Note of Bishop Nicolae Popovici – 12 January 1950

131/12 January 1950

FILES

Popovici Nicolae, Bishop of Oradea. He was born on 3 January 1903 in the commune of Biertan, Tr. Mare County. He graduated in theology from the Faculty of Theology in Chișinău, and after studies abroad in Athens, Munich, Leipzig, Breslau and Tübingen, he returned to the country and was appointed professor at the Theological Academy “Andrean” in Sibiu, where he worked from 1930 to 1936, when he was appointed Bishop of Oradea by royal decree.

During the Antonescu dictatorship, Nicolae Popovici took part in the “religious mission” to Bessarabia, where he went with a team of priests and a deacon. He supported the work and the entire Antonescu dictatorship through preaching, pastoral and field work.

Nicolae Popovici personally asked ex-Marshal Antonescu to allow him to go to Transnistria to accompany the armies, which he was allowed to do with the permission of the General Staff, went to Tiraspol and the Crimea, and took part in the consecration of the church in Sucum. In the USSR, he worked for 6 months collecting “data against the communist regime”.

From Balaclava – Soviet Union – Nicolae Popovici brought a bell, which he installed in Beiuș.

After the 23rd of August 1944, Nicolae Popovici did not fit into the struggle for the democratisation of the clergy, he continued to have the same hostile attitude towards the Soviet Union and the regime in our country, manifesting himself through sermons and speeches of a nationalistic-Soviet character, being one of those waiting for the change of the present regime.

Thus, in February 1949, he said to a circle of friends and colleagues: “I am doing what I can, and when the “Bolshevik” danger has passed, we shall see what we shall do. I am disgusted by everything I am doing, but I am doing it to save what I can, because the foreigners have invaded us and we are being led by three “Muscovites”: Ana, Luca and Bodnaș, who counterbalance the work of the three Romanian communists: Pătrășcanu, who was imprisoned, Gheorghiu Dej and Teohari Georgescu. I liked what I saw in Maramureș. What do I care if Romanianism is anaemic in Bucharest, when it is pulsating here on the border? I came across an English magazine which said that in the event of a war with the USSR and its satellites, 25,000 planes would be launched and their base would be in Turkey. Every evening, and especially at night, there are numerous sounds of planes flying from west to east at an altitude of 10-12 thousand metres, scouting the targets to be bombed”.

The anti-democratic-nationalist-Soviet activity of Nicolae Popovici – is also characterised by the following facts:

In his speech of 27 February 1949 in the Prefectural Hall of Maramureș, in which he spoke about Horia, Cloșca and Crișan, he emphasised the following words of Horia: “I am dying for the people, for the Romanian land conquered by foreigners”, implying that our country was occupied by “foreigners”.

Nicolae Popovici supported and recommended the fraudulent crossing of the border by a group of Catholic seminarians, who had been left unoccupied, as well as a transport of unblocked Orthodox officers, justifying this by mentioning that, although he was Orthodox, he was “Romanian and clever”.

Nicolae Popovici also completely neglected the process of unifying the two Churches and even made it difficult for the missionaries. He made it difficult for the monks of the Drăesti monastery and Abbot Huma to carry out their missionary work, and was content to send reports to the Patriarchate on the success of his work to strengthen the union. When the new vicar of the diocese of Oradea was appointed, in the person of the priest Coman Andrei, who had returned to Orthodoxy, the bishop tried to remove him from his residence and install him in the residence of the former Greek Catholic diocese, giving him things of the least importance in order to compromise him. Despite the fact that at present he has entrusted all things of an active nature to Vicar Coman Andrei, Nicolae Popovici still imposes his point of view, which is why Vicar Coman cannot carry out his work with his free consent, because the Bishop considers the unification to be “provisional”, until the “change of regime”, which is why he does not work sincerely with the returned priests, and in general has a malicious attitude towards the returnees, thus hindering the act of unification. Similarly, the antemension (cloths and vestments) needed for the services sent by the Holy Synod to the returned Churches were not distributed to these Churches on the grounds that “if the regime changes” they should not be accused of being imprudent in giving them. When the economic commission of the diocese decided to give some aid to the poorer parishes, Bishop Popovici said that “no aid will be given to anyone, all resources will be taken (farms, forests, etc.). But if the political situation changes, which is expected soon, then there will be sources of income again and the parishes will be helped”.

At the diocesan meeting of 15 May 1949, Nicolae Popovici gave a speech in which he said, among other things:

“Throughout history, the Church has often had to fight to defend her autonomy, from which her inexpressible rights and freedoms flow as from a spring. The Church has never consented to this, nor has it ever consented to be reduced to the role of an internal or external political auxiliary. The Church has never consented and cannot consent to live in the straitjacket of such measures and has always fought for their destruction or abolition.

In this context, we must confess, without mincing words and in all honesty, that our ecclesial life is greatly and painfully affected by the increasingly frequent and audacious attempts of external factors to interfere in the internal affairs of the Church. This interference has reached a scale and a seriousness that are unprecedented in our history.

Now that the ecclesiastical hierarchs, those wise and faithful counsellors of all times, have been excluded, for the first time in the history of the nation, from the work of legislating the country, all legislation concerning the great and fundamental questions of the Church has been made unilaterally, without her real consultation, and in disregard or circumvention of her legitimate wishes. A “de nobis sine nobis” legislation, lacking the basic principles of true democracy.

It is no wonder that such laws cannot be made out of the conviction of our hearts or approved by our consciences. Thus we ended up with a statute of organisation without the debate and approval of the National Church Congress, a law on cults without the knowledge of the Plenary Synod, the dissolution of historic dioceses without the opinion of those responsible, diocesan assemblies without the vote of the people, the appointment of protopopes according to the foreign and spiteful proposals of those alien to our nation and faith, a law on education with the brutal elimination of religion against the will of the masses of the people, and so many others.

Our priests, beloved and much-tested, overcoming in many places the cheap mockery and the flimsy and feeble criticism of some so-called intellectuals from villages and towns, as well as the obstacles of some overzealous and provocative extremists, have gathered around the ancestral altars the children of the nation, the hope of the country’s future, to teach them the law of God, the law of life, the law of virtue, the law of holiness.

In this sense, we also pause for a moment to think of our older faithful, especially those in the cities, civil servants, teachers, soldiers, craftsmen, etc. We hope and pray that they too will be given a real guarantee of Sunday rest and the unsupervised and unsupervised exercise of their religious duties, by eliminating all moral pressures and artificial obstacles such as “voluntary work, conferences, cinemas, artistic and sporting programmes, with compulsory participation, fixed precisely during the hours of Holy Liturgy”.

On 6 June 1949, Nicolae Popovici came to the Ministry of Religious Affairs to discuss the cases of some priests and asked to see the secret correspondence of the Ministry, which the director of the cadres, Dobocan Ioan, refused to give him: “Mr. Dobocan, do you realise that 80% of the leadership is in the hands of Jews and Hungarians? You are Romanian, not Jewish, and you should behave accordingly”.

On another occasion, Nicolae Popovici told several friends: “We are living in hard times and every Romanian has to be saved. I must save even the murderer of my father, if he is Hungarian, so that there are more of us. Today we are very few because we are overrun by foreigners. Most of our politicians are in prison, our intellectuals are on the streets, without jobs, without the possibility of existence, and only foreigners are at the head of the country and in high positions. Even the most Romanian institution, the army, has been overrun by foreigners. A Jew went in as a civilian and came out as a captain (alluding to the Security Service)”.

In July and August 1949, Nicolae Popovici visited several communes in the county. Maramureș, preaching sermons of a chauvinist nature and hostile to the democratic regime. Thus, in this respect, he held in com. Ieud-Maramureș, where he declared that “the Unification was made to unite all Romanians, to prevent others from ruling the country and to ensure the rule of the Romanians in their country”.

Also in the commune of Cuhnea-Maramures, he told the provisional committee of the commune that had come to receive him that “Our roads do not meet, we go one way and the authorities another, but we are happy when we find someone who comes back to us from that road”. In the monastery of Moisei-Maramures, Popovici declared that “although I have encountered many difficulties with the authorisations I have received from the authorities, I have nevertheless come to pray for the rich and the poor”, and he urged the faithful to preserve their faith and customs, because Christianity would not be defeated by anyone, adding that “many fools, both in the past and today, have tried to obstruct the path of Christianity”.

On 9 November 1949, Popovici received a visit from Bishop Nicolae Colan of Cluj, who advised him to accept the bishopric of Galati, to which Popovici replied that he remained firm in his position and would do what he thought best, even though he was surrounded by spies.

On 10 November 1949, after the ordination of a group of young theologians, Popovici asked them to be strong and, whatever came and whatever happened to him, to look coldly to the future and to realise that the Church would emerge strengthened from its trials.

At the meeting of the Eparchial Council held in Oradea on 11 November 1949, when Protopope Magdău of Sighet reported that the People’s Council, which had occupied the building of the former Maramureș bishopric, had asked the Protopope to evacuate the chapel and to transfer the objects to a church in that locality, Popovici, hearing this, stood up and said: “We will not give in, we will not give anything. If they dare to expel us, the time will come when they will have to take them back with their hands and their backs. They don’t believe how close those times are”.

Speaking to the priest Marin Păunescu shortly afterwards, Nicolae Popovici said: “Do you know, Father Păunescu, where the longest queue will be? Not for bread, nor for anything else, but at the snake pit. They will not be able to escape the snake pit either, because there will be many of them and the pit will be very narrow.

Tomorrow it will be the same for Czeller, Rabinovich, Mihalka and others who were thrown out of the Party. Thanks to them, thanks to chauvinism, we have in the country a permanent spirit of hidden hatred between neighbouring nationalities on the one hand, and between the various state institutions and the Orthodox Church on the other. The hatred of the government or the ministry comes from the Jews and Hungarians of Oradea, who hate me and are driven by a fierce chauvinism.

Do you know the latest news? The arrest of Takacs, the Minister for Minorities in Transylvania, with many others to follow; see what will follow in Oradea and elsewhere. They are all in complete decay and their time is coming”.

The Bishop’s relations with the civil servants are marked by a commanding attitude, and he refuses to talk to the trade union bodies. Instead, he helps the families of people under investigation for their anti-democratic activities, as in the case of the official Petrugan Maria, whom he paid to travel to Cluj, allegedly in the interest of the service, so that she could attend the trial of her husband, the legionnaire Ioan Petrugan.

At a plenary meeting of the diocese, he dismissed the trade union representative because he did not agree with the appointments and promotions that the bishop had made without consulting the others.

In his dealings with the faithful, Nicolae Popovici has attempted to obtain illegal material benefits, for example by demanding high fees for refraining from marrying fifth and sixth degree relatives.

Recently, Nicolae Popovici has sent various addresses to the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Patriarchate, accusing them of “interfering” in the internal affairs of the Church and of “violating” the sacred canons, with rude allusions to our regime, the bishop trying to collect “material for later”, on the basis of which he can justify his reason for coming into conflict with the state authorities.

In his New Year’s sermon, Nicolae Popovici delivered a particularly inflammatory sermon in which he said, among other things: “The half century that has passed over us has been the age of sin and atheism. The human mind has invented many things, murderous weapons, tanks, aeroplanes and the atom, so that the ravages of war could destroy thousands of people and everything that had been built. Science and culture in this age have been and are in the service of earthly man and not in the service of the One Above, and for this reason the world has suffered and will suffer. We do not lack science and culture, but we lack Christ, salvation, freedom of body and soul. We do not weep after these 50 years, but we hope that the next 50 years, and especially the holy year of 1950, will bring relief, forgiveness and consolation, according to the Scriptures, to those who have lost their property, their homes, their freedom and their souls. We have given and will give what is Caesar’s, but we will not let what is God’s be taken from us.

Parents, take care of your children, educate them in the spirit of the Gospel, because you have a responsibility before God, do not leave them in cinemas and sports grounds, where young people are taken by force and where they receive an anti-religious education.

Bring them to the Church, for there they will receive the education that pleases Christ.

We send blessings to our soldiers who are not left in the Church as in the past, so that they may receive the blessing at the beginning of the year. Do not forget and pray and have the courage to follow the examples of our great ancestors, Stephen the Great, Michael the Brave, Horia, Cloșca and Crișan, Avram Iancu and others, great fighters of our nation. May they be a source of courage for you throughout your lives.

We send the blessing of the Church to the rulers of the country, asking them to protect us with deeds and not with words, in the spirit of brotherly love, so that the rulers may be loved by the sons of the country as the father loves the son and each other.

We send our blessing to those who are imprisoned, to those who are suffering, to those who have lost hope for the future, we send our encouragement along with our blessing and we say to them: Lift up your hearts that there is salvation, but only if you pray and ask”.

In the afternoon of the 6th of January, this year of Epiphany, Bishop Nicolae Popovici gave a sermon in which he said, among other things, that the year 1950 is the decisive year in which all those who are without God will perish and the unjust will be removed.

(ACNSAS, Informative fund, file 2669, vol. 1, pp. 31-37. Document reproduced in The Courage to Speak: Bishop Nicolae Popovici of Oradea, edited by George Enache and Adrian Nicolae Petcu, Partener Publishing House, Galati, 2009, pp. 123-128).