Note on the situation of the priest Alexandru Mazilu
Dofteana Commune Town Hall
Bacău County
No. 237 / 12 March 1990
Note on relations
Dofteana Commune Town Hall, Bacău County, is aware of the situation of the priest Alexandru Mazilu, who died on 5 October 1978, of the consequences suffered by him and his family as a result of the communist persecution, of the fact that he was treated as a political prisoner, and confirms what is stated in the memoirs of Prof. Sivoglio Nicolae, associating itself with the idea of his moral rehabilitation.
Mayor,
Ing. Mihai Lăzărescu
Secretary,
Ion Păscălin
From October 1944 to October 1978, from the first arrest of the priest Alexandru Mazilu to his death, 34 years passed, 34 years of suffering, fear, sleepless nights, mistrust in the future, sadness, disappointment and horror. All of this and for what?
During so many arrests, not a single trial was ever found. And never, in all those decades, did he have the certainty that the danger of being tortured again had been removed for good. The future of his children was shattered with no hope of redress, the fate of his wife and other relatives sealed. With such grief and no consolation, he died.
Eleven years passed between October 1978 and December 1989. His widow’s shoulders were burdened with the weight of justice, trampled underfoot, asking, crying, begging for the moment when she would be heard, when someone, a supreme court, would acknowledge with a loud voice that the whole commune, the whole county, the whole of Moldova, as big as it is, the country, from head to toe, would be heard: The priest Alexandru Mazilu suffered without guilt, fell under the knife of a local revenge or, even more miserable, even more absurd, under the bureaucratic necessities that forced every county to hand over martyrs, called for the circumstance “class enemies”, preferably professing Christianity, i.e.. This is an extremely “dangerous” ideology, the exact opposite of the theory of class struggle, of hatred between people, with which the dictatorship of the proletariat motivated the Holocaust that was initiated and perfected in Romania for 45 years.
Forty-five years of Mrs. Mazilu’s existence were dedicated to the belief that God and the people would hear her!
After the revolution of December 1989, “with humility and tears in her eyes”, she asked for the post-mortem rehabilitation of her husband, who had left for a better world. What legal rehabilitation could she give him? He was not accused of anything; he was not found guilty of anything, as if he had been guilty of a lie, in which case he would have been included in the general amnesty for political prisoners granted after the revolution.
But if he had been convicted, to ask for rehabilitation through a substitute court, after the revolution, on the basis of a criminal code, on the part of bloodstained judges, means nothing more than the recognition of the judges, their court, their code, judges who, moreover, acted illegally, who also acted illegally in relation to their own code, causing countless deaths and unimaginable horrors, in the name of a state power that came to power by rigging elections, a local power supported by a foreign power against the legality of Romanian democracy.
Is it wise to give the seal of our honesty to the dishonesty of such justice? Who can benefit from a dirty court scouring the cleanliness of a fellow human being? The rehabilitation it would have proclaimed would have been an insult from which we must guard against the desecration of the dead.
But the priest Alexandru Mazilu cannot be given even this false rehabilitation, because he has never been tried. In other words, no one has found him guilty of anything.
On the other hand, with the exception of the nomenklatura, the organs of repression and those who served them with stupidity and dogmatism, there is not a single person in Romania who was not rehabilitated by the December 1989 revolution from being a slave to communism.
A trial of a post-revolutionary rehabilitation process would require the trial of millions and millions of such processes; But such trials would incontrovertibly testify to a continuity between the communist hell, which in turn called itself a “People’s Republic” and a “Socialist Republic”, and the post-revolutionary democratic state of Romania, a continuity that is basically inconceivable, even though those who took over the so-called new power, representatives of the old nomenclature, claiming to disprove it, more or less openly maintained the previous structures, institutions and laws, albeit with a veneer of democracy, until the 1996 elections.
Why do I say this? Because the very change in the legal structure of the state, the rejection – even if only pro forma – of the murderous ideology of communism of the past, the dressing up in stripes, even if only for a short time, of a handful of the main culprits, the (shameful) execution of the dictator Ceaușescu and his wife, mean that any kind of possible continuity has been abolished, just as every political guilt of yesterday has been transformed into a political merit in preparation for the overthrow of national Bolshevism.
In this way, the priest Alexandru Mazilu is recognised by the undeniable existence of the Revolution as one of the countless heroes martyred by the oppression of treachery and villainy, steamed up at the head of the kitchen, with the help of the stick, embezzlement, forgery, bloodshed.
The only rehabilitation that could wash away the memory of his honesty in the eyes of his fellow citizens is within the reach of the Dofteana Town Hall. It should appeal to the judicial authorities to identify the investigators who, one after the other, recommended that the unfortunate priest be sent to the camp, even though they found no fault worthy of a judicial file. And they should be asked to have the courage to explain to the villagers, in today’s world in which they enjoy all the rights and freedoms of citizenship, what iron fetters they themselves have been put in, and how they allowed themselves to be driven to murder, or chose to do so of their own free will, not by one but by thousands. Let this mea culpa be made to authenticate the innocence of the deceased and to reconcile their consciences, all the more so since yesterday they were beating their breasts in party meetings, on the occasion of self-criticism and public denunciation.
When such confessions are heard by all, when they are published in the newspapers for all Romanians to see, we will shout loudly to the world: Romania is rising from the ashes!
Until then, dear Mrs. Alexandrina Mazilu, assure your children that the mutilation of their father, together with all the other martyrdoms of former political prisoners, rehabilitates the Romanian Orthodox Church and our nation before history and the truth, for the almost half century preceding the supreme sacrifice of the youth in December 1989.
(Document published in Martyrdom of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Ramida Publishing House, 1994 and in the magazine Vestitorul Ortodoxiei, year VI, no. 111, 28 February 1994)
Note:
I wrote this shortly after receiving the above documents at the A.D.F.P.R., believing that they could bring comfort to the widow and children of the martyred priest Alexandru Mazilu from Dofteana. By chance, I lost my files and only found them a few years later. I don’t know what, if any, answer the Association gave. Since a copy of the documents also reached me, I still feel indebted to the presbyter Alexandrina Mazilu, out of respect for the mothers of my Christian students, who bind us in an undying solidarity, the professor and his students.
I feel indebted, as I said, to a deed, that of making public the suffering of her husband’s beloved husband, the long-suffering priest Alexandru Mazilu.
On the subject of “rehabilitation”, I believe that the applicant has been enlightened to the sad truth that, after the revolution, only the former members of Cepex enjoyed rehabilitation, which was not explicit. Today, they run prosperous companies in which they have invested the wealth they have appropriated from their victims of yesterday and by robbing the poor Romanians of the fruits of their labour for forty-five years, either through taxes or contributions of one kind or another, or by not paying their salaries. They continue to oppress the Romanian people by means of economic tyranny, maintaining their old links with the international communist mafia to which they sold their children yesterday and, it would not be surprising if we were to hear it on television one day, continue to do so.
But God has sent angels to Romania, who stood bare-chested and with flowers in their hands in front of the guns in the hands of their contemporaries. God has led us to the land of hope. Doesn’t Alexandra Mazilu believe that this divine mercy is also due to her husband’s suffering? And his prayers? Is she convinced that the December Revolution was built on the spit of yesterday’s prisoners? On their hearts, torn from their peace and thrown to the wild dogs who watched them rot alive? That Father Alexandru did nothing more than continue the tradition of the Lord Jesus Christ, allowing himself to be sacrificed, innocent as he was, for the salvation of humanity, in this case Romania?
Today the name of Father Alexandru Mazilu is printed in a book containing pages from the history of the martyrdom of the Romanian Orthodox Church, which he served in the spirit of the Gospel and not in its dead letter, he served it in its spirit, accepting martyrdom, without murmuring, without betraying his brothers, as an intercession for his own salvation. But this name has long since been written in heaven and will remain an example to his descendants.
The presbyter’s bloodless thirst for justice is understandable. But justice is not demanded of the tyrant. And do not wait for the sign of his understanding, for his understanding comes from elsewhere, not from the Lord of charity, but from the Master of the shedding of innocent blood.
Justice can only be done by the just. The wicked will perpetuate wickedness for all eternity. They must be left in their pool of blood, in the pen of iniquity, to enjoy the wrongs they have done.
To call them to justice is to cry out to a stone wall that is deaf, dumb and stiff.
(Mihai Rădulescu)