Priest Ioan Constantinescu, a hero of the altar and of the freedom of the Romanian nation

In the chronicle of the anti-totalitarian resistance in Romania, the operations launched by the “Haiducii Muscelului” partisan group, which operated on the southern slopes of the Făgăraș Mountains, constitute a reference episode in the struggle against the Communist regime imposed by force, by the “liberating” Soviet troops. In the unequal confrontation with the repressive apparatus of the totalitarian communist state, many sons and daughters of the Muscelian lands heroically fell to their duty, keeping alive, by their example, the living flame of hope for the restoration of the ideals of freedom on the sacred soil of the homeland.

The exaggeration of the “guilt” of the participants in this heroic struggle, in the “rhetoric” of the aberrant “democratic-popular” justice, totally subordinated to a regime of repression of freedom of conscience, was part of the well-known practice of the communist torturers.

Guilty without guilt

Sentence of the Military Tribunal of the 2nd Military Region no. 107 of 19 May 1959, which condemned to death an apostle of freedom, after recording elements of a purely biographical nature, inserted a shocking guilt by distorting the truth: “CONSTANTINESCU IOAN, born on 19 October 1906, in the village Cerbureni, commune Valea Iașului; son of Gheorghe and Victoria, resident in the village Poenărei, commune Corbi; priest, married, father of three children, was recruited into the terrorist gang – sic! – Arnăuțoiu, in the autumn of 1951, by Andreescu Nicolae, a priest from Nucșoara, and a few days later he provided the gang with a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, which were hidden in the church tower of Poenărei, where his brother-in-law, Popescu Gheorghe, had placed them and where he conducted services. In this way, he gave the fugitive gang members the opportunity to take possession of 10 military weapons of various calibres and systems, as well as a large quantity of ammunition. He personally handed over to the fugitive terrorists a T.T. pistol and 100 cartridges that he had obtained from the gang’s supporters”.

The operation to obfuscate the truth, orchestrated by the terrible security of Pitești, through a hideous, pre-arranged scenario, included the false accusation of the parish priest’s involvement in the act of storing weapons in the church tower where he served and, obviously, in the provision of weapons and ammunition to the partisans in the Făgăraș Mountains. The detailed testimony given to the Securitate by the priest Nicolae Andreescu concerning the weapons and ammunition hidden in the attic of the church in Poenărei by the teacher Gheorghe Popescu, reveals the context of the recruitment by the partisans of the parish priest of the church which, without his knowledge, had been transformed into an arms depot for the anti-Communist armed resistance action: “Ion Constantinescu told me that he knew nothing about the existence of an arms depot in the attic of the church in Poenărei”.

Caught in a trap

The timing of the “recruitment” of the parish priest of the church of Poenărei, at the request of the partisans Petre and Toma Arnăuțoiu, was chosen with great skill by the priest Nicolae Andreescu… Since the return journey of the priest Ioan Constantinescu, with whom he had celebrated the funeral of the parishioner Gheorghe Băcioiu near Corbșori, passed by the stable where the partisans were hiding, the priest Nicolae Andreescu had agreed with them that, if the priest Ioan Constantinescu agreed to see them, he would challenge him to “a discussion about the gang, so that they could personally hear what he said” and decide accordingly: “I told Constantinescu Ion that I had met the terrorists Arnăuțoiu Toma and Arnăuțoiu Petre and that they had information about the existence of an arms cache in the attic of the church in Poenărei. Ion Constantinescu told me that he knew nothing. I then told him everything I had learnt and asked Constantinescu Ion if he would have the courage to meet the bandits and give them the weapons. Although Constantinescu Ion had shown and expressed disbelief at what I had told him, he still said he had the courage to meet them. I agreed and promised to put him in touch with the fugitives, telling him that they were in the attic of the stable on my property by the Doamna River, about 100 metres from where we were having this conversation. Arriving near the stable, I asked Constantinescu Ion in a loud voice: What would you do if you met Toma Arnăuțoiu now, to which Constantinescu Ion replied: Mind your business, you’re joking, they’re not there! As we had agreed, we said the Cantemir password, and Constantinescu Ion and I went to the stable; Arnăuțoiu Toma came down first, and then Arnăuțoiu Petre, and in this way the connection was made between the gang and Constantinescu Ion”.[1] An unfortunate meeting, on the way from a funeral, a way that was to lead the parish priest of the church in Poenărei to his own death…

Obviously, in this dramatic situation, with no way out, he agreed to meet the partisans, probably convinced that only they could save him from an extremely dangerous situation, since both his personal freedom and his profession as a priest were at stake… As a priest, he would certainly have been accused by the leadership of the Romanian Orthodox Church of desecrating the place of worship entrusted to him by keeping weapons in the attic of the church, and at the same time the Security Service would have accused him of having hidden the weapons in this “unimaginable place, even for its investigators”, intended for partisans operating in the mountains…

Getting rid of the weapons – if they really existed in his church! – seemed to him, of course, the only way out of this terrible impasse… So the priest left himself in the hands of fate, because another irresponsible hand of his family, that of the teacher Gheorghe Popescu, who lived opposite the church, had desecrated the place of worship in Poenărei… The testimony of the priest Ioan Constantinescu during the cruel interrogations carried out by the Security Sservice is intended, among other things, to establish the dramatic existential context in which the parish priest of the church would continue to bear the cross of his life: “After I had made the acquaintance of the terrorists Toma and Petre Arnăuțoiu, they told me that there were military weapons hidden in the attic of the church, while asking me for the key to get them. During our conversations, the terrorists told me that they had come to do me this great good and that, in order to do so, I would also have to support them materially in the future”.[2] A blackmail that the priest Ioan Constantinescu would have to accept, because the way of revealing to the communist authorities this action, in which the partisans, a priest friend and, above all, his brother-in-law, the teacher Gheorghe Popescu, were involved, was a way of betrayal that would have eaten away at his Christian soul for the rest of his life…

The absurd chain of accusations of “collaboration”, brutally extracted through torture, will be refuted in the intimate “trial” of the family, through “confession” from soul to soul, when the testimony of the priest’s wife, Justina Constantinescu, herself sentenced to 15 years hard labour for “failure to denounce”, will separate the lie from the truth, When the testimony of the priest’s wife, Justina Constantinescu, herself sentenced to 15 years hard labour for “omission of denunciation”, separates the lie from the truth, and states that the “accused” had been informed by the priest Nicolae Andreescu of the existence of weapons intended for the partisans, secretly stored in the attic of the village church by the teacher Gheorghe Popescu – shocking news for the priest Ioan Gh. Constantinescu, who considered the desecration of the holy place in this unimaginable way “a cruel, undeserved punishment, given by God, especially since he had worked hard to build this house of God from the ground up” – the monumental wooden church “Cuvioasa Paraschiva”, built between 1937 and 1943, according to the design of the famous Muscelian architect Dimitrie Ionescu-Berechet.

Shock in the community

Family testimonies always have the stamp of authenticity, because the otherwise motivated tendency to dilute the truth in a sea of uncertainties and hopes, tainted by the prospect of the Communist “gulag”, disappears. The repetition of the monstrous sentence that ‘the priest Ion Constantinescu personally armed himself with a military rifle, a shotgun and a pistol in order to be ready to act against the state’ is a gross insolence that turns truth into lies.

The community of Poenărei, which he had led with dedication and self-sacrifice, would certainly not have accepted such a serious accusation, “concocted” by the agents of evil, against the parish priest of their village, whose moral conduct was exemplary. It was not easy to erase from the memory of the community the faithful image of their confessor, the caretaker of the community, who, through his intervention, had brought about the electrification of the village of Poenărei before other larger localities in the vicinity, who was constantly concerned not only for the health of the souls of those entrusted to his worthy care, but also for the health of the body, The parish priest, Ioan Constantinescu, gave first aid to some of the poor people of the village who were unable to go to hospital, giving them the injections prescribed by the doctor, even tooth extractions, their parish priest being, as one of the villagers confessed, “our holy unmercenary”.

A confessor in the truest sense of the word, who helped the helpless, who made the lonely feel that they lived in a united community that felt that they belonged to it without any discrimination, the priest Ioan Constantinescu had the reputation of a true spiritual shepherd, who, in the words of the same parishioner, was “an inexhaustible source of healing”, who, out of his faith, watered the souls of discouraged people who came to him for confession, sometimes from far away from the village of Poenărei. It is therefore completely absurd to make imaginary accusations, to label as a “terrorist” a man who only served the truth and charity, on the pretext of his participation, under the conspiratorial name of “Micu”, in the group of “Partisans of Freedom”, perhaps the strongest national anti-communist resistance group, which is not only geographically, but also morally, on the highest level, due to the firm stance that its members have consistently taken against the false egalitarian precepts that are being spread everywhere, along the meridians and parallels of the homeland, by the “red racket” stirred up by the Asian Bolshevism of the “geniuses” of the bankrupt Marxist-Leninist ideology.

The absence of a conspiracy in the place where the “partisans of freedom” were sheltered – about a kilometre from the priest’s house, in a cave in the Râpile cu Brazi – the constant help with food, the provision of sources of information (a radio) and other “conspiratorial” material concerning the evolution or, more precisely, the involution, more precisely, the involution of the scourge of the “red plague” in the country and throughout the world, the spiritual nourishment offered to the partisans by means of books with religious content (a Bible, a Cazanie, etc.) and the provision of “conspiratorial” material (a radio, etc.). ), but also patriotic (verses by the martyred poet Radu Gyr and other freedom fighters), constituted “charges” that did not provide sufficient grounds for the application of articles of the Communist Penal Code that provided for the death penalty for such “crimes” against state security. In its criminal alchemy, the “People’s Democratic Justice” deliberately lied about the priest’s grave guilt by claiming that he had “masterminded numerous acts of terrorism against state institutions and members of the PMR” and that he had “played a particularly important role in the failure to detect the gang in time”.

Confessor and man of culture

Author of important studies and articles of moral-religious and methodological content published in ecclesiastical periodicals: “The Practical Method of Teaching Religious Education in the Elementary School” (1944), “Our Ancestral Customs and Habits” (1940), “Christian Love” (1939), “On the Necessity of Religion in Man” (1936), “The Sacred Mystery of Marriage” (1935), “The Good Education of Children” (1933), and others. … the priest Ioan Constantinescu was accused of procuring “counter-revolutionary propaganda material”, of copying and distributing in the village and elsewhere the forbidden verses of the martyr-poet Radu Gyr. The priest Ioan Constantinescu, who knew the bard from Camppulunge personally, hid the precious testimony of a version of his lyrical “manifesto” calling for a holy revolt against atheistic communism.

A certain spiritual communion must have been established between the poet and the scholarly priest from Poenărei, who, among other things, stressed in his articles the regenerative power of religion in the life of the Romanian people: “Religious beliefs”, he wrote in his study “The Practical Method of Teaching Religious Education in Primary School”[3], “form a fund of the soul common to all believers, and when this fund of ideas, feelings and customs is common to the whole nation, then religion is a great force of life for the nation, for all its sons and daughters feel more united in the face of dangers of any kind that threaten them”.

With this conviction, he will have set out to fight the enemies of religion, the infidels, the godless…

For fear of being discovered by the repressive organs of the Securitate, the manuscript of Radu Gyr’s poem, entrusted to him for safekeeping, was condemned to “purgatory” along with other testimonies, and it was only thanks to the memorisation of the verses by the priest’s daughter, prof. Iuliana Constantinescu-Preduț – who was also sentenced to 12 years of hard labour for “omission of denunciation” – that one of the versions of the poem “Get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane” could be saved, thus restoring to the collective memory the verses omitted from the version published in the magazine “Memoria” no. 3 of 1992: “With the cross through the soul of bitter desires,/ with desires crucified under black persecutions,/ with dreams killed by cruel terror,/ get up, Gheorghe, get up, Ioane!

Executed in Jilava

The memory confiscated by the communist regime has crossed, through the tunnel of thoughts that cannot be censored, the hell of darkness created by Marxism-Leninism. A seductive hypothesis would argue that the names invoked by the poet – Gheorghe and Ion – refer to identifiable persons, although this hypothesis seems difficult to accept, since in national onomastics these names of persons have become almost “generic” for the Romanian nation. To return to the “depository” of these verses, I would like to recall the deep sorrow of the priest Ioan Constantinescu, who turned pale the night he learned that his eldest daughter, Iuliana, who was seven months pregnant, had also been arrested and subjected to repeated interrogations by the criminal Security Service in Pitești. In fact, within the walls of Văcărești prison, she was to give birth to a daughter, Justina-Libertatea, whom he would not see again for six years after her release from prison in 1964, because she had been torn from his breast immediately after birth and placed in an orphanage…

With the pain of having left his wife and eldest daughter on the bitter path of the communist dungeons, with the fear that his other two sons would share their fate, with the sadness that the country itself was enslaved to strangers, he died on the bitter night of 18th and 19th July 1959, at 10:30 p.m., in the Jilava prison, making the sign of the cross before the murderous weapons tore his body to pieces, the priest-martyr Ioan Constantinescu, with faith in the Almighty God and in the eternal aspiration for freedom of the Romanian people, for whose freedom he sacrificed himself…

(Prof. Grigore Constantinescu – Argeș Expres Magazine)

1. Archive of the Ministry of National Defence, Military Court of the Second Military Region, file 1238, vol. 45.

2. Archive of the Ministry of National Defence, Military Court of the Second Military Region, file 1238, vol. 46.

3. Magazine “Tomis”, Diocese of Constanta, year XXI, 1944, July-September, no. 7-9, pp. 72-82.