Ioan Lupaș, the missionary academician
Ioan Lupaș, a prominent figure in the cultural and ecclesiastical life of the 20th century, was born on 9 August 1880 in Săliște, Sibiu County. He attended primary school in his home town between 1886 and 1891, and then attended an additional class at the Roman-Catholic Gymnasium in Sibiu to improve his knowledge of German and Hungarian. From 1892 he attended secondary school at the State Gymnasium in Sibiu, where he excelled. Due to a conflict over national issues with the history teacher Arpad Tompa, whose views on the history of the Romanian people the young Lupaș could not accept, he and his classmate Octavian Goga had to transfer to the final class at the “Andrei Șaguna” Gymnasium in Brasov. It was here that they took their baccalaureate exams, with Ioan Lupaș as the class leader, according to Prof. Acad. Mircea Păcurariu in the “Dictionary of Romanian Theologians”.
From the autumn of 1900, he attended the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Budapest, where he received financial support from the Gojdu Foundation, administered by the Mitropolia Ardealului. During his studies in the Hungarian capital, he made a name for himself through his involvement in the “Petru Maior” Academic Society, where he gave lectures on historical topics such as “The Dualistic Principle in Religion and Philosophy” in 1901 or “Andrei Șaguna as a Writer” in 1902, as we learn from the work “Ioan Lupaș 1880-1967″. A Servant of Historical Sciences, Education and the Church”, written by Nicolae Edroiu, Alexandru Moraru, Dorel Man and Veronica Turcuș. During all this time, Ioan Lupaș published articles in the Siberian newspapers “Telegraful român” and “Tribuna”.
Imprisoned for the Romanian cause
After graduating in 1904, he defended his doctoral thesis in history and philosophy on “The Orthodox Church in Transylvania and Religious Unity in the 18th Century”, which was published in Budapest the same year. On 1 September 1905, he was appointed professor of the history of the Romanian Orthodox Church, national history and world history at the “Andrean” Seminary, the future Theological-Pedagogical Institute of Sibiu. Between 1905 and 1908, he attended the same educational institution “privately” in order to fulfil the requirement of a theological degree for the profession. In November 1907 he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and a fine of 200 crowns for “press offences” for “inciting the class of ploughmen to hatred against the class of landowners”. The sentence was served in Seghedin prison between August and October 1908. During his imprisonment, Lupaș began writing the historical monograph “Metropolitan Andrei Șaguna”, which was published in Sibiu in 1909 and awarded the “Adamachi” prize by the Romanian Academy. At the same time, Ioan Lupaș was elected a member of the Synod of the Archdiocese of Sibiu and a member of the National Church Congress of the Archdiocese of Transylvania.
Protopope of Săliște
Ioan Lupaș was forced to leave Sibiu for ten years, from September 1909 to November 1911, by the intervention of the Minister of Public Education in Budapest, Apponyi Albert, because of his activities in defence of the rights of the Church and the Romanian people, both in the cathedral and in public. He was ordained priest and appointed parish priest and “protopopean administrator” of the “tract” of Săliște. On 1 November 1910, after a year of provisional service, he was elected protopope of Săliște. Taking into account the fact that the protopope was also a confessional school inspector and had 13 schools under his authority, Ioan Lupaș managed to save the Romanian primary schools in his protoparchy from the consequences of the 1907 school law of the same minister, Apponyi.
Despite the fact that his appointment to Săliște was intended to remove him from the cultural scene of Sibiu, Ioan Lupaș continued to give lectures in Sibiu or at the meetings of the Romanian Academy, addressing topics that sought to highlight the efforts of the Romanian people in the struggle for national identity, led by representatives of the Church. Thus, in 1917, in Sibiu, in the ceremonial hall of the ASTRA Museum, now the “Astra” Library, he gave a lecture on “The Mission of Bishops Gherasim Adamovici and Ioan Bob to the Court of Vienna in 1792”, held in defence of Romanian journalists imprisoned for press offences, as was his case.
In 1913, he presented a paper at the Romanian Academy on “The Prince of Arad Acatiu Barcsai and the Metropolitan Sava Brancovici (1658-1661)”, and a year later, on 14 May 1914, he was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. For his prolific and sustained work, and on the recommendation of Nicolae Iorga, Ioan Lupaș became a full member of the Romanian Academy in 1916. On 8 June 1920, he delivered his inaugural lecture on “Nicolae Popea and Ioan Micu Moldovan”.
Professor in Cluj
A few months later, in August 1916, he too was arrested by the Hungarian authorities, along with many other personalities and priests from the Sibiu Mărginimea and other areas of Transylvania who were fighting for the rights of the Romanians and who took a stand contrary to the official one when Romania entered the war against Austro-Hungary and Germany in order to liberate Transylvania. However, he was released in March 1917, having been forced to live in Budapest until then. On 1 December 1918, he took part in the Great National Assembly in Alba Iulia, was elected to the Great Council of the Romanian Nation and became secretary of the Resort for Cults and Public Instruction of the Transylvanian Governing Council, based in Sibiu. In the same year, in Sibiu, he published his work “The Ecclesiastical History of the Transylvanian Romanians”, which was of great use to students of theology and history.
On 1 September 1919, by decree of the Romanian Governing Council, he was appointed full professor of modern Romanian and Transylvanian history at the new University of Cluj. King Ferdinand also attended the inauguration of the University of Cluj and donated the sum of 400,000 lei to the new university for the establishment of an institute for the study of Romanian history, which had been so badly treated under the previous rule. In the summer of the same year, the Institute of National History was founded under the direction of Ioan Lupaș and Alexandru Lapedatu, and the oldest historical library in the country was established.
Minister in the first government
Ioan Lupaș also continued his political activity, being elected Member of Parliament for Săliște in the first Parliament of Unified Romania, and in 1926 he became Minister of Health and Social Welfare in the Averescu government. In 1937 he became Minister of Religion and Arts in the Romanian government led by his godfather, Octavian Goga.
It should be noted that, in parallel with his political activity, Ioan Lupaș maintained an intense scientific and academic activity, which took the form of numerous communications in the Romanian Academy, where he became president of the Historical Section in 1932, and conferences in the various “departments” of the Academy. The material resulting from this prodigious activity was collected since 1928 in a series of volumes entitled “Historical Studies – Studies, Conferences and Historical Communications” (vol. I, Bucharest, 451 p.; vol. II, Cluj, 1940, 320 p.; vol. III, Sibiu, 1941, 312 p.; vol. IV, Sibiu, 1943, 392 p.; vol. V, Sibiu, 1946, 511 p.). In the same vein, in 1933 he published two volumes on “Romanian Chroniclers and Historians from Transylvania” (Craiova, 472 p.) and “History of the Union of Romanians” (Bucharest, 406 p.). In 1940, he also supervised the publication in Cluj of the volume “Transylvanian Historical Documents” (522 pp.), which was intended to initiate the publication of a series of collections of diplomatic sources on the pre-modern history of Transylvania.
The second arrest
As a testimony to the prestige he enjoyed and the intellectual training he showed throughout his activity, the volume “Homage to Ioan Lupaș on his 60th birthday” was published in 1943. This publication took place three years later, due to the events that took place after the signing of the Vienna Dictate of 30 August 1940 and the seizure of Northern Transylvania. In 1945, Professor Ioan Lupaș retired, apparently foreseeing the events that would follow on the country’s political scene, events that would also affect him. In 1948 he was expelled from the Romanian Academy, along with 104 other members of the high academic forum, and two years later, in 1950, he was arrested by the communist authorities, together with former inter-war ministers, and imprisoned in Sighet, where he shared a cell with Silviu Dragomir, his former colleague at the University of Cluj, and Stefan Meteș, former director of the State Archives in Cluj and corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. He was imprisoned here until July 1955, during which time he composed the ballad “Pohod na Sighet”, trying not to be overwhelmed by the situation, which was nothing new to him, having been imprisoned in similarly unjust conditions by the Hungarian authorities before 1918. After his liberation, he spent his last years in Sibiu and Bucharest, where his daughter Marina lived. He died on 3 July 1967 and was buried in the cemetery of the monastery of Cernica.
“Invaluable services to the Church and to our nation”
The figure of Ioan Lupaș as a fighter for the rights of the Church and the Romanians in Transylvania places him among the great Romanian personalities of the 20th century. As we have already mentioned, from the very beginning of his studies he devoted himself to historical research on lesser known and unpublished aspects of the Romanian nation’s past, research that took the form of numerous public lectures under the aegis of various cultural institutions in the country and, after 1918, abroad. His scientific merits were soon recognised by his election to the elite membership of the Romanian Academy, where he even held the position of President of the Historical Section. Even if the period during which he held the position of Protopope of Săliște was seen as a “punishment” by the Hungarian authorities through the pressure they exerted on the ecclesiastical authorities of the Transylvanian region, the ten years of activity here should also be seen as a period of study, research and investigation into certain aspects of the life of the people, now drafting the text of most of the conferences that would recommend him for election to the Romanian scientific forum of the Academy. Lupaș’s conscience, as a man who had to fulfil his duty and the responsibilities to which he was called, made him a priest loved by those he served with dedication and for whose rights he fought. A good shepherd, a great preacher and orator, and an expert in the problems of his flock, he tried to be a support to each of them, urging them towards school, culture and respect for tradition. In the “Official Certificate” issued by the Romanian Orthodox Archbishopric of Sibiu to Ioan Lupaș to prove the quality of the teacher and Protopope of Săliște, it is stated that “both as a teacher and as a parish priest and Protopope, Father Lupaș rendered invaluable services to the Church and to our nation”, as Nicolae Edroiu points out in the aforementioned work.
Supporter of the study of national history in Cluj
The periods of imprisonment at the beginning of the 20th century and during the communist period do not seem to have stopped the creative drive of Ioan Lupaș, who created or conceived some of his future works even in these harsh conditions. Through his ecclesiastical and cultural activities before the Great Unification, he influenced the establishment of the Institute of National History at the University of Cluj, a long-cherished but unfulfilled dream of the Romanian intellectuals of Transylvania, which could not be realised due to historical and political circumstances. Ioan Lupaș made a decisive contribution to the advancement of Romanian historiography by tackling hitherto unpublished historical themes and by coordinating the publication of ten volumes of the Yearbook of the Institute of History in Cluj, thus bringing to light aspects of our national history that had not been, or had not wanted to be, highlighted. As proof of the value of these studies and publications, many of them are being republished at the beginning of the 21st century.
(Emanuel Pavel Tăvală – Lumina Newspaper, electronic issue of 10 August 2010)