they wouldn’t laugh at them for being a bride and groom at that age. I solved the problem as best I could. But from this situation I had come into conflict with Metropolitan Bălan, because the problem of King Charles II had arisen. He had separated from the Queen and was staying with Lupeasca.

The Metropolitan called me to ask me to replace the Protopriest of Geoagiu, who had died. We met on the road, I was on horseback and he was in a car. He accused me of being on the side of the Legionaries because I had attended the funeral of one of them, Vasile Marin, who had died in Spain fighting against communism, and then he asked me: “What do you have against the King? “Your Holiness, but you sent me to Renghet to persuade people to marry.” And many said, “How can the king remain unmarried, we cannot stay?” Do you see the confusion in the country? The Metropolitan replied that these were sins to be fought from the confessional. “Very well,” I said. “But who will confess, the king or I, a country priest from Apuseni! One of the prelates of the country must take official action, for if we do not proceed an hour earlier, the country will be in danger because of this great sin in which the king lives!” The Metropolitan became furious and told me that I had fallen from his grace. He punished me by suspending me from my priestly duties for a few months. So began the ordeal…

All the hierarchs were politically connected to the great ones. I was put on trial and so on, as an anti-dynastic, anti-monarchist, I was first on the list when arrests were made. Then I was arrested the first time, then during Antonescu’s time and after 23 August…

Nowhere was I accused of being a politician, but they kept investigating me for months. I felt why, and later they told me, when they saw that I was too much trouble: “What are you thinking about, Father, what’s your fault? For us you were the fiercest preacher in Hunedoara County. We are atheists, we don’t like religious propaganda”.

In ’48 I was arrested because I had written a memo to the American Romanians asking them to help us build the church in Vinerea (Alba County – ed.), where I had been transferred. There were many from there who had gone to America, one was even a senator in the American Senate. The memo fell into the hands of the censors and I was prosecuted. But not for the memo. They had sent someone to ask me for help with the partisans in Apuseni. I was clever enough to tell them that I had nothing to give them, that I was poor. At the trial they acquitted me because they had no evidence, but the prosecutor said: “He would have given if he had, so the act exists!”

“You tell me, priest, because you don’t lie.”

“I had many moments in prison when God showed me that He was with me. I was imprisoned in Deva in ’48, when a major of the Securitate, seeing that I wasn’t guilty of anything, suggested that I be released. There were many of us, the cells were full and they had nowhere else to put the prisoners. They had made prisons in the very rooms I was in. They brought in a lawyer, Nasta was his name, old and sick. They locked him in there, in the pen, to sit on cement for five days, just in his shirt, without food. I forced the door open and put in a blanket and an apple. But the apple left a peel on the board and the Major saw it. He asked who had done it, and I admitted it to him. How could I let him torture all the other innocent people? They’d all taken part, but I was the initiator. The Major, Mohoreanu was his name, asked me why I had done this, and I told him that I was not only a prisoner, but also a priest, and that it was my duty to go to the aid of a man who was dying beside me, no matter what obstacles were in my way. The lawyer was lying down there without water, moaning all the time, and I couldn’t let him die beside me without giving him a last drop of help. The Major promised to punish me, but in the other cells he made an example of me as a “man of honour”, thinking that this would help him to get the confessions he wanted from the others. Whenever something happened, he would ask me: “Tell me, priest, you’re not lying! This happened in the autumn of ’48. At Easter ’49 all the prisoners sang “Christ is risen”. Then Mohoreanu got angry and said: “You beast of a priest! I gave you a favourable report, and now your bones are rotting here! You organised this hooliganism! He ordered all the windows to be sealed and locked. Since then, in prisons all over the country, they have put shutters on the windows, and there was only a tiny crack where the light came through, between the shutter and the window arch…

That was a turning point for me because he was threatening to sue me. I thought what would happen to all of them, that they’d all be taken in for questioning, that they’d all be investigated… I prayed to God that we’d get through this. It was Easter Day. And right then God stopped him from doing any more harm. He was sick and they were treating him, giving him injections. They must have given him the wrong injection because he died that day, right there, about 10 minutes after he threatened me. He was buried with great honours by the Communists, but even the dead God didn’t forgive him: someone must have tried to light candles on the grave, but all the wreaths – there were about 200 of them – caught fire and the fire spread throughout the cemetery. The firemen were afraid that Deva would burn…”

“I take my officer’s hat off to you!”

“There was a lot of trouble when I consecrated the church in Vinerea in October 1958. It’s a big church and more than 10,000 people attended the consecration. The service was celebrated by 120 priests. It was a shock. Along party lines they tried to boycott the consecration. They cut out the tongue of the bell at night so that when the Altar helper went up to pull the bell, it would fall and there would be an accident and they would have grounds to investigate me. There was no electricity in the village, but I was given a generator bought by the Germans especially for the church. They put sugar in the petrol so it wouldn’t start. They brought many events to the village: football teams from Bucharest to play in Cugir, but the people from Cugir came to the blessing in droves, one didn’t go to the match. They brought the puppet theatre, the theatre from Deva, the theatre from Petroșani, and they placed megaphones in front of the church. The women of the village had prepared a meal for 500 people in the large hall of the school, but during the service the propagandists threw all the food on the main road.

When one of the priests heard what had happened, he came out of the service and spoke to the housewives of the village, who each brought a carpet, and in the courtyard of the parish house – which was in ruins – they made a sort of hall out of carpets, creating a special atmosphere. So as not to embarrass the Party with this failure, they said that I had done all this to compromise the Party. The investigation began. They sentenced me to eight years in prison and wrote about me in the newspapers that they had found three machine guns in the church on Friday, the day it was consecrated. After spending two weeks in Vinerea collecting information from the peasants, at the end of the investigation my investigator met one of those from whom he had tried to extract statements against me. He said to him: “Well, sir, I don’t know what you know or don’t know about our priest, but he’s not guilty! He’s been building this church for 20 years and hasn’t taken a single thread. The party members haven’t even started building the cultural centre, but one of them already has a house in Cugir, another in Orăștie… May God strike us if we complain! He was impressed and said to me: “I take my officer’s hat off to you! I admire you for the way your people love you. I’ve made some instigators, but the truth is that I made them. You are one body and soul! That’s the way we want our party members to be…” “Well, if they were like that, they wouldn’t be tearing down churches,” I replied.

The priest, tired, stopped telling his story. It’s not easy to relive the turning points in one’s life, even if God has helped him to overcome them and to look at them now with a kind of forgiving distance. He tells me this much:

“Do not write to praise me, for I have done nothing special. I have lived a life, perhaps different from others, but it was faith in God that helped me. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this…”

(Camelia Stărcescu – Formula AS magazine number 491 from 2001)