Ioan Iovan – a priest full of grace and a great orthodox practitioner
I first heard about Father Ioan from Vladimirești in Jilava prison. Everyone spoke very highly of him and his spiritual life. He was considered an ascetic and a martyr of our Christian faith. Here, in the large TB ward of Aiud prison, I had the opportunity to meet him personally and to be convinced that he was indeed a priest-monk full of grace with a great life in the Lord.
He entered this ward as a real pulmonary patient, even with a pulmonary cavern. But despite the seriousness of his illness, he refused treatment. He had his own treatment: prayer. During all the time we were together, the cavities had neither progressed nor closed.
He was the son of a priest from Oradea and, apart from his spiritual life, he was less interested in what was going on around him…
In the morning he prayed, in the afternoon he prayed, at midnight he prayed. Nobody told me about this, because I saw it myself. After Father Sofian [Boghiu], he was the second priest I confessed to in prison, and I did it well, because I felt very relieved.
While the Aiud prison administration began to prepare us for our re-education by reading from the Communist Guide, Father Ioan came every evening, right under my bed, and told us about the miracles that had happened in Vladimirești.
He himself, a novice, was the confessor of the nuns of this convent, where he arrived by a miracle of Our Lady, because the nuns, after being abandoned by the first two confessors – Fr. Visarion and Fr. Clement – the first old man went to heaven and the other one moved of his own free will to another convent, also of nuns, they prayed fervently and the whole convent fasted (black fast), three Fridays in a row, to send them a good, kind and God-loving confessor. These prayers of the nuns coincided, after three weeks of requests, with the wish of the young theology graduate Silviu Ioan from Oradea. He had decided in his heart and mind to give his life to the Lord without sin.
(Nicu Popescu Vorkuta, Crez și adevăr, Bucharest, 2009, pp. 295-297)