“He passed through the prisons like a meteor. He lit up hearts and left them shinning”

It’s 1963, so what does re-education mean? A preparation for liberation, I wondered, or is it something else, a grouping of some people’s resistance?

– How’s it going?

– Hardly. They’re cruel and intransigent. If we come out, we have to come out compromised, without dignity. Disowned for what we were, a pale loser, never to raise our heads again.

After a while I asked again:

– How’s it going?

– There are high dignitaries in re-education, I was told. The Skemamonk from Rarău is also in re-education. Former Sandu Tudor, now monk Daniil. I knew him: a nobleman who’d sailed the seas in a boat. Back home, he wrote a weekly newspaper called “Faith”, which he wrote with great talent, dealing with religious, literary and political topics. He was arrested and condemned in the group “The Burning Bush of Our Lady”, together with some of our leading theologians, including Dumitru Stăniloae, Archimandrite Ghiuș, Antonie Plămădeală, monk Anania, monk Arsenie Papacioc, abbot of the Plumbuita monastery, Nicolae Porsenna, a specialist in occult sciences, etc. Sandu Tudor passed through the prisons like a meteor. He lit up hearts and left them shining. In debates with sects or Catholics, he was like a dog fighting with puppies. He’d quickly break them, quickly knock them down. He was a terror to the unorthodox, he quickly tore them apart.

I asked how he behaved, what his position was, this man I admired. I was answered:

– He is writting. He has written more than 70 pages so far.

– I think it is a mistake to write so much, I replied.

With communists you have to be brief. They will interpret your words as they wish and bind you with them. His position is this: total concessions in all secular matters and total intransigence in religious matters, because the world no longer interests him. He surprised me. That is why I replied:

– I think it is a false position, because truth is not divisible. I reject it on the one hand and defend it completely on the other. It doesn’t work. We live in this age, among men, even if we are monks. We cannot sacrifice the truth in relation to some representative persons who have lived among us. The truth must be defended as far as they are concerned. Of course, with small concessions as far as they are concerned, because they too could be wrong. But to denigrate them completely is unfair, untrue and unacceptable.

Then I heard that this great monk died a martyr. After he had written, many things were asked of him: “Now declare that there is no God, that you monks are hypocrites who deceive the world,” etc. He vehemently refused. Then they would have put him under severe pressure and he would have had an apoplectic fit and died.

I was very sorry. This “dog” was needed outside.

(Fr. Nicolae Grebenea – Memories from the Dark)