“If an intellectual deserves to be canonised, it is Vasile Voiculescu” – interview with Father Roman Braga
Interview with Archim. Roman Braga, of the Romanian Orthodox Monastery in Detroit, USA.
Nicolae luga: When did you leave Romania and under what circumstances?
Father Roman Braga: I was born in Russian-occupied Moldavia, in Bessarabia. I grew up in Romania and lived in prisons. I was imprisoned as a priest, called a political prisoner by them, simply because I did not think that Romanian youth and children should remain without religious education. You know what the communist government thought: they belonged to the state and not to their parents. We were almost 2000 priests who went through the prisons, mainly for this reason.
N.I.: 2000 Orthodox priests….
F.R.: Orthodox, yes, because it is too much covered up that only Greek Catholic priests went to prison. Nobody wants to say that 13 Romanian Orthodox bishops were thrown out and the synod changed after the communist government came to power. Prisons like prisons. But after that they didn’t allow me to stay in Bucharest or in Iași, where I was a priest before. They exiled me, so to speak, fortunately, to the Oaș region, to Negrești.
N.I.: You said that “fortunately” you came to Oaș. Why fortunately?
F.R.: Because I was very interested in the pre-Christian Christianity of the Romanian people. I had the impression that the Romanian people have an ascetic character. And I am a monk, I am very sensitive to monastic life. I discovered that the Dacians, our ancestors, are on Trajan’s Column, with their sleeveless sumans, with all their customs.
N.I.: Where did you live?
F.R.: I was exiled, I can say, as a second priest, in Negrești, when the protopope Ioan Ursu was there. I didn’t stay long in Negrești because I founded a children’s choir. After all my imprisonments, I didn’t give up my education. They called me to the party district, but I never went. I invited them; I’m an institution, and if they want to talk to me, they should come to the church. Until one night they kidnapped me. They cut off the protopope’s phone, came with a truck, loaded my luggage and I found myself in the commune of Sârbi, between Oradea and Marghita, where I was repairing an unfinished church. And I woke up with a passport to go to Brazil.
N.I.: So you were expelled from Romania?
F.R.: Expelled, yes, from the country. That was in 1968. I went to Brazil.
N.I.: You were involved in a trial and were sentenced. Which trial and with whom?
F.R.: I was not only in prison, but also on a kind of five-day leave. I was in the first prison because I was a teacher of Romanian literature at the Titu Maiorescu High School in Bucharest. In 1948, when the communist government came in, we were given some instructions to interpret all Romanian literature in a Marxist sense. I didn’t want to lie to the children and I didn’t obey. Then they took me away. I went to the canal and to Pitești. I witnessed the whole wrath of Pitești.
N.I.: With which great theologians did you go to prison?
F.R.: I don’t remember any great theologians from the first prison, but I met many simple monks. One thing you should know: the Romanian peasant is a great theologian, and his justice, morality and integrity impressed me. Intellectuals compromised themselves in prisons, but the peasant did not, because he had patience. He sat and watched, talked a little, thought a lot and remained incorruptible. But I remember Father Constantin Galeriu, who recently went to be with the Lord. In the peninsular colony on the Danube Canal I met many priests. I was involved in the “Burning Bush” process. “The Burning Bush was not an association. Antim Monastery was the centre. The Burning Bush was not a formal association, although it was later incorporated. It grew out of spiritual needs between 1944, when the Russians invaded the country, and 1948, when the first communist government was formed. We lived through an era of reversal of values, of total confusion. We didn’t know what was going to happen politically, and then the intellectuals of the University of Bucharest got together: Professor Bota, Alexandru Mironescu, who introduced the Department of Philosophy of Science, Vasile Voiculescu, the poet who was also a doctor at the Royal Palace, Paul Stelian, a poet, Father Stăniloae, who was our mentor, Father Benedict Ghiuș, an intellectual.
N.I.: Were all these people involved in the process?
F.R.: All of them – 16 people were in the trial. And, of course, the one who initiated it was Sandu Tudor, a poet and journalist (the newspaper “Grădinița”, the magazine “Flacăra de foc”), a convert from atheism, from a disordered life, to faith. He later became a monk at Antim monastery and abbot of a hermitage in Rarău. After his conversion, Sandu Tudor began to search the Romanian archives, discovering Romanian saints, hermits in the mountains. He travelled to Mount Athos, from where he returned fully converted.
N.I.: Last year was the 40th anniversary of the death of the poet Vasile Voiculescu. He volunteered to go to the front in the First World War. He wrote deeply Christian poetry. There has been talk of his possible canonisation. What do you think about it?
F.R.: If any intellectual deserves to be canonised, it is Vasile Voiculescu. We speak of the prayer of the heart, of the current of Hesychasm, but I think that the only authentic Hesychast was that civilian who was not a priest, known as the “Seraphic Poet”. He wrote some extremely valuable poems. They are based on the inner universe, which we neglect: man is an infinite reality, like an atom – you can’t get to the bottom of it. About this spiritual atom, the holy apostle Paul said: “We are the church of the living God, because God dwells in you”. Vasile Voiculescu captured this in his poetry.
N.I.: A philologist who works at Radio Cluj, Florin Săsărman, sings these poems…
F.R.: I’m glad that some Christian spiritual songs have been created, because Vasile Voiculescu is a great Orthodox intellectual. He is a Saint. To give you one detail: he died in a small room, he didn’t light a fire, he sat on a chair all day long, meditating, writing, praying. Once the boy wanted to kill a spider: “Don’t touch the creature of God. I look at it all day and discover the fingers of God”. V. Voiculescu was deified in life.
N.I.: Let’s come back to the subject of our discussion. In the second prison you were with V. Voiculescu?
F.R.: No, but I know one thing: “Hey guys, put this tube of paste in my mouth when I die”. He was 75 years old and wanted to be identified; the tubes of paste were metal and didn’t dissolve. But God helped him and he died after a year.
N.I.: How long were you in prison in total?
F.R.: A total of 11 years: five in the first prison and six in the second.
N.I.: When did you arrive in the USA?
F.R.: I spent four years in Brazil, in two Romanian colonies: Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. I was called by Valerian Trifa, the bishop of the Romanians in America, the nephew of Losif Trifa, the founder of “Lord’s Army”. He called me because he needed me, and I spent 7 years with him and Archbishop Nathaniel at the “Vatra Românească”. From there I went to different parishes until I retired and went to the monastery.
N.I.: Have you ever thought of writing your memoirs?
F.R.: It is a sin of mine: when someone asks me, I talk a lot, too much. But when I write… I thought I should. But I have a project in the drawer: “Prolegomena to a Romanian Theology”, because we have some Romanian features in Orthodoxy, which is universal, but which is lived by each nation through the existential dimensions of that nation.
N.I.: Wouldn’t it be more practical to sit down for a discussion and record it?
F.R.: More practical, but if someone intelligent asked me questions, it would be more useful.
The first volume that came out was done that way. There was a theological monk, Dinu Kruger, God forgive him, who knew how to ask questions. And the first volume that was noticed in the world was “The Discovery of the Inner Universe”. It’s a dialogue between me and this great theologian who was younger than us around the “Burning Bush” – 1945-1948.
N.I.: How would a prolegomena to a Romanian theology be structured?
F.R.: You see, Tertullian, a great North African apologist, said that man is born a Christian. The soul is Christian by nature. But our Christian roots are peaceful: God created us in His own image and likeness. We have no need to despise any people. We started with our pre-Christian history, the proto-Roman history, in which our fathers were monotheists. Archaeologists have not found a single statue of a god in the whole of Romania. They did not represent God as an idol. They believed in one God. They worshipped him on the mountain tops, as can be seen at Grădiștea. The high priest, like Deceneu, was an ascetic, he lived in a cave. According to history, he followed Burebista to the throne, and the priests were celibate, not married. They lived a very intense spiritual life. They believed in the afterlife. They sent messengers to God by impaling them…
Well, all these things have been handed down in Christian history. The biggest mystery of Romanian history is that they don’t know when they became Christians. That’s how well the proto-religion of our parents matched Christianity, that they became Christians by accident. Our asceticism is the asceticism of the Dacians, who had hermits who lived in the mountains, in our Carpathian caves. So it is a continuation of traditions in a Christian form. That would be an idea, let’s say, that would be a chapter.
N.I.: Another chapter?
F.R.: Another chapter is certainly the Romanian Christian folklore. Our Christian tradition, which is actually found in the village. The intellectual is a sophisticated man and his mentality is the universal mentality of the intellectual. But the Romanian peasant keeps within himself a great depth of faith in God, which is expressed in folkloric form and in the form of myth. Mircea Olinescu’s “Romanian Mythology” was recently published. It is our idea of the Romanian people, of salvation, of angels, of pagans, of Ileana Cosânzeana and the Mother of the Forest. All these things, even if they are popular, are in our fairy tales the true Romanian idea of God. Life without death is found in our fairy tales, in our poems, in our ballads. God will curse the Romanian folklorists if they don’t revive them. And they won’t, because everything we have created intellectually, if it is not inspired by the people, if it is not rooted in popular spirituality, is not authentic. I admire Enescu, but no one is interested in Oedipus, because it is a theme that many people deal with. But with Enescu we missed an opportunity. If he had given us a Burebista, a Deceneu, something of our own, it would have gone down in history much more.
N.I.: Of the ideas we are discussing now, what have you written, what have you published?
F.R.: Only a few articles. In the second volume, which I wrote, there are isolated articles that I published in the Romanian press, especially in “Romanian Words” in Toronto.
N.I.: Didn’t you think of a synthesis to be printed and distributed in the country?
F.R.: If my mind helps me, because I’m 82 years old and I tell the nuns where I am, that if I go crazy, don’t look at me, but of course, if my mind helps me, I thought of a synthesis. As I said, it’s better for someone to ask me than for me to write it down.
N.I.: We wish you good health, we wish you to see this project through to the end.
And maybe we’ll meet again when you come back to the country. Thank you.
(Interview by Nicolae Iuga in August 2003 – Memoria Ethnologica Magazine, Year III, No. 8-9, July-December, 2003, pp. 841-844)