Letter to my spiritual father
Last night I felt like I was passing out. I don’t know exactly where the disease came from, because most of my organs are affected. My life is slowly passing into eternal life.
I had a restful night and woke up somewhat recovered, although a wave of death can be felt in my body. But my spirit is alive and awake. I still have something to give to the world. Self-giving is my joy.
My mind is focused on myself. I feel that the world is a dream, a discovery and a miracle. It’s wonderful, this fragile and fleeting incarnation of the world!
I love the world, I love it very much. It’s worth sacrificing oneself to save such a wonderful creation! In order to understand it and to decipher my own destiny, I have clearly in mind the satanic and sinful reality with its apocalyptic sense of history. That is why I am not troubled by the terrible drama of my personal life, nor by the deep abyss of the modern world. I see clearly how a divine, providential economy watches over and gives meaning to the world of men, the world of angels and the world of matter.
A harmonious and robust datum is unfolding in the universe and is reflected in my consciousness. I feel brother to all people and connected to all that is happening in creation, for in all there is God. I feel His presence in the limitless depths of spirit as well as in the limitless depths of matter. It is through the boundlessness of the Spirit that the door is opened to Jesus Christ, the Logos who created the world and then descended into the human soul to ennoble it. I tremble at this thought, for I am not worthy to understand it, but I know the mystery of it by faith. The mystery of the salvation of the world concerns me.
When I awoke, I saw the sun rise and the birds begin to sing. This spring is dry and fills me with anxiety. Then, a little wistfully, I looked around the basement of my room. I fingered my desk, paper and pencil. I sat in my chair for a while, carried away on the wings of thought. Calling upon the name of the consuming fire, I sit in the Holy Spirit, submissive, meek and content. I wait vigilantly, ready for service. So I began these pages.
It’s been a few years since I wanted to clarify things with my confessor; it seems that today this desire has been fulfilled. I confront my life, willed by God, with the life of the world, willed by God, because this is the only way I can tell my wise confessor what is troubling me and what I have to confess to him.
When I read the depths of my being, I find that the defining characteristic of my personality is communion with God, through the necessity of faith, through a great capacity for self-giving and through the power of witnessing to the truth. It is on these three values that I have become the man I am today, in my old age and maturity of spirit. In the depths of the soul there are also many negative traits, such as self-fulfilment, uncontrolled senses and short memory. But with God’s help, I have subdued the negative ones to the holy ones in me.
The Celestial Tendency split my life in two in the middle of the 20th century. As this was an extraordinarily tense period, and as I entered its most intense focus, suffering all its distortions and abysses, I had much to learn. For it is not easy to take an active part in the tension between Stalin, Hitler and Reagan, or to move from bourgeoisie to fascism and from fascism to communism, or – something astonishingly serious – to see the Jerusalem of Christ move from Islamic to Talmudic rule. This explains the turbulence of my life, although I am a poor, anonymous person, known only to the dungeon.
I was a young schoolboy when my life was drastically turned upside down by an event foreign to me. At that time, my mind was filled with the democratic, liberal, cosmopolitan ideas that my father had instilled in me. One day, sitting on a bench in a park, a young man said to me with the air of an archangel announcing a miracle: “Do you believe in God? Surprised, I replied sincerely: “I believe!”. “You answer so easily because you don’t know what faith is. Faith must be confessed with strength and, if necessary, you must happily give your life for Christ,” he told me. I was astonished. There was a great opening in my mind and I said to him, “I have never thought about these things”. “You are a stranger to the saints and martyrs of this age,” he warned me in a prophetic tone. “What should I know?” I asked him. “What, you don’t read the newspapers, you don’t know what has happened?”[1]…
This young man was not an archangel, but a windwalker, a little adventurer on whom the Holy Spirit had been working for some time. He disappeared from my life forever, and I never heard from him again. But I made faith a sincere concept of new life, hoping for my personal renewal as well as the renewal of the world in which I lived. My formation on this path did not have a proven guide, but was made from the abundance of gift and grace given to me by the Holy Spirit. Thus I found myself engaged in the struggle against sin in myself and in the world.
At first, there were generalities by which I was guided. And so I came into conflict with the selfishness of the bourgeois world, the atheism of communist ideology and the pride of fascist racism. I opposed them all in Christ, although at that age my ideas were not very clear. I am reluctant to admit that the priests of the time and the literature they offered me were not enough to quench the thirst that burned in my heart. However, the flower of Christian education given in the schools and the atmosphere of our God-fearing nation gave me the first seeds of faith.
An important role in the formation of my conscience was played by my grandmother, who was illiterate, and my mother, who knew little about books; both were strong, balanced and impressive personalities.
Before the Second World War, society was decaying with abuse, crime, debauchery and greed. Young people were confused and troubled. So my youth was coloured by some of the vices of the time.
I was dissatisfied with myself and the world I lived in. Driven more by emotion than by reason, I expressed, as best I could at that age, my rejection of such a world. The result was that I was imprisoned by the bourgeois[2], then by the fascists[3] and finally by the communists, in the order in which they came to power.
But even in prison I was not too wise and I fought against all odds. A hateful criminal and passionate libertine tormented me until he defeated me and forced me to admit publicly that he was a man of honour and I was a slanderer and a bandit. Then I fell on my face and for the first time in my life said to myself with strength, “I am a scoundrel!” That was the turning point in my inner life: the awareness of sin, or more precisely, of humiliation.
Although I believed and prayed for hours a day, prayed at night, read the Scriptures daily, studied theology and Christian literature, I had not yet come to an inner life. I continued to study law, philosophy, politics, sociology and pedagogy, learning from all the fields that analyse the human soul. I had a good opinion of myself and could not overcome my pride. However, I was aware of some common human sins, but even these I could not confess because of the same self-love mixed with shame. I was later to learn that Satan gives people shame for virtue and shamelessness for sin.
So I had hidden within myself an intimacy that I reproached myself for. But now, through the defeat I had suffered, not only had my pride been destroyed, but I had destroyed myself in my own eyes, so that I had become unbearable[4]. And not knowing how to get out of such a situation, I despaired. A terrible gloom had set in, a kind of inner degeneration. A wounded pride and a confused mind manifested themselves in this pit. Satan was pushing me towards the most terrible disaster. Death seemed the only alternative. And I knew that I would die like a Neom. I also knew that I was not guilty and that death was a final collapse of my soul. I was alone, and even if I had been with someone, I would not have been able to ask for help, perhaps I would even have refused the intervention of a person who would have noticed my drama, because in a perverse way pride was still stronger in me than humility. They were days of darkness directed towards nothingness.
In these circumstances, my liberation came from the mercy of God, proclaimed to me by a priest. This priest had given a lecture in the dungeon in which he spoke about Mount Athos, a centre of Orthodox spirituality, a spirituality at the heart of which is hesychasm, the prayer of silence. He spoke of closing the spirit in matter, the mind in the heart, by repeating a very short prayer, with the help of which one reaches complete inner peace, until the mind sees its own light and in the final stage, enlightenment, is flooded by the light of Tabor. The sharing of the Taboric Light renews the light of the human spirit, so that even the most sinful man, the man of all disasters, can be born again, purified and renewed in the first dignity of being.
That’s pretty much what I remembered, but the essential thing for me, in the state I was in, was to believe that God could cleanse and renew my soul. Then a glimmer of light opened up in my dark soul. I decided to give myself completely to God for life. But since I did not even know the formula of this prayer,[5] I took as a model the words that end the typical Orthodox prayers and began to repeat them.
I did it with desperate hope and my spirit was full of longing, but I had no experience. I soon discovered that it wasn’t so easy, and I combined it with the rosary and other prayers. I did not want to do anything else, although my mind was full of thoughts. The body also claimed some rights. The world followed me with the images in my memory and the ideals I had cherished. Concentration in the mind proved difficult and I was unable to bring order to myself. But my faith in God and the power of prayer remained unshaken.
The cell proved to be a harsher environment for people drawn to God, and even more conducive than a monastic cell, except that the demands of faith were much harsher. For some months I lived in this total isolation, guided only by my believing heart, but without the guidance of my mind. I needed a confessor to whom I could entrust all the intimacy of my feelings and ask him to guide me. I knew that the priest had grace and I believed that he could give me the strength and the divine light that I needed and longed for.
And the day came when the isolation ended. I was still in the dungeon, but there were priests among the prisoners. With all my decisions and desires, when the time came to act, I again felt the constraint of self-love to confess, but this time I overcame it. For I did not play with words, nor with life, nor with holy things. Everything I did was sincere, even when, in my confusion, I was wrong. Therefore, I understand very well why the apostles put the Lord’s teaching first; for man hears, he knows, and the right time will come for the generously sown seed to bear fruit. This is what happened to me, and it is good.
I chose the most devout priest there and asked him to confess me. He asked me:
– Are you ready to confess?
I replied: “Yes!”
– How long has it been since your last confession?
– A long time.
– Have you ever made a true, sincere, life-changing confession?
The priest put his finger on the wound in my soul. I answered him:
– I want to do it now, that’s why I came here.
He looked at me and said:
– Because I believe you sincerely, I feel it is my duty as a priest to tell you that you are not ready for confession.
– What should I do?
– Can you do what I say?
– I can! I replied categorically.
The priest paused for a moment and then made a confession that impressed me.
– “You know,” he said, “I am the overseer of the mysteries of God, but I haven’t become a good confessor. I don’t know the human soul very well, because even I don’t have an experience of the soul that corresponds to the holy mission I fulfil. In the past, not even every priest was allowed to be a confessor, but only those with grace and experience in the Spirit. It is an immense responsibility to walk in the soul of man, a responsibility that does not exist in the technical, biological, social, medical or philosophical fields. Here you are working with the soul of man, guiding it to orient itself between God and Satan, between spirit and matter, between eternity and impermanence. That is why I consider myself unfit for such a work, and a mere formality performed piously does not satisfy me.
– So what is to be done?
– There are two ways: either to give you a certain reading to do and to figure yourself out, or to send you to a great healer of human souls who knows how to heal all wounds. And it is to Him that I owe the little spiritual life I have been given. What will you choose? I sat and thought and then I said:
– I think the highest way is to combine these two paths. That is why I am receiving guidance from this doctor of souls, because my efforts to guide myself by reading alone have not satisfied me.
– Think again what an important decision this is! Can you obey another, obey another as you would obey God? It is a humility of which few people are capable!
I too felt that a very narrow and difficult path was opening up, but my burning desire to be in God’s grace led me to answer in the affirmative. The priest continued:
– That is my suggestion, we will have to see what Arsenius says, because he only deals with people who are serious about salvation and holiness. He is not a man of half-measures, but goes only the royal way. If he thinks you are not ready for such a high road, you may have to find another guide.
Arsenie [Papacioc] was a few years older than me. We were friends, but there was no affinity between us, precisely because of an intransigence I felt in him, just as he was dissatisfied with a certain superficiality on my part. Faced with this relationship, it was difficult to overcome the resistance that immediately arose in my heart: Him? Why not someone else to whom I am close in spirit? Should I admit that he was right? Should I prove myself inferior to him? Should I even submit to him? Such urges stirred in the depths of my soul, but they were thwarted by my determination to humble myself at all costs, to consider myself worthy of all contempt.
The priest asked me to come to him the next day so that he could give me Arsenios’ answer. And Arsenius received me. But within me there were the negative and painful reactions of the ego that felt offended. But I had started on this path and was determined to see it through to the end, so I went to see Arsenius.
As luck would have it, I found Virgil [Maxim][6], another friend, younger than myself, with whom I was not close in spirit because he was a disciple of Arsenius. The surprise of finding him there weighed heavily on my heart. He wanted to withdraw, but Arsenius stopped him and told me:
– I think you have nothing against Virgil being there. But if you want him to go, he’ll go.
– No, I said, I want him to stay!
And the desire to overcome myself was born in me. It was an extra humility that I imposed on myself, and it suited me very well. I told Arsenius that I had come to enter into his obedience, to go to confession. Arsenius is a rather small, red-haired, sharp, energetic, authoritative and direct man. He quickly boils things down to their essence between good and evil, affirming the good and making no concessions to the evil, which makes him seem rigid and uncompromising, perhaps too simple. Before giving me an answer, he invited me to a general discussion, which led to the question:
– What connects you with God?
– Faith, I replied.
– Faith with works or without works?
– Faith with works. And not only with works, but with my whole life, I said.
– That’s nice, but it’s not enough to believe. What else unites you with God?
– Love. I love him. I love him more than myself. I’m willing to give my life for him.
– As far as I know you are capable of sacrifice, but you lack the wisdom of sacrifice, but that is too deep a subject to go into now. So let’s continue to see what unites you with God.
– Hope, I replied, the hope of salvation, the hope of healing and the hope of eternal life. I know that He can do it all, so I entrust myself to Him.
– And what else? he asked me.
I thought for a while and listed all the virtues I could think of: mercy, forgiveness, kindness, justice, honesty, humility, obedience, patience, forbearance, charity, sacrifice, holiness… He listened to me, but he was not convinced.
– You’re missing something, something essential!
I felt a knot in my stomach and a wave of anger was ready to rise up in discontent and revolt. I said to myself: “What do these people want from me? They think they’re too clever! Do they want to humiliate me? Or maybe I really am missing something and I don’t know what it is! But what am I missing, I’m a theology nerd!
While I was thinking this, I forgot that a few years ago a friend of mine had given me the Catechism and warmly urged me to read it. I had read one page and closed the book, finding it trivial for an intellectual like me. It seemed slimy, old-fashioned, medieval to me, although in theory I had a good opinion of the Middle Ages. If I had read it, it might have opened another bridge to God in me, but I hadn’t, and now I was suffering this humiliation. In the end, however, the good thought in me prevailed and I said:
– This is who I am. I don’t know what else is missing. You tell me!
Arsenie looked at Virgil, which hurt me even more, but also made me more interested, and then he said:
– You lack the fear of God! Then an eye was opened in my mind and I saw an immeasurable radiance.
– You’re right,” I said, giving up. There is no fear of God in me, only some small, almost superstitious, human forms of fear.
There followed a moment of mutual silence. Arsenius proved to have extraordinary insight into the human soul. While I was thinking about what I had to do to acquire the fear of God, he understood that it was worth making the effort to soften my soul. In conclusion, he said to me
– Very well, I will obey your desire. But I want to be sure of the firmness of this decision!
– Please believe me that it is final and integral, I assured him.
The die was cast, and so we set out together to enter the heavenly Jerusalem, but the battle was of great breadth and depth. It was difficult to let go of my own will, even in my innermost thoughts. I felt like I was destroying myself, but I knew that I was actually searching for my identity. Most of the time I didn’t see the finality of this experiment, but I continued to believe in it.
We met and talked every day. I read books that helped me a lot: “The Catechism”, “The Discipleship of Christ”, “The Philokalia”, “A Very Useful Book for the Soul”. I also reread Dostoyevsky and Papini.
I eliminated the worries of the world, whether good or bad, and concentrated only on inner goodness. I began to distinguish more and more clearly the relationship between soul and body, mind and heart, conscious and unconscious. I began to understand the material world, the world of men and the world of angels as a wonderful work of the Spirit. In the Holy Spirit I gathered all the spirit within me. The effort of the will was aided by the longing for salvation. In the Spirit I discovered that the whole world was there, but I did not stop there, I turned to the innermost part of the Spirit, to that holy place where man meets the divine spark within himself. This was the essence of the work: to know the world by turning away from it, because living in Christ fills the human soul with true knowledge. The world revealed itself to me in a pure and harmonious horizon. I was dying day by day and Christ was being born in me. The few moments in which I had this enlightenment were enough to draw me deeper and deeper into the transformation that was taking place in my soul.
At that time I didn’t work, I didn’t have other relationships, I didn’t care about what was around me. At that time I felt no hunger, no dungeon, no apocalyptic terror. I had a feeling of unbridled liberation.
The process of letting go of old concepts, old friends and old concerns was painful, but the rediscovery of new perspectives filled me with such joy that the journey was irreversible.
Everything I read went straight to my heart and became a living act of inner life. As for discernment, I had entrusted it to Arsenie, because I always told him what was going on inside me, how I thought and understood, and he did the fine work of soul aesthetics. Sometimes I wasn’t very happy with his words, but I accepted them with humility and the trust of a child in its parents.
I had a great inner peace so that even my sleep was filled with beautiful dreams. A feeling of cleansing relief had entered my being.
Most of the day was spent in the cell, for only two or three hours a day were the doors open, but cell life has the quality of compressing time, of giving material consistency to spiritual events, and of stressing people out over who knows what little things. The normal behaviour of human beings in society benefits from ample space and time, which absorbs some of the spiritual conflicts between people, so that they can live together with some ease. The prison, on the other hand, crowds the soul into the soul, and each “I” comes into conflict with the others over a word, a wish, a gesture, an opinion, a silence, and the little problems of living together, so that here, if people do not have a good spiritual arsenal, they find it very difficult to find peace among themselves. Harsh conflicts arise from trivial occurrences, and the explanation lies in the fact that each person feels the spirit of the other materially. So I have found that it is not the material aspect of existence that is conflicting, but the spiritual charge that people put on it. It is the intentional investment of people in words, ideas, actions and objects that creates conflict.
I myself have had this experience, and I am only now discovering its mechanism, and moreover, I am discovering the key to peace between people, that is, inner peace. It is only when you come to know and master yourself that you will know and master your relationships with other people.
But I did not live with spiritual people at that time, so the struggle was difficult because it was one-sided. Day after day there were all sorts of situations to which I had to apply the inner discipline I was experiencing. Contrary to expectation, I found that most conflicts did not arise from selfish, material and greedy interests, or if they did, they were very easy to remove. For example, if someone was greedy for the biggest helping of porridge, it was enough for me to pretend I didn’t notice and let them satisfy this small weakness. And I was used to seeing greedy people who, in time, cried, regretted their gesture and tried to make amends.
This material aspect also benefits from the reason of the obviousness of things, which obliges us to behave correctly. For example, when we slept three people in a narrow single bed, there were difficult issues of sharing space, which turned out to be more difficult than the living space required by some policies. But we had found solutions that were so right they could not be denied. However, I had to sit with someone[7] who lingered in bed beyond his rightful limits and became violent when corrected, once lifting his boot with nails on the sole and threatening to break my head. It took a great deal of patience, humility and strength for me to live with such a man.
And yet it wasn’t these conflicts that were worse, but those that arose out of pride. I remember another man, cultured, intelligent and talented, even a man with a beautiful character, but who categorically refused the spiritual life, not because he was an atheist, but because he was full of himself and very proud. He couldn’t stand humility, self-denial and modesty in me. That’s why he mocked me at every word and gesture. He didn’t like my deep inwardness and my striving for a Christian life. He called me hypocritical, false and proud. A perverse pride he felt in me. Later I knew temptation and these forms of pride disguised as humility, but then my heart did not bleed when he accused me of such dishonesty.
My attempts to enlighten him made him even more bitter, for I could only prove my good intentions by indirectly showing him that he was wrong, or this made him so angry that he hated my guts and made my life hell. I tried to humble myself and beg his forgiveness, even when I was right, but to no avail. It was then that I understood the importance of patience. He turned to abuse, which he delivered with intelligent finesse and sarcasm. There was no other way to soothe his pride but time. I tried to disappear from his sight, but in that narrow space he had concentrated only on his passion against me, so that he could be neither rational nor objective. If I was silent, it was bad; if I spoke, it was bad. I remember some of the harsh words he used to hold my soul: “You’re a devil!”, “You’re a Pharisee!”, “You’re an incompetent and incapable coward!”, “You’re a perverted scum!”, “I despise you, you’re pride embodied in lies!”. Even when there was silence in the cell and we were not looking at each other, he would rage at me, because he had been so mentally stressed by my person that he had become obsessed and could no longer control his reactions. He must have discovered in his mind other facets of me that he considered perverse, and he could not restrain himself from unleashing them on me mercilessly and without mercy. I laughed, but it cost me a lot not to be able to make peace with this man. He is the most implacable ego I have ever met, and he never gave in. This man died without me being able to make peace with him, although I wanted to. I have met bigger egos in life, in the sense of huge aspirations and very wide horizons, but this man’s ego was smaller, but so hardened that it could never be overcome[8]. […]
Since the confessor is the doctor of man’s spiritual state and knows how to make the invisible and the spirit visible and real, under Arsenius’ guidance I gradually entered into the spiritual materiality of existence and regarded matter itself as a miraculous appearance in which I became master. My world depended on my soul. Peace with my fellow men flowed from me. For I was always dying and Christ lived in me. He is all in all and had to be all in me. Thus I came to understand the condition of human freedom, on the one hand with its right of choice, and on the other with the peace of truth as a state of inner and universal freedom.
With Jesus I was happy everywhere.
Day by day I was more and more full of joy, and Arsenius noticed my spiritual growth. Although obedience was easier to bear, there were still obstacles and thresholds in me that were difficult to overcome, but I was moving forward, because spiritual work must have continuity: it is not a moment, but a life. One day Arsenius told me that I could go to confession, drawing my attention to the continuity of the spiritual life.
– You are only at the beginning, he said, from now on you will be on your own, but you will need the obedience of the Church all your life.
I prepared myself for confession by consulting a couple of canons of Confession, one on the criterion of groups of sins and another on the criterion of the Creed, the Decalogue and the Beatitudes, both asking the most nuanced questions for the most accurate analysis of the soul and life. I also read the original Orthodox canons given and was very frightened. I wrote down my sins on a piece of paper. I had forgotten that I was before a man, but I felt that I was before God, receiving the priest’s word as the very voice of God. I feared a severe canonical penance, but it was limited to one year’s absence from Holy Communion, during which I had a few duties that seemed light compared to my zeal and efforts. At the end, I rejoiced and made another gesture which was to influence my whole future. I chose two friends with whom I had an obvious spiritual affinity. I went to their cell, gave them the paper with my confessions and said to them:
– I want you to know me inside, naked in my emptiness, and if you can, help me! The two friends were impressed and confessed to me. We were put in the same cell. It was an atmosphere of intense experience. We prayed together day and night. We read and commented on the Scriptures together, holding each other in complete trust. […]
Loving each other sincerely, we began to understand each other and learn how to behave for our salvation. The love between us remained holy and united us for life, committing us as servants of God and man. In this small community we found the support we needed in the fierce struggle of the times. But our way of life was becoming increasingly detached from the world and its realities.
For two centuries, humanity had been taken over by bourgeois materialism. The martyrs of the French Revolution had long since rotted in the ground, and no one had done them justice, for history had been written according to the concepts of the triumphant bourgeoisie. After seizing power, the bourgeoisie had kept what it liked from Christianity and the Enlightenment to serve its plutocratic ideas. Freedom had become synonymous with the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Amorality had penetrated the economy, politics, the law, the family, and was eating away at society. The moral elite and traditional values had disappeared. A new tyranny of government by the elites was being introduced under the guise of democracy. The churches had broken up into smaller and smaller denominations. Christianity was slandered and tolerated only as a popular corrective to morality, for the bourgeoisie worshipped the golden calf and often Satan. Christianity had not distanced itself from the bourgeoisie and capitalism, but had reached a modus vivendi. The Church had been secularised. Society had been desacralised. Decay was rife in culture. Since Romanticism there have been no cultural trends worthy of praise. Science was seen as an absolute law replacing Christian dogma. The explosion of technology had conquered humanity to the point of obsession, without anyone being able to control the phenomenon. Society was torn apart by conflict. The most terrible and inhuman wars raged. Tyranny terrified humanity.
It was in these conditions that the communist revolution was born. After several unsuccessful upheavals, the Bolshevik Revolution founded the Soviet state and organised the international revolution politically and militarily. Europe was overrun by the undead of revolution, activists who criticised all capitalist roots and identified them with Christianity.
Between capitalism and communism rose the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler, which had no spiritual basis and knew only violence as a method of working. But the people had the intuition that it could be a salvation between capitalism and communism. But capitalism allied itself with communism and overcame fascism.
At the end of the war, a tribunal was set up which discredited the idea of justice, because not all the guilty were called before the allies Nuremberg court to be tried, but only the losers were sentenced before a court which operated with capitalist-communist spectacles. In the light of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the crime was only that of the defeated, and the crime of the victors became the law of humanity. Not justice but power was judged at Nuremberg, and the world was presented with a false truth, an unjust justice and an amoral, inhuman concept.
The concepts of the new post-war era were anthropocentrism, humanism, evolutionism, enlightenment, rationalism, scholasticism, materialism, liberalism, atheism, human rights, democratism, pacifism and the UN with its Charter signed by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
Humanity had thus declared freedom for international atheism.
I survived the dungeons. My friends, thousands on the left and tens of thousands on the right, fell defending their eternal being, because that is all we have left, not to die spiritually. From our experience, we must make known the apocalypse of Pitesti, the quintessence of the Satanic phenomenon of this century, a kind of accumulation of all the Satanic energies of history, which have become a system for killing the Christian soul.
Christ faced the Antichrist. Although other religions and nations suffered in there, the two spirits, Christ and Antichrist, dominated. A Jew, Colonel Zeller, led the so-called Marxist-Leninist re-education in the Pitesti dungeon around 1950, when the world communist revolution was in full swing.
There were young anti-communist students in Pitești. They were faithful and highly humane and ethical people. The experience of re-education had to be made on their young, generous and enthusiastic souls.
Zeller quickly found the axe wielders and thugs among the inmates to carry out his orders. He was an insider. He had come with a pre-established and already tested plan, a scientific method without fail. And indeed, humanly speaking, one cannot resist the means used there.
No one can save his soul under the conditions there.
The souls of those young men were demanded, and if not, they would be tortured without the right to death until they succumbed and became weak. For the new man, the re-educated man was conceived as a trained animal. […]
The most terrible hatred was directed against the believers, the heroes and the strong personalities. They were denied even the right to ‘re-education’ and were subjected to ‘permanent torture’.
I passed through Pitești, but the germs sent by Providence spared me from the “tour” and I was transferred to a hospital. So I know the phenomenon of Pitești and I can speak as if I were in the middle of it, and yet, with the distance that being outside it gives me, I have an objective view.
I have been the confidant of many of those who have passed through there, and their testimonies have overwhelmed me. I feel them as a burden that I have to confess.
I have seen saints and I have seen demons. I have been to heaven and I have been to hell. The spiritual armour has been my shield in these circumstances. While waiting for the ‘shift’, I would pray ten, sixteen or even twenty hours a day, and at night the prayer would be said alone through sleep. I did not have a breakdown in those circumstances because God protected me, but I confess that I would have preferred to die than to be killed in the spirit, and I would have sought my death if I had seen that I could not endure. But I was saved, and so I lived to a ripe old age.
The Pitești experiment failed, but if humanity does not understand in time what awaits it, there will be an international Piteștian darkness […].
The victims of Pitești can be divided into three groups: some who were killed, others who were mentally maimed for life, and others – the majority and the best – who discovered heaven in the depths of hell and thus became conscious and desirous Christians. Even these lines owe much to the Piteștian experience.
The ‘re-education’ in Pitești created monsters, not people. I didn’t believe that what I saw in Pitești was possible. The spiritual opacity of humanity fills me with concern for its future, for if it does not understand what awaits it, it will not be able to open itself to a sacred vision.
Humanity lies. Lies are more destructive than terror, they pervert and alienate humanity. Lies in symbiosis with terror are the quintessence of modern Satanism.
History cannot be explained as a series of ideas, as a phenomenon in itself. This does not correspond to reality. Ideas are transmitted by men, and men are inspired by a spirit. Modern history has therefore fallen into the hands of a satanic, anti-Christian, atheistic, materialistic, lying and tyrannical spirit, because certain people have joined it in order to rule the world.
Modern man has succumbed to the temptation with which Christ was lured, so that Satan has become his god, and some of them declare themselves to be anti-Christians, and others still call themselves Christians, and are therefore lying Christs.
Mankind has become obsessed with technical progress as a method of human happiness. Progressivism has set out to master and even change nature through technology.
Humanity is dominated by technology. Technology offers a false and tyrannical political-technical omnipotence in the world. Technology has radically changed the way people think, their aspirations, their behaviour and the structure of society, giving them a false sense of eternal happiness on earth, breaking them from heaven and emptying them of spirit.
The means of communication, construction and manufacture are astonishing, but they are put at the service of decay and destruction.
Genetic engineering can change species, and so human beings can become laboratory phenomena, losing their human value as free consciousnesses. The subconscious can be technically determined. The psyche is tested and determined by technical means, thereby nullifying human responsibility and independence.
Atoms unleash their energies and can become a weapon of universal tyranny. The cosmos is being explored and the solar system is to be populated by technical means by human beings who will carry with them all the vices of an alienated world.
A Jew once asked me why Jesus did not reveal to us all the wonders of technology. He did not understand that technology would not have been possible if it had not been ontologically inscribed in us by Christ. But technology taken out of its natural order is not only useless, it is destructive.
This is why modern civilisation poses the following risks The extinction of life by military nuclear annihilation or, by peaceful means, by pollution and depletion of natural resources; the extinction of life by the Stavroghian manipulation of genetic engineering; the extinction of life by the alienation of human beings; absolute tyranny through the monopoly of technology; the transformation of society into a dungeon, a farm or a factory through technology; the determination of consciousness by technical means; a technically controlled world; the abolition of man as a free, conscious and masterful being; ecological imbalance; nature’s revenge on technology; a general catastrophe justified by man’s fall from divine grace; man’s deprivation of the grace of the Holy Spirit and the disappearance of transcendental finality.
Nuclear weapons prove the reality of this perspective. Defensive space weapons threaten universal tyranny. Technology, if it develops at its present rate, will soon kill the world peacefully. The world is already alienated. Nature is retaliating. God does not beat us with a stick, but we beat ourselves with our own folly, in this case technology. Technology can only be useful in the light and perspective of human freedom and perfection. There is no salvation apart from Christ.
Modern history has accumulated materialistic ideas and forces, culminating in atheistic-revolutionary materialism. Not only an ideology is created, but also the instrument of power to implement it, proving the existence of a conscious action aimed at dominating humanity.
The Jews want to Judaize the world, the proletarians want to proletarianise the world, the capitalists want to enslave the world. In the face of these tendencies, there is the hope of a Christian rebirth that will give a new beginning to history and make the world more Christian by restoring its communion with God. This is why Christ became incarnate, why he gave us the Holy Spirit and why he will come a second time. The triumph of the Lamb over the apocalyptic beast will come through the Christian host.
Once I made this tour of the horizon with my friends, now I do it accompanied by their prayers. The dungeon has fallen behind. My spirit is anchored in the future of humanity. The salvation of the world is the problem of the apostolate – and we are doing the apostolate. This vocation has crystallised in the ordeal of the 20th century. Christianity has produced saints and martyrs. Along with them, humanity has experienced tens of millions of communist victims. This is the tragic holocaust of this century and it is a pity that it is not known, recognised and honoured.
Now I am sick and mature and there are signs that I do not have long to live. I wanted to go to the West, but they didn’t want me and wouldn’t let me. The time is under the sign of the Antichrist. I am left with a testamentary confession. That’s why I’m writing to you, Father Confessor.
Faced with the spectacle of contemporary history and as a result of my personal life experience, I have something new to say to the world and to you, my confessor, or to you, Christian, or to you, human being, whoever you are and wherever you are. My problem is the problem of Christianity and of humanity. In the face of all that has been and all that is, and in the face of all that is to come, I ask myself with all gravity: What is the authentically Christian stance? What would Christ do in our place? Have we done the right thing? Have we done God’s will in this century?
These are deeply disturbing questions. To answer them we need to know very well what Christ is and what humanity is. We cannot properly articulate the saving work of Christ with the salvation of the world unless we know the proper relationship between Christ and history.
I will now try to give a portrait of Christ, drawn from the New Testament and inspired by the Holy Spirit, as he has worked in history and is working to the end of time.
I start from the well-known formula in theology that Christ is perfect God and perfect man, and I stop at the human aspect, because I consider the divine aspect to be complete. I have new things to say about Jesus as a man, which I have not discovered, but which people have forgotten. Men have reduced Christ to certain characters: theologians have tended to dogmas and abstractions; mystics have embarked on spiritual experiences of divinisation; moralists have made morality the centre of their concern; philosophers, sociologists, artists, musicians, politicians and even economists have discovered in Jesus the part that corresponded to their own aims.
I will make Christianity different from all of them. I am looking for a total Christ. The world needs a universal archetype that is alive and obvious to all categories of people, and especially to the elite and the creative spirits. Thus the theologian and the layman, the artist and the scientist, the politician and the economist must have an integral image of Christ, who is the Logos incarnate in history, even if each of them, according to his or her gift, deepens and dedicates himself or herself to a particular understanding of Christ. Because Christ, who is the Creator of all, is also the Saviour of all, he is present and active in all. Christ is the Master of life, without being confused with life, but giving meaning to life; he is the Master of the universe, without being confused with the universe, but giving meaning to it; he is the Lord of man, without being reduced to man, but saving man. He is both the inwardness of man and his outwardness. He is both in heaven and on earth, in man and in the transcendent. His presence alone makes us not feel alone and defines our role as human beings. Jesus in man empowers the human personality to its fullest. Man without God is chaos, nothingness and alienation.
He came into the world as the Messiah and Christ of the Father. He has revealed to man a new world, for which He has given us a teaching, but also the Holy Spirit to bring it about. The new world is the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is an integral work because it has three places where it is built simultaneously and in solidarity: in the heart, in the world and in heaven. Human life and nature must be renewed in Christ.
Some see him only as God and others only as man, but he is both God and man. He is also the Light, the Shepherd, the Saviour and the King of the world, because He is the Christ. He appeared in the world in a wonderful way and worked miracles, but He behaved and lived like all men. He was also in the wilderness and at feasts, he fasted but also ate and drank, he prayed but also worked, he worked miracles but also suffered as a man, he was also on Mount Tabor but also put his hand on the scourge, he forgave but also announced the unmerciful judgement, he was righteous but also wisdom incarnate, he entered Jerusalem as a king but also was crucified in the same Jerusalem. He carried on His Cross all the problems of humanity, because He, as the Creator of man, happily solved all human problems.
When I sit before Jesus, I feel myself melting into him and from him I flow into my fragile and silent being. Jesus is the point from which everything begins and in which everything is concentrated, so that I know very well that it is only through Him that I exist, together with my world. He is full of courage but also of wisdom, he knows how to work with people. His wisdom, his intelligence, his cunning proved superior to all those he faced, whether it was Satan, the Pharisees, the scribes, the people, Judas, Caiaphas, Herod or Pilate. He overcame them all. He was never overcome by men’s words.
Truth was not only categorically stated by Him, but also demonstrated beyond doubt. His truth is not silently imposed, but logically demonstrated. And the supreme argument with which He justifies His truth is His righteousness and, ultimately, His sacrifice for the truth. Jesus, who is love, lovingly calls people to the truth. He demonstrates the truth by word, by miracles, by virtues and by sacrifice, going so far as to understand those who were unable to recognise the truth preached in their own city.
But God being God, He also sets an end to divine patience, the day of the Last Judgement, when the unbelievers, who deny and scoff at the truth in the face of evidence, who neither save themselves nor let others be saved, will receive their due punishment in the utter and eternal darkness.
Humanity’s responsibility is global. Salvation is a general human phenomenon, but the responsibility of the ruling elites is far greater. Therefore, there is no strictly individual responsibility, but neither is there an exclusively collective responsibility. To the extent that a person has greater responsibility in humanity, more will be demanded of him before the Judgement. Considerable is the responsibility of the ruler who leads a people, gives them a certain education, proclaims a certain doctrine, engages them in certain battles, gives them certain laws and ordinances, gives them just or unjust justice, protects their physical and mental health, creates a just or an abusive society, respects the freedom and dignity of the people or tyrannises them, promotes great values or relies on what is negative in the world, and finally leads the world to salvation or to nothingness.
Every politician, every priest, every philosopher, every artist, every economist, every scientist, every teacher must ask himself with trepidation what spirit he is in, what spirit he is expressing, what work he is doing: saving or destroying?
Jesus claimed to be the expression of the Father. The Christian must be the expression of Christ and this now, immediately, concretely, directly, with soul and body and in full responsibility. Therefore, the Christian must be clearly aware of the significance of every moment of his spiritual and material life. For we are saved in soul as well as in body. Salvation is at work in every moment. This is how we enter eternity: through every moment. This is how we enter universality: through every little place on earth.
This is how man, filled with Christ, becomes God’s chosen one, Israel. The messianic work and the work of salvation rest on the shoulders of Israel. From the people called to the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus chose twelve apostles and filled them with the Holy Spirit and with responsibility. Thus we become aware of our apostleship, which is both a sacred mission and the work of sanctifying the world. At the heart of Christianity is Israel, the apostolate, the messianic – the working elite of the Holy Spirit with full responsibility for the salvation of the world.
Having said this, I now return to the beginning of my letter. I juxtapose the inner work of healing, to which I have devoted a quarter of a century, with the reality of humanity, which I have observed for another quarter of a century. The conclusion I draw is that the spirituality I have practised has separated me from the reality of the age, but at the same time I owe to that spirituality the ability to face the age, to think about the age and to see its destiny. I do not fully justify the former spirituality, but neither do I exempt it from necessary criticism.
My criticism is directed against modern Christian spirituality, which has set out to please God, but in fact pleases the power of men. First of all, modern Christian spirituality is reductionist. Its teaching has distanced itself from life and the world, dealing more with abstractions and mostly with moral issues, but neglecting the social and the historical.
The social function was left to chance, according to the power that ruled the world. Under these conditions, people felt abandoned by the Church, and God seemed more and more distant. Soul-relief and moral corrections did not fill the huge void that had been created in souls and society. The Kingdom of God remained in the heart and in the eschatological perspective, but lost its historical work. Christian doctrine must cover the whole of human life and existence, because everything was created by Christ and everything is saved through Christ. It is not a bigoted, but an enlightened and open teaching that will triumph in the eyes of men and be recognised as their guardian authority. What is needed, then, is a unified, united and integral vision of the world, of life and of nature. Therefore, in the formation of a Christian soul, it is not enough to give it virtues and the Holy Spirit, but also a horizon and a meaning.
Secondly, formalism is embedded in Christianity. The Saviour’s stern rebuke of the Jewish hardening into formalism must now also be given to formalistic Christianity. We have locked ourselves into dogmas, ideas, ordinances, rituals and institutions. But life in the Holy Spirit cannot be confined to a few traditional forms. Neither the anarchy of forms nor the confinement to forms is acceptable.
Thirdly, the Saviour broke with Jewish convention and proclaimed a new world, but after two thousand years, Christianity is waking up to convention. Conventions are a subtle plague that creeps into Christian behaviour to suit the times. They are insincere about Christian truth, either out of ignorance or out of hypocrisy and cowardice. Conventions are a surrender of Christian authenticity to non-Christian conventions. Conventionalism secularises Christianity, making it opportunistic, dubious and insincere. Conventionalism abandons the struggle for salvation and indulges in a life of deprivation. Through conventionalism, grace is indiscriminately economised, without covering it with the gold of faith, making us dishonest mis-appropriators of it.
It is necessary to preserve without deviation the purity of Christian doctrine, so as not to be unworthy economists of divine grace and not to discredit Christianity before men. A persecuted but pure Church is more useful than a brilliant but conventional one. This is the position of Christ and of Paul. It happily combined the purity of truth with the wisdom of the world’s methods of salvation, whereas the conventionalism sometimes practised by Christianity is morally dubious and socially discredited.
Fourthly, neutralism prevails in modern Christian spirituality, a plague disguised as wisdom, but in reality an evil that eats away at the dynamic, daring, heroic and martyr-like powers of Christianity.
Neutrality towards nature abandons the world to primitiveness. Neutrality towards life abandons the world to sin. Neutrality towards Satan leaves the world in moral ambiguity. Neutrality towards matter leaves the world in misery. Social neutrality leaves the world in bondage. Political neutrality gives power to the antichristian forces. Intellectual neutrality stultifies. Cultural neutrality is the spiritual grave. Neutrality towards the world is the inability to change the world. Neutrality towards history is history for history’s sake. Neutrality is spiritual death.
Christ is the proof of the supreme power that intervened to save the world, so the neutrality of Christians is the abandonment of Christ and indirectly of the world. If Christianity today has become neutral instead of heroic, the Holy Spirit will regenerate it into Christianity for the whole world and for all time. It has taken the harsh experiences of modern atheism to bring us back to the sacred work of restoring the world to its natural order. The sufferings of modernity are a method of reawakening the Christian conscience.
Fifthly, Christianity holds out to history the prospect of eternal life after death, but through this eschatological character it must not leave history with all its problems, but draw it into the sacred. In Byzantium, the Patriarch was the first adviser to the Emperor, but soon there was a conflict between the ecclesiastical power of the Church, which wanted to be truly Christian, and the political power of the State, which was indulging in the life of the persecuted. The State then assumed its historical responsibility and reduced the clergy to an eschatological perspective. Unable to change the state, Christianity was able to use the means of faith to create societies of moral order, such as monasteries, convents, charities and educational institutions. These gave the Church strength in her struggle against the states that were against God. That is why the enemies of the Christian faith secularised the property of the monasteries, abolished the oblates and corporations and restricted the charitable and educational work of the Church, aiming at the complete secularisation of the State.
In the modern age, the State ignores the Church, discredits it, weakens it, dominates it and seeks to destroy it. In the modern age, faith is limited to the eschatological perspective, concerned only with the immortality of the soul and without socio-historical rights. In this way, the Church seems to be defeated and relegated to the margins of life and history. It turns out, however, that this is not the case. While the course of humanist-materialist society has reached the abyss and death, humanity is rediscovering the historical perspective of Christian spirituality
Sixthly, Christianity was founded by Christ as a communitarian concept, but in our century we see two phenomena: a mass collectivist-materialist phenomenon which believes it can scientifically determine the consciousness of the world, and an individualistic spiritual phenomenon which, although it reaches great depths of the soul, lacks the communitarian power and order in which it can develop freely.
The materialistic phenomenon politically dominates the modern world to such an extent that Christian spirituality develops to the point of maximum tension, pushed to the point of martyrdom. The affirmation of the Christian condition today is an act of heroism of thought, word and life. Whoever is not ready for the supreme sacrifice cannot stand in faith in this century. On the other hand, modern Christian spirituality focuses so intensely on the individual that it loses sight of the collective. The world cannot be saved by extremes. Individual spirituality is part of community spirituality, for if people do not enter into community with one another, they are neither worthy followers of Christ nor do they love one another, and moreover, they make salvation doubtful.
No traditionalist, even in his most severe asceticism, can separate himself from the universal communion of Christianity. The whole world must be concentrated in each individual, and the community must be the heavenly Jerusalem in which the individual ascends to heaven. This wonderful harmony of the world is shown to us by nature, but above all by the Holy Spirit. Fully seated in Christ, we should look at the world with his eyes, love it as he does, and do for it all that he would do if he were in our place.
This level of consciousness is not reached by oneself, nor is it easy, but it is a great task given to those who care for the human soul, and especially to confessors. The confessor fills man with God, but he also gives him the divine perspective on the world and on life, that is, he forms Christian communion and community. This is a wonderful and great mission, and if Christians do not understand and fulfil it, they let people go down the broad path of self-indulgence, which leads to hell.
Finally, the time has come to criticise spirituality too. Amazing, isn’t it? After advocating it to the extent that it seemed to be a universal and infallible panacea, we suddenly find that it too has its limits, its economy, its meaning. But it is also necessary to receive this cold shower on our souls to understand that truth is not in man, but in God, and that spirituality is only a part of the Christian man.
Pure, absolute, unlimited, unconditional spirituality is only in God. Only the mystical depths of the human spirit communicate with the unfathomable mystery of the Godhead. In heaven, man lived in communion with God, with a clear conscience and therefore an untainted spirituality. Sin followed, with all its consequences, and man became fallen, his conscience darkened, and his spirituality confused and disoriented. Through Christ, man has been restored, spirituality has become sacred again, and man can be restored to God’s grace and to a righteous life.
Spirituality is therefore not an end in itself, but the means to the sanctification, perfection and salvation of man. The Holy Spirit is the inexhaustible divine power that works the work of salvation in man, and all the works of man, filled with the Holy Spirit, constitute Christian spirituality. Spirituality, then, would be living in spirit and in truth. Everything is beautiful in theory, but human practice degrades Christian spirituality and makes it unfulfilled. Therefore, only a sustained and permanent effort throughout the ages will succeed in transfiguring the world. Christianity must work with wisdom, not only with justice, with strength, not only with humility.
In conclusion, Christians have full responsibility for the destiny of humanity. They must think out, direct and order the problems of humanity. They must know the world, life and especially their enemies. Christians must respond to the bourgeoisie, communism, fascism, Judaism, Islamism, etc. And they have lost their historical vocation, they do not understand what is going on and they have not been able to create a representative force.
We must know what an idea is and whom it serves. Faced with a world built on materialistic, atheistic and anti-Christian concepts, Christians must have the strength to bring into history the concepts that will lead the world to salvation. The crisis of the modern world does not belong to Christian spirituality, but it has occurred in the midst of the Christian world, and therefore we are responsible for what is happening.
We cannot sympathise with the catastrophe of modern civilisation, but neither can we allow the world to perish. We cannot avoid the suffering of the modern world, but we must save its future. If God himself became man in order to save the world, and as the man Christ prophesied, taught, fought, confronted enemies, suffered and was buried in order to establish the Kingdom of God, then we human beings have all the more the duty to commit ourselves fully and integrally to the salvation of the world.
The Church, as a sentient being, must dedicate herself fully and powerfully to the ministry of grace and bear witness to the Word of God openly, courageously and lucidly in this age. This is the role of the clergy. In order to fulfil this role, a change of perspective is needed in the clergy. But the Church is also seen as an ecclesial body in which the lay hierarchy has an important role to play. Christianity must work on the synergy between the clerical and lay hierarchies. Only these two hierarchies, well formed and organised, will be able to give a Christian witness to the State, without falling into the error of either papo-caesarianism or caesaro-papism.
The problems of the age are not only political, but also moral, cultural, social, economic and scientific. What spirit inspires this age? What ideas dominate us? What is our culture and where is it leading us? What literary schools and trends are emerging? What is modernism? Realism? Naturalism? Avangardism? Did the century produce any philosophical geniuses? Artists? Which personalities marked the century? Have personalities or masses defined modernity? Can mass be a form of culture? Is science part of culture? What is science? What do we know about the mystery of matter, life and man? Isn’t theology also a science? Isn’t mysticism also a science? Isn’t science a form of mysticism? Where are the boundaries between religion, art and science? Must science necessarily be materialistic-atheistic? Can we have absolute faith in scientific truth? Did science create today’s technical civilisation? How did the technological explosion come about? Can it be controlled? Will it lead to catastrophe? What are man and humanity in the face of modern civilisation? What has happened to man by the materialistic-atheistic civilisation? What has become of society? Where is it going? What laws drive us? What values do we have? What criteria are left to save us? Does the modern world still want truth? What is justice? What is freedom? Is there still love? What is man without love? What is man without God? What is peace? Who lies in this age, who perverts everything? Does peace belong to the rebellious servant or to the tyrannical satrap (dictator)? Is freedom for truth or for lies? Where is evil in this age? In things and works, or in the evil and lying spirit that men have stored up in them?
Can we be saved without answering the myriad problems that plague humanity? Are not all these matters of salvation: to eat, to drink, to multiply, to work, to govern, to rule, to make laws, to command, to fight, to watch, to react, to do justice, to triumph over evil, to know, to learn, to create, to perfect, to energize, to lead, to save, to rejoice, to die, to rise, to exalt, to save the world?
A good confessor must give a soul and a mind capable to answer all the problems of saving the world.
Father Confessor, this vision is authentically Christian, but people don’t like it. The formation you gave me, and for which I thank you, gave me the strength to face the times, but it did not guide me through them, and that is the mistake. It had depth, but no horizon and no historical message. I felt the need for this enlightenment to make us both worthy servants of Christ and of humanity.
I am old and ill, perhaps I will go there, but I confess the love and care I have for the Church and the world. I have an extraordinary spiritual and life experience, and I have a duty to bear witness to it in the first person, not out of pride, but for the authenticity of these times, because I am the product of an era of high tension.
I would like to write a book about the confessor and the confessional, but I don’t know if my powers will help me.
Praised be Christ, the Saviour and King of the world!
(Ioan Ianolide – The Prophet Prisoner, Bonifaciu Publishing House, Bacău, 2009, pp. 113-177)
[1] Reference to the deaths of Ionel Moța and Vasile Marin, an event that was widely publicised in the Romanian press between the wars and that marked an entire generation. In a letter to Vasile Marin’s wife, Ioan himself confessed: “Providence has brought us together in these circumstances. Those men whom we love and respect together have marked the life and soul of my generation, of my friends and of me personally. It was through them that I came to know the true Christian vocation. It’s been almost four decades since then”. (op. cit., p. 13)
[2] The confessor is probably referring to the Carlist dictatorship, but we do not know that John suffered any imprisonment or investigation during the reign of Charles II.
[3] The reference is to the Antonescu regime, but in our opinion the labelling of this regime as “fascist” is incorrect, even if the incrimination of the regime itself is justified. First of all, it should be pointed out that the form of nationalism that proliferated in our country during the interwar period was Legionnairism, the only nationalist movement in Europe to be decriminalised as a war crime by the Nuremberg Tribunal, while Fascism was the expression of Italian extremist nationalism and Nazism was the expression of German extremist nationalism, each with its own peculiarities. But Marshal Antonescu’s regime cannot be accused of fascism or Nazism, because the Marshal did not subscribe to either ideology, not even formally to Legionnairism. The Marshal’s intellectual training was pro-French, and he even sought an alliance with France and England before committing Romania to the world conflagration alongside Nazi Germany in order to recover the territories lost under the Vienna dictatorship. The Antonescu regime was therefore not structurally fascist/Nazi, but conjuncturally collaborationist, out of national interest, the leadership of the time having to choose between two evils. That the Antonescu regime later became dictatorial and took criminal measures against Jews, Gypsies and Legionnaires is not disputed. However, we reiterate that these deplorable acts do not constitute grounds for classifying the Antonescu regime as a fascist or Nazi ideology, whose specific feature was racism, but we believe that it was precisely the territorial dismemberment of Romania, due to the expansionist ambitions of the tyrants Stalin and Hitler, that was the mitigating circumstance for the Marshal to ally himself with Nazi Germany, which forced his political decisions and ultimately led him to take radical measures that cost thousands of innocent lives.
[4] This was the capitulation of the old, proud man who finally saw in his soul the futility of self-government. Now begins the new birth in Christ. In this sense, Father Arsenie Boca teaches that “salvation is worked only on the ruins of selfishness”.
[5] “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
[6] Father Arsenie Papacioc and Virgil Maxim were cellmates for some time in Aiud in the early years.
[7] It was the former Under-Secretary of State for Agriculture, Aurel Dobrescu, with whom Ioan had to sleep in the same bed in the hospital-penitentiary of Văcărești in 1958. The confessor recalls that “he looked like an angry bull. Right from the start he showed me a well-aimed mountaineer’s boot and said to me: ‘If you want me to drill a hole in your head, look for me’. […] I could hardly bear it, for we both slept in a narrow bed. When I parted from this man, I breathed a sigh of relief”. (Return to Christ. Document for a New World, Bonifaciu Publishing House, Bacău, 2012, p. 324)
[8] Father Arsenie Boca also points out that “whoever has the gift of love, patience and humble thinking, in times of struggle – if he fights according to the law, and the law is love – can see wonderful things, unexpected returns to God. For example, we do not know the mysteries of God: whom he saves from the world and whom he condemns. If God knows that the one who is evil against you because of his darkness will be saved, he will be saved with your help, because he gives you the gift of patience, forgiveness of heart and prayer. In this way, because of your humility, God will overcome him and cast out the evil spirit from him. But if this brother should suffer more in a foreign bondage, or even lose his soul, if you act according to God, his wickedness will increase and he will be wild against men and against God”.
[9 The two friends in Christ were Valeriu Gafencu and Marin Naidim, with whom John would also go to the forced labour colony of Galda de Jos.
[10] Like Stalin and his collaborators, responsible for the deaths of millions of victims.
[11] Zeller was only one of the shadowy protagonists of the experiment, but Gheorghe Pintilie, Alexandru Nicolschi, Iosif Nemeș, Tudor Sepeanu, Ioan Marina and others had a greater influence.