Man of God – Father Ioan from Recea

At Recea monastery near Târgu-Mureș, the church is always full. The faithful, who come by the thousands from all over the country, struggle to listen to their confessor, Father Ioan Iovan.

Waiting for the ordeal

Inside the high church, with its spires raised to the sky like two hands in prayer, the priest’s voice resounds like a mystical bell. Even a simple onlooker shudders. The priest’s words come from deep within. They have power.

He spoke of Christ as if He were there, right next to him. “The Saviour is with us. He is here, on the holy table”. Not a day went by when he didn’t preach about the Sacrament of Communion. “Let us stand upright, let us stand in fear”. His words carry the measure and weight of prayer, of many years of hard imprisonment, during which he celebrated Holy Liturgy every day – a unique case among arrested Orthodox priests. 

Strengthened in his faith, with fasting and uninterrupted prayer, Father John transformed the barred cell into an altar. Instead of icons, he used his finger dipped in water to draw the saving sign of the cross on the weathered plaster of the wall. In 1955, on the day of his arrest, the Securitate guards confiscated his epitrachelion as if it were an incriminating corpus delicti. Father was waiting for them. He had sewn on the back of his shirt his antimension, obligatory when celebrating Liturgy, and the pottery was a previously consecrated medicine chest. The ordeal could begin. Father John was ready.

Father John is not an easy man to talk to. In the Recea monastery, the faithful wait 2-3 days for their turn to go to confession. Moreover, without much explanation, the priest refuses to talk to the press. What is the point of exposing your wounds, the deep marks of the handcuffs that are still visible on your wrists, in front of everyone? On several occasions, the priest mentioned Mother Mihaela Iordache and the other anonymous people who died as martyrs in prison, unceasingly confessing Christ. The mere fact of living is no reason for praise. Everything is given by God, including trials and the strength to face them without selling one’s soul.

“It’s a miracle that I came out of prison alive,” says Father, “but the greatest miracle in a cell is to keep your sanity, to endure to the end and thank God, even in the darkest suffering.”

In the room of death, where water flowed incessantly down the walls

Arrested after a cruel plot, accused of inciting terrorism and sentenced to hard labour for life, Father Ioan followed the way of his cross step by step: Galați, Jilava, Văcărești, Gherla, Bacău, Aiud. Imprisoned in Galați, in a cell without windows and without a stove, he underwent a cruel examination which gave him Tbc ganglion, while his hands – due to the cold and the misery – were so badly cracked that he could see the phalanges of his fingers through the open wounds. In Gherla, after the Hungarian uprising, he had to endure the brutal beatings ordered by Commander Goiciu, who beat him with a crowbar and a wet sheet in the presence of the doctor, who was ready to intervene when the punished man fainted. Then, at Aiud, when dysentery was ravaging the prisoners, he was forced to spend weeks in a small, overcrowded cell where, because of the pestilential smell from the toilet and the plank-like windows, someone died every day, to the cynical amazement of the guards, who almost laughed at the morning inspection: “Only two have died here?”.

Harder than the cold, hunger and beatings were the humiliations. It wasn’t the body that the secret police wanted to destroy, but the soul. Panting silently, the priest still marvels at the strength God gave him not to give in. If, during the re-education in Pitești, the theological students were made to celebrate Holy Liturgy with a bowl of their own excrement, in Bacău the priest had to sit for hours in a torturous position, bent from the waist, with his hands on his toes, and then someone else saddled him, saying in a heavy profanity: “Now the Saviour is entering Jerusalem, riding on a donkey”.

“The greatest humiliation,” Father recalls, “was on the first day of Easter, when, after Liturgy with my fellow prisoners, I spoke about the Resurrection of the Lord. A guard, a Tatar by nationality, whom we nicknamed ‘the square head’, listened to me from behind his visor, opened the door and handed me over to the officer in charge, who ordered me to cut off my beard. It was no use trying to defend myself by talking about the right of prisoners of other faiths to wear beards. Two guards rushed at me, grabbed me and the officer cut it with scissors. His gesture disturbed me deeply and I told him without fear: “You are an Orthodox Christian, the son of a peasant from Minteiu Gherlei. How can you make such a mockery on Easter Day? Then I cried with my cellmates, not so much for the suffering as for the humiliation caused by a Romanian brother. But the officer did not forget my courage in confronting him. As a punishment, he demanded that I be transferred to the dirtiest cell in Gherla, where water was constantly running down the walls, directed in a certain way. It seems unbelievable, but the straw underneath me rotted within days. Normally no one could stand the cold and damp. I’m only alive now by a miracle of God.

“I can’t and won’t forget prison”

Calm and quiet as deep water, the priest recounts terrible things that seem to have been experienced by someone else: the dead men dragged out of their cells like bales of straw; the 70 blows with a crowbar inflicted on the airman Dumitru Cucu; the priest Mircea from Liteni, who died when he heard that his wife had divorced him; the political prisoner from Jilava, whom the guards left to dig a gallery so that they could catch and shoot him if he tried to escape. Beyond the cruelty of the details, the father’s voice betrays a certain nostalgia, a slight regret, like a breeze from afar. “I can’t and won’t forget the prison. It was there that I experienced the most uplifting spiritual moments of my life. I was born there for the second time and God gave me countless miracles to experience, to know His power. After 64 I was investigated and imprisoned three more times. Each time I regretted getting out”. Amidst the snowy whips of the years, Father sees with his mind’s eye. There are disturbing scenes and events that time will never erase: the night he dreamt of his mother, for example. It was a daydream in which Father’s mother was surrounded by beautiful flowers while the rest of the family looked on next door, candles in hand. Seven months later, when he was called to the speaker, he asked his father, who had come alone: “What happened to my mother? What happened on the 5th of February? Hearing this, the poor man collapsed on the wire fence and barely whispered: “I broke my mourning, I had a glass of wine to pluck up courage, but I see you know”. In fact, on 5 February, the night of the dream, Father’s mother had died.

Miracles are neither big nor small. They happen simply, shockingly and inexplicably. “I was in Gherla,” Father John continued. “A group of Romanian prisoners pardoned by the Soviets had just arrived, prisoners whom the Romanian Securitate forces had waited for in Ungheni and then, after a cursory investigation, sentenced them back to hard years in prison. Outraged by this wickedness, and knowing that our new colleagues had not received Holy Communion for many years, I decided to send them the sacraments. The means of transport was the “donkey”, a large bag in which the object to be sent was placed. It was tied with a string and a makeshift pulley was used to lower the bag between the shutters. At the same time, the recipients were announced by tapping on the barrel in Morse code. Halfway through, the spotlight caught the “donkey” and the alarm went off. The guards came straight to our cell. Even as my colleagues were ripping open the bag and shoving it into the corner of a mattress, the guard came to me and asked about the bag, which had a black cross stitched on it. I knew what was going to happen to me, but without a moment’s hesitation I acknowledged all that I had done for our brothers, who were already suffering enough among the strangers. At that moment something happened. The guard, notorious for his brutality, said nothing, bowed his head and warned me: “Because you were honest, nothing will happen to you. Don’t let it happen again or you’ll be in solitary confinement”. I was to see for myself some time later that God had softened the guard’s heart. I had just celebrated Holy Liturgy, with the Greek Catholic priest Nicolae Opriș from Bonțida as cantor, when towards the end of the service the same guard opened his visor, entered the cell and violently pushed my colleague on duty. Although I was in great danger, I didn’t stop. I continued to celebrate Liturgy as if nothing had happened. At the end, the guard called me to the bean slot and, surprisingly, instead of shouting and swearing, he said to me in a low voice: “Because you didn’t interrupt Liturgy and because you considered me a Christian, I won’t do anything to you”. From that moment on he became our ally. Whenever there was a search, he would try to get our attention by smashing a bottle on the floor and shouting: “Why are you sleeping over there? Other guards, more dog-like, glued felt to the soles of their boots so as not to be heard. My colleagues were inventive and found a remedy for this shortcoming. They sprinkled a little sand in front of the door to warn us of any movement. In the dungeon, the weakest is the strongest. When you have nothing, you have everything. You have God”.

Holy Liturgy with birds

Prison teaches you a lot, and you can achieve things you never thought possible. In the cells of communist persecution, prisoners wrote on the soles of their boots, painted pictures on their tin mesh, wrote poems on pieces of cloth, wove warm coats and shorts from scraps of flannel, gave scientific lectures and astonished the audience with their knowledge. Dinu Mateescu knew the New Testament by heart, while Cucu, an aviator, “edited” an entire English dictionary on the back of his shirt. For his part, Father Ioan celebrated Holy Liturgy every day. He did it so fervently and passionately that on Sundays, at the time of Liturgy, the windowsill of the cell was filled with birds, as if they too were waiting for the soft, silent songs of the prisoners. Punished time and again because his uneven boots (one was 46, the other 42) gave the impression that he was never standing in a regular position, the priest learnt patience and the profound virtues of humility in prison. “In Jilava I experienced the most intense feeling of being a priest. One day I was taken to the forge to be transferred to Gherla. I chose a necklace from among those thrown by a common prisoner. Then I venerated it and kissed it, thinking of the Passion of the Apostle Paul. I admit that I didn’t choose the chain very well. Instead of getting one that was thicker and longer, I chose one that seemed shorter and lighter. The blacksmith caught me and placed my foot on the anvil, and as he struck the rivets, the metal bit thirstily into the living flesh of my feet – marks I still bear today. Thus equipped, and with American handcuffs on my hands, I made my way back to the cell with the usual curses: “Move along, bandit!”. Halfway there, careful to keep my balance, I suddenly felt a terrible blow on my back. Then I felt the miracle – I was off balance, but I didn’t fall. I even felt the power of God strengthening me to keep my mind unclouded by hatred, and I said to the guard who had struck me: “May the Lord God and our Saviour Jesus Christ forgive you, my spiritual son, by name, and blot out all your sins, and may I, the unworthy spiritual priest, by the power vested in me, forgive you and absolve you of all your sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. At that moment I understood that I was truly a Christian and a priest. I had confessed with all my heart. The one who had beaten me was immediately silent and frightened. Humility and forgiveness had overcome hatred and bestiality”.

“Our hope: we are born Christians, not made Christians”.

Father Ioan Iovan has many stories to tell: how he was miraculously saved from death several times; how a simple peasant from Baia died after receiving Holy Communion, saying like a true confessor of Christ: “Please, Father, tell home that I died a Christian death, like a good Romanian”. He endured all the sufferings without murmuring, but he had the strength to cry out during the trial: “The Romanian people are not atheists… God does not ask us to give to the atheist Caesar what is Caesar’s”. These are things that young people or those who think they are suffering should know and think about. We are stronger than we think and weaker than we want to be. Seen from the height of Father John’s 80 years, life appears as a light-filled pain. “Let us grasp Christ as our Saviour,” urges Father earnestly. “Otherwise we will find him as our judge when nothing can be done. Let us always remember his words: ‘Rejoice, I have overcome the world. Do not let the troubles of the world darken your heart. God never leaves us. Let us not lose hope and close the window to worldly challenges. All evil and terrible despair come from unbelief. How can you not believe in Christ, in eternity? That is where all the sicknesses and all the downfalls of today’s world come from”.

Father was 33 years old when he was imprisoned. “I ate fire and thought only of the death of a martyr. I wanted to die on my knees, praying. I had to go through so many trials to realise that the prison cell is still a monk’s cell. To be strong, you must always have God with you. In prison I thought every day that it is God who locks the cell, not the guard. Everywhere you can be saved. That’s why I say to young people: check the compass of your conscience, and keep it fixed on God. The religious indifference of today’s world is the worst disease – a new atheism. It’s like a cross between old communism and new atheism. Let us not go astray and end up in the situation of an unwilling bottom and an incapable top. We have an enormous dowry, that of being born and not made Christians. This is the source of my optimism. We have an ancient Christian strength that will help us to finally see the light”.

(Sorin Preda, “Man of God – Father Ioan de la Recea” in Formula AS magazine number 732, 2006)