Father Justin, a true bearer of Christ
On the Neamț plain that leads to the village of Petru Vodă, on a road that is not easily accessible, full of potholes and stones, after passing through the village of houses hidden behind poor fences, houses that seem even smaller in the shadow of the wooded mountains, suddenly a clearing opens up, an unexpected sight from the 15th century: a few buildings around a church built on the model of those founded by St. Stephen the Great. You approach with quiet humility and look around to see if there is something written on the frontispiece of the church in the name of the Holy Voivode: “Here the Lord wants me to defeat the pagan robber”.
The walls, painted with motifs from the time of the Voivode, are bathed in the light of the setting sun. See the Last Judgement, the glory of the Holy Martyrs, the map of Great Romania, untouched by enemies from within and without, guarded by saints and soldiers of yesterday and today. It is a moment of passage from the present to the past.
The church is filled with uninterrupted singing and litanies, people, mostly simple, a few monks, young, some very young, crowd around the courtyard, pilgrims waiting to be received. It was not yet time for the evening service. In front of a door and a modest chapel, dozens of people, men, children, women, some with bags beside them, were waiting. Some were whispering prayers, others were reading akathists or canons. In this modest little room, Father Justin Pârvu confesses people. 17 hours in a row, with very short breaks, the priest receives with a warm heart these pilgrims – penitents – who come from all over the country to shed their tears of sorrow and repentance, to rid their souls of sins, light or heavy. This small and poorly built convent contains both the heaven that Father Justin keeps alive through his unceasing prayers and the hell of confessed sins, both great and small.
17 hours in the confessional
Father Justin said: “When you are a confessor and you have to deal with this endless crowd of penitents, you need the patience of Christ not to be frightened by the way Satan works in the world and takes hold of people’s souls. The devil is very clever in leading people into sin and very inventive in planting all kinds of sins in people’s hearts. Some sins are as heavy as hell, you are terrified to hear them, they fall on you as a confessor like huge, crushing boulders. Then I sit down and pray that God will protect me from weakness of soul and hardness of heart. And the fear of great sin is dispelled, and the penitent goes away relieved”.
When I was a teacher at the Theological Seminary, some of the parents of the students would come to us, the parent teachers, for confession. Then they would participate in the Liturgy and receive Holy Communion. I noticed that when a student’s father came to receive the sacrament, he kissed my hand and then my shoulder. After two or three such encounters, I asked him why he was kissing my shoulder. The man who had confessed to me replied, “Father, I was kissing the shoulder on which I had laid my sins in confession. I had my own sins and I was afraid that someone else would lay his sins on my shoulder. As I listened to Father Justin, I thought about how difficult it must be for a monastic confessor, who is perhaps more in demand for confession than anyone else.
If God strengthens him 17 hours a day in the confessional chair, surely the Holy Spirit works in his preaching the power of not being afraid of what he hears, of patience, and of relieving the heart and mind of the burden of the sins heard.
I do not know what Father Justin says to his penitents, not in the sense of listing the sins confessed, but in the sense of forgiveness, what words of rebuke and forgiveness he speaks to them, how he places their souls cleansed by confession on the right path, with what words he comforts them, advises them not to err. If you go to the door through which the penitents go out after confession, you will see that the people have faces like angels. Radu Gyr wrote in a book of poems from the Russian front – where he was sent to die by Marshal Antonescu – that “soldiers have the face of an angel when they die”.
The Father’s word is strong, in a spiritual sense, but greater than the word that comes out of his mouth is the spirit in him, which communicates itself to you beyond the word, with an irresistible force, without violating your thought and sensibility, caressing you, embracing you on all sides like blessed water. But his logic is also fiery, born of an unshakable conviction of his faith, of a great experience as a confessor, crowned also by the experience of the prisons he passed through, where his patience was formed and where he comforted, rebuked and healed with prayer and love.
A pilgrim told me – and I agreed with him – that the greatest (his expression) of all the monks today is Father Justin. I did not perceive his strength in his behaviour, but in his spirit and in the power he has over people, without any ostentatious gesture, he is indeed the strongest monk, stronger than any archpriest who, by the fatality of his position, always remains isolated and can only get out of this forced situation by gestures of extraordinary will, which remain memorable but are rare. Father Justin was one with the monastery, one with the ministry, one with confession, one with the penitent, whom he purified through confession and consoled with kind words and love.
Love in action, patriotism without slogans
I can say that through the experience of my years in prison, through the falls and the rises, God has given me a great power of love, which I practice effortlessly and which I did not have before this experience. My love is exercised at the level of a parish, Father Justin’s love is exercised at the level of a whole country and even beyond, when I think of the huge number of people in the West who know him.
God gave the country, at the time of communist persecution, the greatest spiritual fathers and spiritual teachers in the history of our Church. They kept the faith in the hearts of the Romanians with their strong word. When the hierarchy was bent and the word of the hierarchs was ambiguous, these spiritual fathers kept the Romanian heart in the hope that God had not abandoned us. Their names are written on our consciences in letters of fire. Blessed be the Lord our God, who has not abandoned us to our enemies, who laugh at us and say: ‘Well, well’.
But all the while, deep underground and unknown, God was preparing other holy fathers to take the place of those who were called to the Lord after the fall of communism, people of great sacrificial strength – and I am thinking of Father Justin, because sitting in the confessional chair for 17 hours is a great sacrifice for Christ and for one’s fellow men. These monks, who grew up in prisons, mocked, humiliated, but never broken, learned there that true love of country has nothing to do with the concept of nationalism practised by scientific socialism, nor does love of country have anything to do with party patriotism.
There we understood and lived this love, without slogans, without partisan bluster, we loved our Church, our homeland and our nation, from which we were separated by violence and murder, with all the fibres of our heart, just as the Jews loved their homeland (which was given to them late, and did not appear whilst bearing the nation in itself, as was the case with us), and I sighed with a broken heart when I saw how the communist verbal tics were adopted (without any resistance, at least intellectually) by some representatives of the Church and part of the elite of our country. It was there that we learnt to love our homeland with the fervour and hope with which the Jews of Babylon loved it during their captivity; it was there that we learnt how sacred the concept of nation is, how Christian it is, and not a word of contempt, as it was for the Communists and as it is today for the Freemasons and heretics of the West (and of us) who mock our soul and our great loves.
That is why Father Justin is loved, and, like him, all the monks who preserve this untouched love and line of the true faith, untainted by the greatest heresy of the century – as the Greeks call it – ecumenism, which has become for us what the communist heresy was until 1990, accepted by a large part of the hierarchy and by some priests, who put before the purity of Orthodoxy the false Christianity of ecumenism, the crusader of Freemasonry, which created the French Revolution, with all its heinous crimes, with false slogans such as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, but which was not afraid to claim that it would hang the last king with the guts of the last priest. All these slogans and deeds became an integral part of the Bolshevik Revolution because they had the same parents: Freemasonry and heresy.
The true bearers of Christ
The Romanian soul, simple and pure, has sensed heresy and danger, and the good gather around the confessors who live in monasteries to listen to their word of true doctrine. They are not afraid of terrorists, they, the fathers, do not welcome masked Masonic or Communist officials at the back doors of monasteries to put them in “places of honour”, because real monasteries have neither such doors nor such places of honour. It is here that the Orthodox Christian learns the true faith, it is here that the tears shed for sins committed are consoled, it is here that the confessor sanctifies himself with the formula he utters at the end: “… and I, the unbelieving priest and confessor, by the power given me from above, forgive you and absolve you from all your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and forever and unto ages of ages. Amen”. Then with the gentle advice, “From now on, try not to sin again!”
Of course, I don’t think there are fewer holy fathers and confessors today than there were under communism. That would be to doubt the mercy of our Saviour for our oppressed people. The monasteries are full of such confessors, the parishes are full of such priests, who take all the risks to preach free of all falsehood, and who do not aspire to administrative positions or archiepiscopal chairs. They are the bearers of Christ, not the lying mouthpieces of bishops.
But I speak of Father Justin because I know him, because I have seen him work for the true Church, as an obedient follower of the seven Ecumenical Synods and of all the canons and teachings of the Holy Fathers of Orthodoxy, without anti-Orthodox teachings, without abandoning the Christian line of faith for a scholarship or an office. How can our hearts not leap when we see such followers of Christ, who do not praise the powers of this world, but only God, and who lay down their lives for Christ and his flock, shepherds who enter the fold through the door and the sheep know his voice and listen to him and follow him, for he is not a shepherd in vain, but a true shepherd who himself follows the Great Shepherd Jesus.
In the call to obedience, Jesus is addressing all of us, first of all the hierarchs, then the priests, deacons, hieromonks, hierodacons, monks, nuns and the speaking flock for whom Jesus gave his soul and for whom we are responsible if we do not obey the call of our Lord Jesus Christ. The order of my enumeration also implies the order of responsibility of these categories. Woe to those who mystify the Lord’s message, for His judgement will be like fire.
But we turn our eyes with hope to the true bearers of Christ, and we pray that the good may shine like lighthouses in the sky of Orthodoxy, and that the monastery of Father Justin, with all its inhabitants, together with all the true monasteries that “did not pass through Herod”*, may rise like stars in the sky of Romania, to show us who the true God is and how to worship Him, not as Baal, but by placing at the feet of Christ the tears of our repentance, the gold of our minds, the frankincense of our hearts and the myrrh of our souls. Amen!
(Fr. Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa – Rost Magazine no. 33, November 2005, pp. 10-12)
* After his release from prison, I went with Marcel Petrișor and Lucian Popescu to his parents’ house in Ocișor. Immediately the Securitate set up at all the exits from the village, there were probably several dozen agents. Late one night someone knocked on the window. I thought it was one of the Securitate agents coming to see if we were home. A young man, a labourer, quickly entered the house and told us in a whisper that he was from the local priesthood, that he had heard I was there and wanted to know if I was ‘OK’. But the man immediately added, wagging his finger in denial, “You know I didn’t go to Herod’s”.