Father Teofil Bădoiu – a man of unearthly innocence

I had been sitting in the monastery for some time, watching him walk among the disciples. He had the speed of a young horse and the insecurity of a child. A wide black scarf hid his small shoulders and his limp body. Two dark eyes, sometimes serious, sometimes quick and merry, looked at you inquiringly, illuminating his serene white cheek. Father’s whole frame exuded a strange mixture of frailty and strength, of gentle humility and inner firmness, all sealed by a kind and open smile that lit up everything around him. A man of unearthly innocence who immediately captivated you and forced you to fall in love with him from the first moment. You couldn’t have done otherwise! You just couldn’t!

That’s how, years ago, I met Father Teofil Bădoi, abbot of the Slănic Monastery in Argeș County, one of the greatest and least known spiritualists in this country. A baby’s heart with the blood of a lion flowing through it, a soul built in perfect humility.

Our last meeting took place in the depths of winter, when darkness had begun to bite at the light and the snow, with its whiteness, wiped away all the rusty traces of autumn. He invited me into his little hut for a chat. It was a tiny room, lined with books and icons and filled with the aromatic warmth of a wood-burning stove crackling with great flames. Father chuckled happily and, with that warm smile that radiates from his whole being, beckoned me to sit down. Years have passed over the old abbot. Since I’ve known him, his hair and beard have turned black, but now it seems that his body has also turned white, from which an unknown light seems to shine discreetly in the darkness of the chapel. It is the silent hour of prayer and confession, the hour when each person seems closer to you and each word remains suspended between the worlds, bringing heaven closer to earth. Outside, the thick snow covered your footsteps and muffled the sounds of the monastery. Father unraveled the thread of his life, whipped by terrible events, by moments of hardship that later turned out to be trials, thoughtful or ordained from above. God’s love is sometimes difficult for us in the world to understand.

A crucified childhood

Father Theophilus was born in the village of Vlădești, in Argeș, on 11 September 1925. A sensitive child, he grew close to his mother, whom he loved dearly. They were not to be together for long. At the age of 42, after giving birth to four children, she would go to heaven. This disappearance would test Titu’s (his father’s first name) soul and faith. In their mother’s absence, the four children scattered, each looking for a place in the world. Their father, tormented by drunkenness, had nothing to offer them.

So Father Theophilus entered adolescence. At an age when others were building palaces of dreams and daring to hope to conquer the moon in the sky, he was already working as a servant. He was telling us that his “master” was “a wicked and ungodly man”. That was all. But the suffering was not in vain. God often turns evil for good and uses life’s difficulties to strengthen the faithful. Father Theophilus was one of them.

Once a wise old man gave him advice that would change his life. He was at a crossroads and didn’t know which way to turn. The elder John told him about Saint Nicholas and gave him a little book with the life and akathist of the great hierarch. He instructed him to get up in the middle of the night, “when the roosters are crowing”, to read the prayers in silence and to add at the end: “Holy Hierarch Nicholas, pray to God to lead me to the right path! Titu did just that. His pure soul, tempered by the hardships he had endured without rebellion, opened the heavens to him. For such people, a simple prayer is often enough to light their way. An ordinary believer needs years with a great confessor to come to his senses. For Titu, all it took was a prayer book and a wise old man.

The decisive advice came from an uncle of his who one day said to him: “Listen, Titus, why don’t you become a monk and pray in peace? “What are monks? “Some people who live in monasteries! “What do they do there?” “They sit in church and pray all the time.” Although he had never heard of monasteries or monks before, in the boy’s soul, where the longing for heaven flickered like a candle, a burning desire to give his life to God was born. For us ordinary people, such sudden illuminations are difficult to understand. For us, God penetrates the veil of passions and barely glimmers in the heart. But for those who have somehow detached themselves from the world, grace rushes in unbidden. In such moments, man can change himself from the bottom up and immediately learn to fly within. Years later, Father Theophilus Bădoi would say that from the moment he heard about the monastic life, an incomprehensible love was kindled in his heart. “I felt something burning inside me. It was like throwing an armful of dry wood on a low fire. From that moment on, I was never at peace again. I wanted to go away and see what the monastery was like”. And off he went…

Counsels written on the heart

Near the commune of Domnești in Argeș, on a hilltop shaded by ancient beech forests, the Slănic Hermitage is a historical testimony to the faith of the Romanians. Its founder was Vlad Țepeș himself. But the centuries have wasted the church and the chapels, of which only traces of walls and a stone cross remained in the 18th century. It was only in 1922 that the villagers decided to rebuild the church, and with the sweat of their brow and their love for the heavens, they carried the stone backwards up the steep slope and laid it as a foundation. The Lord returned their gift and sent them a mentor who had been tested by prayer and fasting – Father Vitimion Nețoiu. He founded a small order of monks and introduced strict rules, just like on the Holy Mountain. He prayed unceasingly, all day long, and celebrated Holy Mass every evening. He also did not allow anyone to eat meat because, according to the fathers, without fasting the monk’s soul is like a bird trying to fly with only one wing.

It was in this atmosphere that Titu Bădoi began his monastic life. He loved Abbot Vitimion from the first moment: “He was a fervent, prayerful man, and his teachings were powerful because they came from the Holy Spirit. I still try to follow in his footsteps, but I would have to run very fast to catch up with him. Father remembers his teacher fondly. Since he went to be with the Lord, he has been alone. I asked him if he loved him and he replied briefly and sincerely: “Yes, very much. As a child loves his father”. The motherless orphan, tormented by heartless masters, had found not only a teacher but also a father in the humble hermitage of Slănic. Perhaps that is why the abbot’s pieces of advice remained, as he says today, “written on his heart”. Elder Vitimion taught him that today there are few experienced confessors, and that is why the monk must turn to the holy books. Their words flow through the centuries like a fiery river of grace and can inspire even the most powerless monk with heavenly longing.

So the young Titu began to read the writings of the hermits of the Egyptian desert. Their aphorisms, though written on papyri more than 1700 years ago, were fresh and alive. After all, the human soul is the same. At the monastery, he was given the name Theophilus, which translates as “lover of God”, and after being ordained a deacon, he began to speak to the Christians who climbed the Zlatina hill. “I had great love. I could take all the young people and put them in the monastery”.

Father loved those years very much. He told me about them, lost in memories. The cramped cell was already dark, and reddish tongues slipped from the stove, biting into the velvety darkness. Outside, the congregation seemed to have fallen asleep, waiting for the midnight prayer. The story of Father’s life approaches the darkness of the dictatorship. In those days, the fervour of young Theophilus’ preaching drew not only young hearts to Christ, but also the spies of the Security Service. The frost fell on our country.

The Corbi Uprising

The “comrades” came at night. Like all bandits come. They were led by Bărbulescu, the inspector of the Argeș religious order. “He was the worst man I’ve ever met in this country. He had come before and warned me: “I have come to meet you. To meet you and to tell you to leave.” And it happened, just like he said.

The secret police did not arrest Father Theophilus, but they threw him out of the monastery and forced him to sign a strange statement. In it, he “asked” the authorities that if he was found in the Slănic hermitage again, he would be shot! The police did nothing to Abbot Vitimion Nețoiu. He was too old.

He was left alone to look after the empty hermitage, abandoned by its inhabitants. His disciple went to the Stone Crows, a village founded by some shepherds who had come from Transylvania during the Catholic persecution. He was forced to live there and was repeatedly investigated.

It was not enough for the Communists to banish him from the hermitage. They wanted to compromise him at all costs, forcing him to renounce his monastic vows and marry. Not content with threats, they often resorted to savage beatings: “By the time I left there, even if I had been drunk I would have walked straighter. I’d be nothing but skin and bones. That’s when I realised it was harder to fight communists than devils. The devils ran away from prayer, but the communists did not.

In addition to the external persecution, there was an internal struggle. Father was completely immersed in his monastic life. He loved it fervently, enraptured by the beauty and silence of the night services, the luminous presence of Father Vitimion, the warm love of the other brothers. Now, banished back to the world, deprived of the spiritual blaze in which he had been formed, he lived as if were in prison. He prayed fervently that the Lord would intercede for his return, but his wish was not granted. Heaven seemed deaf to his unceasing prayers. Countless nights were spent in vigil and suffering. Hours of weeping, begging for mercy for his sins. Those who knew him at the time say that his inner pain was so intense that he often fainted during prayer. They would find him collapsed in front of the icons in a pool of tears, melted by prayer and weeping. His only consolation were his silent meetings with Father Vitimion Nețoiu. When he could no longer bear the longing for the monastery, he took the road to Slănic.

He walked through the woods at night, like a thief, under threat of arrest and death. The abbot welcomed him with joy, confessed him, gave him communion and then set him free.

Eventually the guards’ patience ran out. The villagers of Corbi had built a wall around the priest, whom they loved for his faith and kindness. The communists arrested him, threatening that if he did not leave the monastery he would rot forever within the walls of his cell. “It seemed I had no way out. They were always snarling at me: “Bandit, why don’t you get married?” Then I said to the officer: “If you were threatened with death, would you be willing to break your oath as a soldier? He said no. Then I told him that my oath as a monk was more important than his oath as a soldier, and that I would not break it even if I were dead! I would much rather prefer death or prison. It was all the same to me. The communist prisons were also a kind of tomb”.

Father’s fate seemed sealed. But God had another plan for him… The news of his arrest spread through the village, and the fierce shepherds of Corbi rose up quickly and without warning. They stormed the militia and the investigators were terrified. They called in the army from Pitești, but Father Teofil had to be released. The Corbi uprising was a sign of God’s answered prayers. A crazy and unexpected uprising, unique in its kind. A village defending a monk in the midst of communism! Shortly after the Corbi uprising, Father Theophilus was to return to a monastery. Not as a monk, but as a porter, in the nunnery of Preda Brâncoveanu and the monastery founded by the ruler Matei Basarab in Vâlcea, the monastery “Dintr-un lemn”. Although he was a clergyman, he lived a humble life as a simple worker, helping the nuns around the household. Although he could not serve as a priest because he was still being persecuted, he rejoiced in his heart that he could once again live in a monastic community and even remain in the church during services. It was from this humble obedience that he received the news of the reopening of the monasteries in Romania. He even heard it from Patriarch Justinian, who had come to visit the monastery. Out of sheer joy, the priest picked a bunch of flowers and gave them to him. “They were the most beautiful in the monastery, and I was bursting of joy!

His return

After seven years of wandering, Fr. Teofil Bădoi, the monk who set fire to the souls of the shepherds of Corbi with his prayers, returned home. Father Vitimion welcomed him with open arms, just as he had when he first entered the hermitage at the age of 19.

He was 43 now, but he had been through 100 years of trials. He told me about them with a kind of biblical piety. “If I had studied in the best schools in the world, they would not have been as useful to me as the school of suffering! The years when his persistent prayers seemed unanswered were already behind him. Perhaps the Lord had tested his heart by allowing the lawless to oppress him, but out of that terrible bondage had come another man, a true man of Christ. He would be able to bear in his soul not only the serene tranquillity of monastic life, but also the fierce heat of temptation. Slowly, with patience, he built up a fatherly heart.

The pain of those years was instantly erased by the happiness of returning to the convent. “The Lord had rebuked me, but he had not abandoned me to death. Little did I know in my years of wandering that so much suffering would bring me so much joy. But not an ordinary joy, but a boundless joy that comes from God and that the mind cannot comprehend”. Getting up at night, immersing himself in prayer, then spending the whole day like a robot and then starting again. For this rhythm, which seems ominously monotonous, Father Theophilus shed tears for seven years! There is a hidden longing here, a consuming passion for the invisible. For it was not the return to the hermitage that he rejoiced in, but the reunion with the Lord, through serene prayer and silence. The years that followed were all steps towards the depths of God.

The forgiveness of the sinner

Slowly, like a battle-scarred shepherd, but with his soul strengthened by the beauty of victory, old Abbot Vitimion grew weaker every day. Though his spirit was now more alert than ever, his clay was slowly crumbling, like that of any mortal. In 1978 he handed over the priesthood to his beloved disciple. Father Theophilus received the ministry with joy. Now he could pursue the dream that had thrown him into the arms of the Security Service – to fill the monastery with young people.

He began on the spur of the moment. His playful way of speaking, his serene manner and his boundless patience from years of imprisonment attracted the faithful like a magnet. Some of them wanted to enter the monastery. Father did not set any conditions. He embraced them with his heart and placed his life and his prayers at their feet. Soon the convent began to grow. But not only in Slănic, because Father also led hundreds of young girls to monasticism. Before choosing a convent, he would take them by car on a pilgrimage through Argeș. They saw large and small lavras, hermitages in the mountains, numerous convents and solitary nuns. In the end, the novice chose the place where she wanted to stay. The father’s tender heart begged him not to interfere. But he won the young girl’s heart precisely by this unspoken freedom, which he shared with the generosity of an unshakeable and unselfish love. That is why today the Father has hundreds of monks and nuns who, although scattered throughout the diocese of Argeș, consider themselves his spiritual sons.

But during all this time, as the monastic community of Slănic grew and strengthened in Christ, the Security Srvice was following Father’s footsteps. Since the people and the monks no longer had room to pray in the church, Father Theophilus decided to build a more spacious place. Since official approval was out of the question, he decided to build it in secret. In those days, such a gesture could land you in prison. The priest, who had already proved his mettle in battles with politicians, started the work anyway. Envious, a priest from a neighbouring village reported him, and the religious inspectors soon arrived.

“They called me in. What are you doing here? A church without Party approval? I told them it wasn’t a church, but a shelter for the winter. “Shelter ay? We will see about that! When you’re finished, we’ll tear it down!” The old man smiled and then abruptly ends the episode with the Security Service: “After we finished building, they came, saw and left, but Theophilus and the church remained…. To this day”. Years later, the priest who had betrayed him came to him and confessed, telling him how he had denounced him. But in the priest’s heart there was nothing but forgiveness. He quietly tells me how he took him in his arms and kissed his hand, as any priest would do. “Brother, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you have done. If you hadn’t denounced me, I would have died in fear of the Security forces until I had finished building the church. So they came, I confronted them and then I calmed down and looked forward to finishing my work”. The attitude of Father Teofil Bădoi healed them both. An attitude capable of extinguishing the deaf struggle within our nation. Total forgiveness, forgiveness accompanied by forgettfulness, can heal the wound of both the victim and the executioner. In such a silent embrace, they can then find themselves on the other side of existence, enlightened by God’s grace. It is, in fact, the only way out of the communist hell that still haunts us today.

To the land of light

Twelve years after Father Teofil Bădoi took over the leadership of the monastery, the old abbot Vitimion Nețoiu went to meet the Lord. He died as he had lived. Deep in prayer, always awake. He did not die like an ordinary man. He knew the day and the moment of his great departure beforehand, by divine proclamation. He had prepared for it all his life. For an accomplished monk, it is like a wedding, like a great feast, when you are reunited with all your loved ones. Father Theophilus held him in his arms until his last moments.

It was 1990, the feast of the Annunciation. The ground was still fresh and shaded in places by snow. In his cell, old Vitimion had suffered patiently for more than ten days. He knew that the mystery of the separation of the soul from the body, which is not without pain and suffering. As the time drew near, he asked for a special prayer to be read to him, the Canon for the Departure of the Soul. When the priest finished, he lay quietly on the bed, raised his hands to heaven, whispered: “Mother of God, receive me”, and died. The end of a holy man. Father Theophilus watched the whole scene in awe. He told me that this was how he wished to go to the Lord. Conscious until the last moment, bathed in the priest’s prayers, strengthened by the presence of the saints.

In the small cell, darkness was now complete. We could hardly see each other’s faces. But I felt the priest close to me, as if he had unconsciously got up from his chair and sat down inside me. It’s warm. Warm and bright. Just as I believe that the Lord is with each one of us. I turned off the recorder and waited in silence. In the soft darkness, his face radiated infinite affection.

It was to be our last meeting. In the last years of his life I never had the leisure to go up to the monastery. News from Slănic came to me from time to time through a friend. Father was well, in good health, although the years were quietly settling on him like snow in the middle of winter. I had a strange feeling, which I had experienced with most of our great confessors. That old age was not enough for him, as it is for all mortals. That somewhere, in some secret corner of their being, there is a shred of eternity. And gradually it will consume their whole being and make them immortal. Without argument, in spite of their nature, we hope that death will not touch them and that they will remain with us forever, like this, with their white hair, but alive and fresh, always radiating that cheerful joy that made them so loved.

In their company, I felt that youth is above all a state of the heart. And like any state of the heart, it does not take into account the clay, but the spirit.

But it didn’t. Father Teofil Bădoi died as all people die. He died quietly, as he had lived. It happened on the 17th of July 2010, and the Fathers buried him on the feast of the Holy Prophet Elijah. They wrapped him in psalms and hymns and made him a cocoon of prayer, for the journey to the Kingdom of Light, the Father’s soul did not leave the earth completely. Perhaps he didn’t want to leave the monastery at all. Perhaps, with his childlike heart, Father Theophilus was able to persuade the Lord to let him remain between the worlds by showering his grace upon us. If you go to Slănic on a glassy winter evening, when the snow covers all footsteps and Fathers are gathered for prayer, listen to the silence. Somewhere, like a murmur, like a breeze, you will feel Father Theophilus’ prayer filled with a serene light. Let yourself be carried away by it and you will see how it awakens hope. It is the first step towards the Kingdom of light.

(Cristian Curte – Formula AS magazine, issue no. 998, 2011)