In memory of an apostle

Among the many of our people who have sacrificed their lives in the past decades during the communist-Stalinist campaign to exterminate the values of the nation, the cohort of priests and monks who paid with their lives for the courage to stand at the head of the tormented people, who, in the face of the offensive to implant atheism in the country, resisted silently and patiently, but stubbornly, with faith in God and the hope of salvation. Many clergy perished, but many more remained to guide the people with wisdom on the path of faith, love and hope in the salvation that was achieved in the days at the end of December 1989.

Of these sacrificial martyrs, I would like to recall the memory of those who knew him, and to sketch in a few poor words the personality of one of my teachers in my youth, who, together with Protosinghel Justinian Chira (now Archbishop Justinian Maramureșanul), former Abbot of the Rohia Monastery, shaped my spiritual sentiments and guided my steps along the narrow but joyful paths of the Orthodox faith. It is about the priest Dr. Florea Mureșanu, former Orthodox protopope of Cluj, who was pastor in the parish of Suciul de Sus, Maramureș, from where he began his ordeal that ended with his death as a mucenic in the prison of Aiud.

In the spring of 1953, in the beautiful commune of Suciul de Sus, in Lăpușului County, at the foot of Tibleș, temporarily without a pastor, on the eve of Easter, Father Florea Mureșanu, sent by the worthy Bishop Nicolae Colan, future Metropolitan of Ardeal, then Chiriarch of Cluj, came to take over the task of pastor and confessor. At that time, Father Florea Mureșanu was entering the sixth decade of his life as a priest, patriot and man of culture. He had received the gift of life in the early years of the century in the village of Ciubanca, Someș County, he went through all the stages of education, from the “Andrei Mureșanu” gymnasium in Dej, the Theological Academy in Cluj, and then brilliant doctoral studies in Paris, Berlin, Chernivtsi and Bucharest, where he obtained his doctorate in theology.

The Viennese dictatorship found him as the protopope of Cluj and also as a man of Romanian culture. For several years he edited the column “Grai și suflet românesc” in the magazine “Tribuna Ardealului”, which was particularly important for the preservation and promotion of Romanian cultural and spiritual traditions. Together with his wife, the poet Eugenia Mureșanu, he carried out a fruitful cultural work, as can be seen from the publications of the time.

As a protopope priest, he risked his position and his life under the Horthy rule by actions such as saving many Jews from extermination in the Nazi camps, issuing fictitious Christian baptismal certificates and not putting any pressure on those saved to convert, as contemporary Jewish rabbis testify in later writings about those days, such as that of the Jewish doctor Oliver Lusting[1] in his Bloody Diary, published in 1987. In this activity he was accompanied, with the same risks, by the Greek-Catholic protopope of Cluj, Dr. Vasile Astilean, the future Bishop Visarion of Arad.

After the installation of communism at the head of the country, in the known circumstances, Father Florea Mureșanu and his wife were the object of a torturous investigation, from which, however, he was saved by divine mercy, being reserved for the future mucenic sacrifice, going through the sufferings of the Canal and Aiud.

The new field that the parish of Suciul de Sus had given him to work on after his return from the canal was full of thorns and weeds, but His Holiness set to work with great energy to make it fruitful. The first thing he did was to clean and beautify the holy place, explaining to the parishioners that in the church we really meet the Saviour himself, who is present on the holy altar in the Eucharist. Through the power of his word, preached with strength and grace, he was able to make his listeners understand the mysterious things of the Lord. He had a special power of actualisation that made all of us listeners feel that we were part of the crowds that followed the Lord through Galilee and witnessed His miracles. He also captivated the audience with his impressive patriarchal beard and silvered hair, his voice sometimes thunderous, sometimes dissarmingly gentle, his gaze sometimes serene, sometimes flashing on sin. With his words he pleaded for an intense life in Christ, for the renunciation of formalism and the transformation of life. He had a great devotion to the Holy Sacrament of Confession and Communion, and brought many religious indifferent who had been deprived of the sacraments for decades under his banner.

In a few months, the faithful of Suciul de Sus realised that their priest was a special man who wanted a Christian life of substance and not of form.

He fought vigorously against drunkenness and other illnesses for which he had no sympathy, and succeeded in drastically reducing alcoholism and its consequences, which was a charge against him in his future trial as a saboteur of socialist trade. He also fought against uncivilised revelry, teaching us a host of religious songs, suitable both for church and for work in the fields and on long winter evenings.

He hated laziness and carelessness, both in the household and in communal affairs, so that on several occasions he led and carried out repair work on communal roads and crumbling bridges, work to sanitise the locality, which the management failed to do because they did not set an example to the villagers, but only gave orders. They were accused of undermining the authority of the state. During the summer, the priest managed to save the “collective’s” harvest by taking the people directly from the church to harvest after prayers of unbiding. The irony was that at the trial he was accused of sabotaging the work of the C.A.P. by urging people not to attend.

I am going back in time to say that on his arrival from Cluj to his new teaching flock, on the Feast of the Annunciation in 1953, Fr. Florea stopped at the Rohia Monastery, where he celebrated Holy Liturgy with Abbot Justinian, and at the end preached to the people present on “The Virtues of Our Lady”. His Beatitude Archim. Seraphim Man, now retired, recalls this emotional day with these words: I was a young brother in the monastery and a disciple of Father Justinian, eager to learn from the elders, and I still feel the holy thrill that seized me and shook me to the depths of my soul as I listened to Father Florea’s homily, through which he painted for us the sublime gift of the Mother of God, who, frightened by the words of the Archangel, nevertheless exclaimed: “Behold Your handmaid, be it to me according to your word”. In addition, by the way she spoke, she managed to fascinate and move us deeply.

Father Florea loved our monastery very much and often stayed with us. He helped us a great deal in the work we were doing, gathering help and working with us himself, advising us with words of true Avva, instructing us not to leave prayer and singing in the church, in the chapel or at the funerals, because this would drive the devil out of the monastery. He also wished to wear the monastic habit along us, and his request is still in the archives, but the hardships of the times thwarted his dream”.

During the five years of his pastorate in Suciul de Sus, he organised many pilgrimages, not only to Rohia and Nicula, but also to the old monasteries of Moldavia and Oltenia, where he was known and loved as a true teacher and preacher.

Since there was no parish house in the village, the existing one having been confiscated by the lords in a despicable manner, Father Florea built a small house with a chapel in the hamlet of Breaza, 8 km from the centre of the village, where he used to retreat for prayer, study and meditation, a place he wanted to become a hermitage in the future. This place soon became the object of numerous pilgrimages, but also of constant surveillance by the security services. It is said that this hermitage was the result of a promise made to God by Father Florea during his time at the Canal and the cruel investigations to save him.

I, a schoolboy and then a medical student from Cluj, who had come for my holidays, approached him with suspicion and then with an unquenchable thirst for light and teaching, because he attracted me and discovered for me unexpected meanings of life. I still thank God for having given me the opportunity to be in the presence of this holy man in my youth, who, together with Abbot Justinian, marked my later life.

The attachment of the village and especially of the young people to Father Florea thwarted the atheistic indoctrination plan of the local and regional ideologists, who in their madness believed that it was possible and therefore planned to destroy Father Florea’s activity.

On the night of 12/13 June 1958, a Securitate patrol secretly took him away from the Breaza hermitage, stripped him naked, humiliated and ridiculed him, placed a heavy sack with his precious books on his back, like Jesus on the cross, and took him over the hill to the village of Boiereni, In order to avoid the village of Suciul de Sus, for fear of the villagers, they loaded him into a cart and set him on the painful path of suffering that would end, after countless torments in the vile places of extermination, in the dungeon of Aiud, where, at the age of 54, he gave his soul into the hands of his Master.

A few months after its erection, it is said that it was not by chance that the hermitage of Breaza caught fire and burned down with everything inside (books, vestments, icons, etc.) Faithful hands placed a cross there to commemorate and venerate it.

The priest Gavril Burzo, transferred to Suciul de Sus and son of the village, apprentice of the father, in 1958, seminarian in the fourth year of study, was also brought up, together with his grandfather, the peasant leader Ioan Chindriș from Bizoaiei, and the parish priest Gavril Ciceu, for the crime of taking an interest in the fate of the father and writing to the bishopric that he was not guilty and that nobody in the village knew of his arrest.

The trial for the above accusations, to which was added the classic lie of this type of trial – espionage – was held in Satu-Mare, where the priest and the three later arrested were involved. The perfect set-up, in which the verdict was known regardless of the debates, resulted in 25 years of hard labour for Father Florea, 6 years for Ioan Chindriș and his nephew Gavril Burzo and 4 years for Gavril Ciceu.

During his imprisonment, the priest Florea Mureșan, aware that he was acting in the spirit of his Christian faith, comforting his suffering brothers and reconciled with his fate, perhaps thanking God for the crown of a martyr that was being prepared for him, saw fit to give his meagre bread ration to younger people who were more likely to be saved, thus sacrificing his life for his brothers. He had lost so much weight that when he died he weighed only 100 pounds, a mountain of a man as he had been. For a similar act in a Nazi death camp, a Roman Catholic priest was canonised.

I should mention that a few years ago, when Father Burzo came to the village, at the risk of the dictatorship, he rebuilt a chapel on the site of the burnt hermitage and resumed the pilgrimage on the Feast of the Holy Trinity (the second day of Pentecost), the feast established by Father Florea. In 1990, we came here for the same feast, but this time with our heads held high in freedom and dignity, where the Divine Liturgy was celebrated by a choir of seven priests, led by the Provost of Lăpuș, Ioan Ciceu, and in the presence of about 600 faithful. The words recalled the personality and the sufferings of Father Florea Mureșanu. It was proposed to transfer the remains of the martyr from the prison cemetery of Aiud to the cemetery of Breaza, as he had wished.

I ask all those who will read these lines to forgive me any omissions and, if they can complete the picture of this martyred priest with other illuminating data, to do so, so that the heroes and martyrs of that dark period of persecution may be known.

I also ask the good Saviour Jesus to reward his sacrifice and sufferings for the glory of God, the Holy Church and the restoration of human dignity.

Surely, as I pray, all those who knew him, esteemed him and shared in his teaching, await his reunion in the heavenly places, as the song I lovingly learned with His Holiness also suggests:

“We shall meet again one day
Up in the land of the dawn
Where the Lord will lead
His people to life…

We’ll meet again someday
Up in heaven when we are,
And from there never
We’ll never be parted again.

(Dr. Ioan Buteanu – Rost Magazine, Year IX, No. 97, pp. 24-27)

[1] In his memoirs, Oliver Lasting describes Jewish attempts to escape death during the Horthy occupation as follows: “One of the most difficult problems was the ‘preparation’ of documents for escapees. I personally had some experience in this matter. Even before the measures that heralded the ‘final solution’, I had, at the request of friends, procured documents that would help refugees in particular. I contacted the Greek-Catholic protopope of Cluj, later to become an Orthodox bishop, Astileanu, who had a cousin, Petre Astileanu, a printer, whom I knew and who was close to the workers’ movement, and the Orthodox protopope Florea Mureșan, who was able to issue me with baptismal certificates, the best document for establishing a false identity. I told them frankly from the beginning what it was all about. Neither of them showed the slightest hesitation. I did not keep a record of these certificates, of which there are dozens. Interestingly enough, perhaps at the request of some Jewish friends, I also sent such certificates abroad. (Bloody Diary, Military Publishing House, Bucharest, 1987, p. 259)