Martyr of the communist regime: Father Petre Focșăneanu
After the Sunday of the Romanian Saints, as a natural continuation of the sacrifice of the Romanian nation, it is appropriate to remember those who kept the candle of faith burning, from the apostles Andrew and Philip to the contemporaries Dumitru Stăniloae and Ilie Cleopa. In this chain of sanctity and the Romanian faith, no stone can be left unturned, which is why we must not continue to believe in an untouchable sanctity, something from the past that ceased to exist ten centuries ago, but we must strive to discover it with the particularities of each age and, finally, to live it according to eternal models.
The years of the communist regime, which seemed to want to erase the faith and holiness of this nation, anchored in Christ for 2,000 years, achieved the opposite of what was intended: it gave the Romanian Orthodox Church an endless stream of martyrs. An encyclopaedia of a few thousand pages would not be enough to record the sacrifice of these martyrs of the Romanian faith: priests, lawyers, philosophers, doctors, peasants, who paid with their lives and the lives of their families so that today we can bow our knees at the Liturgy.
Faith and honour
“I have never done any kind of politics, because I consider politics to be a degradation of the priesthood” – Father Petre Focșăneanu stated bluntly after the accusations of the regime (Martyrs for Christ, from Romania, during the communist regime, ed. IBMBOR, 2007, p. 241).
Born on 18 April 1914 in the commune of Podu Turcului, Bacău County, Fr. Focșăneanu attended the theological seminary in Galați, which he continued for only two years at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest “due to lack of funds”. His ministry as a priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church began in 1935, when he was ordained a priest in the village of țiplești, Bălți County. After five years, he had to take refuge in the Old Kingdom and serve Christ in the Church of St. George – Old Ploiești.
A year later, on 1 October 1941, he returned to his first parish on the other side of the Prut, and in 1943 he went to the front. There he served on the Eastern Front with the rank of Captain Confessor in the 1st Mountain Division to serve the Romanian Army on the front in Transylvania.
After the war, he served for another year in a parish in Prahova, before returning across the Prut River to the parish of Podu Turcului. In December 1949, he was transferred to the parish of Nistorești, Vrancea County, where he endured countless “harassments” from the authorities.
Accusations and beatings
The first accusations began in 1948, when Father Focșăneanu was arrested as a “legionnaire”, following a denunciation by a local resident, for having uttered a phrase during a wedding sermon that predicted the imminent fall of the Communist regime: “This persecution lasts, and the other persecutions that surround us will soon be swept away” (ibid., p. 240).
This was only a pretext for much more serious accusations against the servant of Christ and his family. Father would be released after the efforts of his wife, who proved the malice of the investigating officer in the case.
The persecution did not stop there. A year later, Father Petre Focșăneanu was arrested for no clear reason and managed to escape from the Tecuci Security Service prison the following night. He was caught in less than 24 hours, as those to whom he sought refuge with a bleeding hand refused to help him, not even with clothes or shoes.
Once in the Galați Security Service prison, he is obliged to sign a pledge to the National Security and to give information on request and on his own initiative. This was after his wife, Melania Focșăneanu, had been arrested, investigated and humiliated.
According to the documents in the information file, Father Petre, who was given the conspiratorial name “Zeus”, never gave any information to the Security Service and was closely watched by the communist authorities.
It was his courage and faith that led Father Focșăneanu to join resistance groups in the Vrancea Mountains in 1950. Interrogations, accusations, testimonies, sentences of “10 years’ imprisonment, three years’ prohibition and a fine of 20,000 lei”.
17 June 1953: at the age of 39, Father Petre Focșăneanu received the martyrdom for Christ in the prison of Gherla, “apparently after a punishment of solitary confinement and the beatings to which he was subjected for having carried out the service of the Holy Resurrection” (ibidem, p. 244), and it was only three years later that his family learned of his passage to the Lord.
(Roxana Dragoș – Argeșul Ortodox Magazine, Year VI, no. 317 of 14-20 July 2007, p. 3)