Father Ioan – The road from Vladimirești to the communist dungeons
Another known person, but whilst in freedom, from the monastery of Sâmbăta in Făgăraș was Father Ioan from Vladimireștii Tecuciului. When I knew him, he had been called Silviu Iovan since his student days. We were contemporaries in Sibiu, he was a student at the Andrean Theological Academy, but we met in the F.O.R.S. (Romanian Orthodox Student Fellowship), either at the meetings at the University or at those held at their Academy, where during Lent they held meditations and vespers in the chapel inside, painted with the same talent by Octav Smighelschi, the painter who also decorated the Metropolitan Cathedral. When he entered monastic life, he was given the name of John, the translation of the Serbian Iovan into the Romanian calendar.
I had heard the story of this monastery from many people, including Dr. Aurel Iubu. Mother Mihaela, sister of Iordache Nicoară, who was killed without trial in 1939, had become a monk and gathered up to 60 nuns in this convent.
Father Ioan had come there as a priest and confessor. Full of Christian spirit and strong in his faith, he was not ashamed to confess it from the pulpit.
The story of him and his sermons spread throughout the country. The Patriarchate, at the request of the Resort of Cults (as the supreme governmental body for cults was called), which did not like the strong Christian trend that had emerged in an age of scientific materialism, tried to transfer the confessor, but the nuns would not let him go. Then they packed up the circle of nuns, like the good secretaries they were, and brought in older nuns who had retired to the monasteries after their worldly lives. Pilgrims came from the countryside and from all over Moldova. At one feast there were up to 10,000 pilgrims. When the crowds wanted to confess to Father John – the services were held in the fields – the confessor was no longer afraid to listen to everyone, one by one, and reintroduced collective confession, as in early Christianity. Those who were there said that it was impressive to see so many people on their knees, and when the priest said the sin, the sinners in the crowd responded here and there: “I have stolen”, “I have committed adultery”, “I have given false testimony”, and all the things that corrupt people’s souls and lives.
About 70 priests in the region, worried that their people were going to another confessor or perhaps being pressured by some ecclesiastical or lay authority, lodged a complaint (i.e. a denunciation or complaint). This kind of confession was against the canons, the Church had long since renounced it, and here Father John was a heretic.
But the Securitate police attacked him on another front. A frail young nun, she had a younger brother who was a high school student in 1948 when he was sentenced. He was imprisoned in Târgșor, the student prison, from which he managed to escape. He dragged himself home and lived in hiding in the surrounding area. He was a silent witness, because he would hide nearby, or he would often find his mother mistreated by the commune’s postmaster. One day he – the runaway pupil – met the militiaman on a bridge. He caught him. He fired. He ran away. He went to the convent to find his sister. She took him to confession. He got an ID from the nuns that was one of the ones lost by the pilgrims.
When they arrested the nun, she, testified against the confessor, as the Securitate wanted. The priest denied it. He then confronted the investigators and the girl, her voice trembling, repeated what she had signed. Then she turned to the interrogator and said: But now you give me air?
Father John understood. The nun had tuberculosis and was being treated with pneumothorax (a method used at the time of blowing air into the pleural cavity to collapse – flatten – the diseased lung and bring the walls of the cavities closer together). They blackmailed her with the treatment: if you don’t say what we say, we won’t give you the treatment. The girl, utterly distressed, played along. But now (implied after I’d said it your way) you’re giving me air? and the confessor, to stop torturing the sick nun, said he’d sign. They accused him of being an accessory to murder and gave him 25 years.
It was a big trial that led to the convent being dismantled and then demolished. The monastery was defended by the lawyer Petre Pandrea, who was also sentenced to Aiud. […]
Father John now had pulmonary tuberculosis, and although it was strictly forbidden to live the religious life in community, in his room, where there were “lung patients” with an advanced stage of the disease, he dared to lead prayers for the salvation of all on Sundays, celebrating Liturgy even though he did not have with him the Holy Sacraments.
(Ioan Muntean, La pas prin “reeducările” de Pitești, Gherla și Aiud sau Ridică-te Gheorghe, ridică-te Ioane, Majadahonda Publishing House, Bucharest, 1997, 272-275)