Father Teofil Bădoi, the heart of the Argeșean monasticism
I was in the convent of Sâmbăta de Sus. Since Father Teofil Pârâian, the confessor of Sâmbăta, whom I had come to see, was away for a short time, I went up to the lake behind the monastery. There I saw a group of monks resting. Between them, as if protected from the others, stood an elderly monk, small in stature, with a sparse beard and white hair. Naturally curious and eager to talk, I approached him. “Good heavens, where are you from, fathers? “God help us, from the Slănic Monastery in Argeș” – said one of them, a young man.
“I know someone there”, I said, “Father Teofil Bădoi”. Suddenly, the elderly monk raised his head towards me and said very seriously: “Who?! That thief, that bastard, he ran away from the monastery, he’s no longer with us! I looked at him in astonishment and a little fear that the Father I knew from books had such a bad reputation in Slănic! The others laughed. One of them stopped next to me and, seeing my confusion, said discreetly, smiling: “This is Father Teofil Bădoi, the abbot of Slănic!!!”.
Teofil Bădoi was born on 11 September 1925. He entered the monastery on 20 February 1944 and was ordained a monk on 30 March 1947. In the same year he became a hieromonk on 14 July. He was ordained a hieromonk in 1968, after having gone through the school of suffering – the seven years he was expelled from the monastery following the diabolical Decree 410 of 1959.
Dialogue with Father Theophilus
– My son, youth is full of temptations and old age is full of infirmities. My voice is weak, my teeth are weak. I have only one eye and one tooth left. But we’re going on, according to the words of Avva Vitimion.
If I had attended all the schools of this world, the highest ones, no school would have been of any use to me like the school of suffering has. I was dismissed from the monastery on 15 January 1961. I was 36 years old. I was in Slănic with Father Vitimion, Father Nifon (Jupânu’, as we called him) and Father Iosif from Corbi. Nicodim and Gavriil were already in prison. I miraculously escaped from prison. God kept me safe because I wouldn’t resist, I would have died. So at that time I was preaching in the Lord’s Guild. I had a great love, I was able to get all the young people to join the monastery. On 14 October 1960, Comrade Bărbulescu, the Inspector of Religious Affairs for the Argeș region, the worst man I have ever met in this country, came to the hermitage. He said to me: “I came to meet you because you are the only monk in the region I don’t know. Let me meet you and tell you to go away”. “I’m not going anywhere, comrade. I won’t leave until spring.” “You will leave, I promise you.” And so he did. One night I found myself with Bărbulescu, accompanied by three or four secretaries. I had hidden Father Boboc in a room, he was sick, poor thing, I was looking after him. “Where is Boboc?” he asked me. “What’s wrong with him? Leave him alone, he’s sick.” They came in and what my ears heard… what a load of crap they were shouting at him!
– Did they beat him?
– No, they didn’t beat him. They arrested him and threw me out of the monastery. “Where will you go now, he asked me?” “To Corbi.” “Why don’t you go to Vlădești?” I didn’t want to go back to my village and they couldn’t understand that I, a monk, couldn’t go home. “I have nothing to go back to Vlădești for. My parents are dead”. And they left me in Corbi, but they made me sign a statement saying that if I was found in the hermitage I would be shot.
– How long were you under house arrest in Corbi?
– Five years. Until November 1966.
– And they left you alone?
– You bet! They regularly called me to the police station. When I came back, even if I had been drunk I would have walked better. “Bandit, why don’t you get married?” They wouldn’t stop calling me a Bandit. “Listen, man, some people just like you get married, but they stay on the side. What do you say?” “I say that whoever gets married must respect all the laws of marriage. I know that. And those who are not married obey all the laws of single life”. Another time I asked the questioner: “You took the military oath too, didn’t you?” “Yes, I did.” “And would you break it?” “No, never!” “Well, I also took an oath, the oath of monkhood. And I can’t break it for anything in the world.” And you know what he said? “Good thing you don’t break it.” Well, what do you know?
– You’ve kept the monk’s vows in the world in spite being a civilian.
– With holiness, Father, with God’s help! I had temptations from Satan’s servants, I was watched step by step, everything I did, and because of the stress, for five years while I was in Corbi, I only fell asleep with pills, the strongest pills, I had come to take three instead of one to take effect. But Satan was also fighting me personally. You should have seen the way I looked, I was all skin and bones, you pitied me and so, in this state, the devil of lust had descended upon me. I prayed, Father, that God would deliver me from the puddle of tears beneath me. And Sister Veta asked me why I was crying, and I told her I was crying because I missed the convent, I couldn’t tell her why. And I saw that the secret police were worse than the devil: with the devil you prayed to God and got rid of him, but with the secret police… I cried until I fainted, Mother Gabriela told me later: “If you only knew how many blows Your Holiness received from me!” “Why?” “Well, it’s the only way I could wake you up.”
Avva Teofil said:
When I was ordained, I prayed to God: “Lord, save me from envy and greed!” These two things spoil good relationships with our fellow human beings. I didn’t save money, everything I did was for the convent. I’ve also bought many books, the dowry I leave to my “soldiers”. I also have about 700 cassettes of sermons, church music, recordings of my life.
So said the Avva: The priesthood is the most terrible thing on earth. When he serves, the priest has heaven on his right and hell on his left. The priest will lose every soul in his parish if he gets lost. The priesthood is not a job, it’s a divine mission. It hurts my soul when I see young men, future priests, going off to study theology without thinking about the yoke they are taking on.
After 1990, when Father Theophilus went to Pitești with the monastery treasurer to do some shopping, a citizen stopped him and said with a certain arrogance: “Father, I am an evangelist: “Father, I am an evangelist”. The father looked at him in amazement and said, “I only know four Evangelists. Where are you from?” The unexpected answer stunned the “evangelist”. The father had taken about 50 steps, but the “evangelist” didn’t move. He just stood there, among the people, watching the Avva with his eyes until he was lost in the crowd.
I often heard him say: “… discotheques, sectarian meeting places and Sunday or holiday fairs are the ‘mouths of hell’. Whoever buys or sells on Sundays instead of going to Church, to Holy Mass, has no gain, but only loss! This is what the Holy Fathers say, and I believe it!
Father Teofil said: “In my life I have had many desires for which I have prayed to God to grant me if they are pleasing to Him. So I have longed to build the Church, for here we are remembered both in life and after death, as long as the Church exists. Where Holy Mass is celebrated daily, many blessings are poured out from God. You know that the Fathers of the Church say that the greatest good you can do in a day is to listen to Holy Mass. I can’t stop rejoicing when I see the three churches being built and the Seven Praises being said daily according to the monastic order and the Holy Mass. When I went to the Holy Places for the first time, I saw how uplifting and peaceful the night services were. That is why the Holy Fathers said that night prayer is golden, because the mind is not as troubled by thoughts as it is during the day. The scattering of the mind in prayer brings coldness to the soul, and the soul does not benefits as much as when the mind is gathered in prayer and we shed a tear or two. When I came from Jerusalem, I gathered my “soldiers” together and advised them to hold night services. That’s how we started the midnight Mass and the midnight Eucharist. Since then I have seen the Lord’s blessing, for the congregation has grown in numbers and, I believe, spiritually and materially”.
(Fr. Visarion Sorescu – Monks’ World Magazine Year I, No. 1, July 2007)