Florea Mureșan – an exceptional priest
In the autumn of 1945, King Ferdinand University returned to Cluj. Transylvania had been liberated from Hungarian occupation, the front was advancing towards Berlin, many young people had been demobilised and poured into the lecture halls, some to begin, others to complete their interrupted studies. (…)
Victor Papilian had re-established his old literary circle, whose meetings were held, for lack of a better place, in the hospitable and spacious house of Father Florea Mureșan, a priest of exceptional character, a scholar, the author of an introduction to Varlaam, the owner of a rich library of general knowledge. His wife, Eugenia Mureșan, was a woman of rare distinction, an essential quality without which her beauty would have remained only beauty. The author of a volume of short stories published in Cluj during the Hungarian occupation, she also had the talents of an excellent hostess, as those who created the “French salon” must have been in the past. It was at Mureșan’s house that I met Ion Luca and later Lucian Blaga.
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I often went to see Father Florea Mureșan – who had moved into the parish house of the church on the hill – I was invited to dinner, the lady even suggested that I could have a room in her house, but I shied away easily, as if I were facing a sweet danger.
It was there, in the house of the Muresenilors, that one evening I met Lucian Blaga, a man from whom I had kept my distance so as not to upset Victor Papilian. Blaga sometimes visited the Mureseni (the lady even confided to me that he used her as a shorthand for his memoirs, which he wrote from dictation).
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Thursday, 14 January [1971] Plenty of mail today! Received indigo paper and two letters from Pat, three large envelopes and a smaller one with mail that had arrived in Detroit in the meantime. No less than 31 letters and postcards from various friends. Finally, a letter from Dr. Begu and one from Agapiescu. A New Year’s message from Nichita Stănescu, another from Victoria Dinu.
And a Christmas card from Mitică and his family!
Father Iorgu Ionescu, a former comrade in the Aiud prison, is almost blind, deaf and asthmatic and asks for help.
A letter from Professor Ion Mărgineanu with some news about Eugenia Mureșan. After divorcing Father Florea Mureșan, she married Professor D.D. Rosca. The wedding was performed by Father Florea Mureșan himself, the bride’s first husband. It is assumed that he wanted to show that everything had been done with his permission, but the situation has puzzled many[1]. After several stormy years of marriage, she was divorced again and now lives in Cluj, receiving alimony from D.D. Roșca.
Father Florea Mureșan entered a monastery where he died[2]. Poor world! It was in their house that I first met Lucian Blaga (who took care of Eugenia Mureșan, a very beautiful and intelligent woman), where I met the playwright Ion Luca, where I so often attended the meetings of Victor Papilian’s literary circle. Even the present critic D. Micu claims to have met me in the house of the Mureșan family. Father Mureșan, in spite of his eccentricities, was really a wonderful man.
(Valerius Ananias – Memoirs)
[1] Father Florea Muresan, strongly influenced by the spiritual movement of the monastery of Vladimirești, which he visited for the first time in the summer of 1950, returned after the liberation of 1953 with his wife, the two having decided by mutual agreement to separate so that Father Florea could become a monk and worship in that monastery, as he himself would later confess during the inquest: “I gladly agreed to this and immediately applied to the Diocese of Galați to be accepted as a confessor, but my application was rejected and I was forced to return home, while remaining very attached to the mystical movement that had arisen in Vladimirești and determined to become a priest there one day. ” (File P695, vol. 1, tab 109)
[2] Father Florea Mureșan died in Aiud prison on 4 January 1963.