Priest Ioan Sabău, defender and confessor of the right faith
I met the worthy priest Ioan Sabău in the spring of 1984, when I was invited by a friend to the six-week funeral of his father, celebrated in the parish of Bobâlna (near Simeria), where he was priest. I confess from the beginning that my meeting as a young deacon (I was only one year and two months after my ordination) with the already septuagenarian “Confessor of Transylvania” – as he was rightly called – was a providential moment, full of the most beautiful impressions and the most useful teachings for the soul.
When he found out that I was a professor at the Theological Seminary of Caransebeș, for which he had sincere feelings of admiration and esteem, especially since during my seminary studies his good friend and fellow doctoral student in Bucharest, the priest Ioan Teodorovici, taught there, Father Ioan Sabău asked me to address a word of teaching to the faithful present in the church in quite large numbers.
Not knowing that I had before me one of the most knowledgeable, appreciated and listened to preachers in Transylvania, a priest “with book and grace”, I gladly accepted the invitation to preach, and at the end of the sermon I was convinced that I had succeeded in capturing the attention of the faithful.
However, at the end of the Holy Liturgy and the memorial service, the parish priest Ioan Sabău spoke and at that moment I had a revelation. I thought I was in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Sibiu, and from the pulpit was preaching the priest Professor Teodor Bodogae, or it seemed to me that I was in front of the pulpit of the Episcopal Cathedral of St George in Caransebeș, listening to the gentle hieromonk and Professor Paulin Leca. Father Ioan Sabău had transformed himself as if into an archangel, he had a power in his words and a power to convince, to impress and to reach the soul of his listeners like few of the priests I had listened to until that moment.
As I sat next to him, I watched his emotions, the tears that occasionally ran down his face, I was amazed at the ease with which he could quote from memory the most appropriate verses and teachings, both from the Bible and from the Holy Fathers, to justify his sermons, which poured out on the faithful who listened to him with awe and delight, with joy and tears. What I had tried to convey now seemed to me of no importance, and I even thought how good it would be if I could hide behind the pew on my left, ashamed that I had dared to speak before a priest of such overwhelming intellectual and spiritual stature.
At the alms table and afterwards in the parish house, where the priestess received us as honoured guests, we were to learn from her words something of the difficult and troubled times they had lived through together.
Since then, we have always kept in touch with the worthy priest Ioan Sabău, through the friend who invited us to Bobâlna and by correspondence (unfortunately, moving six times, some letters from him, as well as other documents, have been lost).
A year later I returned to Bobâlna, again on the occasion of the aforementioned Parast, but this time I was ordained a priest. Suspecting that Father would give me the opportunity to preach, I prepared myself as I knew best, and above all I tried to warm in my soul the teachings addressed to the faithful. The lesson that Fr. Ioan Sabău had given a year before, and that he had renewed the following year, remained forever in my memory and in my soul, and was of great use to me throughout my mission as a servant of the ancestral altar.
From 1985 onwards, I had several meetings with Father Ioan de la Bobâlna, and the Heavenly Father allowed me to serve with him in the monastery of Prislop (he was very devoted to Father Arsenie Boca, whom he had met in the monastery of Sâmbăta de Sus and whom he often quoted), in the hermitage of Ghelar, I was invited by Mother Haritina to participate in the feast of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, the feast of the ancient church there, and even in the parish entrusted to me, Timișoara Iosefin, where Father had the kindness to serve on 10 December 2006, sowing the Word of God in the hearts of our good faithful. (Seeing the crowd of faithful present at the Liturgy, Father Ioan exclaimed: “What am I going to say to so many people, I am a helpless old man”. (His uplifting words, with an obvious touch of enlightened patriotism, moved all those present to tears). A special bond of trust, sincerity and affection was thus established between us, as a result of which Father considered me worthy to share with him the trials, temptations and difficulties of my life. This is how I came to know that after graduating from the Faculty of Theology in Cernăuți with very good results, Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan wanted to send him to study abroad, but he refused and asked the Transylvanian hierarch to appoint him to the most oppressed parish of the diocese.
The perseverance of the Metropolitan, who helped to train many theologians who became eminent professors at the Siberian Theological School, could not overcome the young graduate’s decision, and he was appointed to the vacant parish of Ceru Băcăinți, an ancient but extremely isolated village in the county of Alba, at the foot of the Metaliferi Mountains. From the priest’s stories, we learned about the hard life of his shepherds, who lived by cultivating the not very fertile land and raising animals. He and his young priestess, Alexandra, who had studied French in Cernăuți, were forced, “with or without time”, to travel to and from the village with oxen in winter when the snow was heavy. The harsh conditions in which they lived, and the fact that the parish had not had a priest for many years, did not prevent them from carrying out an extraordinary pastoral, missionary and cultural work, convincing the villagers to marry, to live according to the precepts of the Gospel and to send their children to school.
After almost two years of novitiate in Ceru Băcăinți, he was transferred to the parish of Rengheț in Hunedoara, “with the mission of bringing all the concubines of this community into the Church”[1].
In his younger years, the family of the priest Ioan Sabău also went through a difficult ordeal, as the priest’s wife had serious health problems that required her to be hospitalised in Cluj. Father Ioan, with tears in his eyes, recalled that after the examinations, the doctors decided to intervene surgically. However, the situation became more complicated when, after receiving the results of the medical tests, other life-threatening complications came to light. Priest Ioan Sabău was summoned by Professor Dr Ion Chiricuță, Director of the Institute of Oncology, son of Priest Toma Chiricuță, who told him that he had to sign his consent to the operation because there was a serious risk of losing his wife. Without a moment’s hesitation, the father signed the medical documents and, with great determination, told the well-known surgeon to operate, but to inform him of the date and time of the operation.
According to his own testimony, the father had prepared for the scheduled day by fasting and praying. At the same time, he spoke with the priests of the diocese of Orăștie and with former colleagues in the Bucharest area, so that on that day he could celebrate 40 Holy Liturgies and 40 Holy Unctions for the priestess and the doctors who operated on her. Thus, by the power of God and the skill of the doctors, the priestess was saved and lived to the venerable age of 90.
An exemplary family man, a great confessor, an ardent preacher and a devoted servant of the priestly mission, Father Ioan Sabău was sought out for confession and the alleviation of spiritual needs, not only by the faithful whom he shepherded at Ceru Băcăinți, Rengheț, at Vinerea Cugir, where he built a cathedral-like church, the first to be built during the communist regime, although he was hindered in many ways, and then in Bobâlna, but also by other believers from neighbouring parishes, from Orăștie, Alba Iulia, Deva and Cluj-Napoca, including some of the leading intellectuals of Transylvania: University professors, famous doctors, engineers, writers, professors of philosophy, etc. His warm and firm words, his intransigence towards sin and his love for sinners, his soul-healing counsels, his spiritual experience and his exceptional cultural background, as well as the fact that he was a passionate reader, always in search of news and information necessary for his priestly mission, made him known as the “Confessor of Transylvania”.
One of the main pastoral concerns of Fr. Ioan Sabău was to “raise marriage to the level of a sacrament”, as Fr. Arsenie Boca said, and to restore in the parish “the sanctity of family life”.[2] Thus, in the Vinerea parish, Fr. Sabău refused to celebrate on Saturday evening the Sacrament of Marriage, even though he was severely criticised and ridiculed. “My people,” he said, “our village is small. Everyone’s at the party, the whole village is at the wedding. Just think, in that case we have to close the church on Sundays. Nobody comes…”. The priest, Ioan Sabău, explained to the parishioners with his characteristic strength of conviction: “Sunday is a special day for us. Saturday is for the dead. How can we ask God to bless our marriages if we do this? “[3].
His zeal for pastoral work, his courage in witnessing to Christ, his firm condemnation of the concubinage of King Charles II, his closeness to the “Lord’s Host” movement and his sympathy with the Legionary movement, the accusation that he had helped the anti-communist fighters in the mountains and that “by preaching he incites the faithful against the regime”[4] (communist, n.n.) brought him more than thirty years in prison. n.), he spent more than thirteen years in prison in the camps of Deva, Gherla, Aiud, Hațeg and Calafat. In prison he met some of Romania’s leading intellectuals, including the priests Professor Dumitru Stăniloae and Nichifor Crainic. Referring to these sufferings, Father Ioan used to say: “They did not imprison us because we were insignificant people, but because of Christ! On 1 August 1964 he was released from Aiud, but he continued to be closely watched by the Securitate authorities, by the representative of the Department of Religious Affairs for Hunedoara County, and by informers who spied on him[5]. Father did not allow himself to be intimidated and, as he confessed to me once again, he continued his priestly ministry with the same dedication, including the celebration of 40 Holy Liturgies. So as not to attract the attention of those who followed him, he preferred to serve alone during the week in the church “in the valley”, built in 1828 on the site of a small wooden church[6], and to remember “all those who asked him to pray for the unworthy”. Many tears were shed by Father John, unknown to anyone, in that humble church, in the silence and unspoilt beauty of the Bobâlna valley, and many prayers were said there for the faithful who, for many years, had no hope except in God.
Endowed by the Lord with many talents, priest Ioan Sabău could have served in any city church, in any diocesan cathedral, as well as being a brilliant professor of theology. His training through constant reading, his thorough studies, his efforts to acquire new publications in all fields: theological, scientific, cultural, etc., his closeness to intellectuals and young people, his published articles, his lectures, his passionate and electrifying sermons, often interspersed with stories from the troubled past of our Romanian nation, would have earned him the promotion and recognition he deserved. The hard times and the people he had to deal with prevented him from sharing the knowledge, skills and grace he had received from God with other believers who were eager to hear God’s Word and be saved.
The love for books of the “Patriarch of the Hunedoreans”, as the priest Ioan Sabău was also called, is also evident in the content of our correspondence. For example, in a letter sent from Bobâlna on 1 June 1984, Father Sabău expressed his joy at receiving the books “The Discipleship of Christ” and “The Foundations of Orthodox Doctrine”, printed by the Archdiocese of Timișoara. About the author of the latter, Metropolitan Nicolae, Father wrote: “Great scholar, God bless him! It seems that in my intimacy I wish that the vacancy of Arad would be prolonged (the diocese had become vacant after the death of Bishop Visarion Astileanu n.n.), that he would keep us for a while. (I don’t want the candidates for our widowed diocese to hear me, I’m prolonging their excitement. Besides, I don’t know them and they don’t know me”, the Father noted with characteristic humour, “because I don’t even have the anxiety of the “citizen” of Caragiale in this matter: … “Who do I vote for?”). He then asked me to send him the book by Metropolitan Antonie Plămădeală, “Tradition and Freedom in Orthodox Spirituality”, and concluded by expressing his wish to meet again his former colleague and friend, the priest Ioan Teodorovici from Caransebeș.
In another letter, dated 1 June 1988, Father Sabău refers to the thoughts I had sent him concerning the young seminarians and their preparation for the priestly mission. The priest, with the rich pastoral experience of a lifetime in the priesthood, wrote: “I am pleased with your proposal, but I would like to remind you of an old proverb: ‘Children and elders do not sow today what was sown yesterday’. This proverb is meant to remind us that the ups and downs of children and the elderly are dizzying, you can’t see them from one day to the next”. Finally, Father asked me to give him “the joy of a reunion”, the most appropriate day for our meeting being Friday, “when I usually reduce my commitment to those ‘outside’ in favour of those ‘inside'”.
The third and last surviving letter from this “Transylvanian preacher”, undated but also written in 1988, refers to his same passion for books. “I am obliged to bother you again,” he wrote. “Only through Your Holiness do I get a book. In the ranks of the clergy I am now the oldest, if not the only one. All the priests of the diocese are young, and I see myself so stolid in a corner of the bed – completely outdated and old-fashioned – (that’s how priest Ioan Sabău was: humble and modest), in all pastoral matters. I have announced the publication of Fr. Coman’s book in the Mitropolia Banatului publishing house: “Frumusețile iubirii de oameni în spiritualitatea patristică” (Timișoara, 1988) […] Please forgive me for burdening you again with this task. If you can get hold of it, please send it to me with a refund. I have heard that the second volume of “Convorbiri duhovnicești” (by Father Ioanichie Bălan, n.n.) will also be published, perhaps more copies will arrive at the Centre”.
Although he lived in seclusion, he knew not only what was printed in the country, but also what appeared abroad. For example, in the letter quoted above, he wrote: “On the other side of the ocean, another writing of Fr. Dumitru Bodale has appeared, somehow you got his address – or maybe you also got the book. He was a colleague of mine in Cernăuți and I would dare to ask him for it. In his youth he ran a religious publication in Bucharest. His writing was seductive”. Finally, Father John points out that he also received news from close to home. “I also learned of the special impression you made in Deva, preaching (I had someone to learn from!) and conducting the concert given by the Seminary of Caransebeș” (At the invitation of the Protopope Alexandru Hotăran, we made a trip to Deva, together with the choir of the Theological Seminary, conducted by Fr. Professor Nicolae Belean, we all participated in the Holy Mass in the Cathedral “Saint Nicholas” and preached). “Please forgive my boldness, as well as my convoluted writing. I am justified in saying that from the hidden corner where I am, I should no longer make my presence known, but what can I do? Thank you for bearing with me as I read what you have written, and perhaps you can quench my thirst. With all my love, Ion Sabău, Bobâlna”.
Extraordinary. A 74-year-old priest was thirsty, not for water, food and high office, but for the “living water” and light that we acquire through soul-building books. Are young priests and young people in general still thirsty for such spiritual, moral and cultural values? The secularised and highly technological society in which we live, the omnipresence of all kinds of attractions, exaggerated consumerism, the relativisation of values and the ever-increasing degradation of the moral life worry not only people in the Church, but also sociologists, analysts and all those who love spirituality and culture. This is why the luminous figure of some of the Church’s servants, such as priest Ioan Sabău, is a shining example of dedication, body and soul, to the defence and promotion of the authentic values of our Christian Orthodox and national spirituality, of faithful service at the altar of the Church, of fruitful pastoral activity, thanks to which the unquenchable flame of our rightful faith was preserved even during the communist-atheist period.
It should also be remembered that Father Ioan Sabău, with much effort, built seven churches and five parish houses during the period of bitter communist persecution, for which his name is inscribed in a place of honour in the list of worthy “priests of lay people who have fallen asleep in the Lord”, as Professor Nicolae M. Popescu said, “whom the Holy Spirit has appointed to shepherd the Church of God” (Acts 20:28).
(Pr. Dr. Ionel Popescu, “Priest Ioan Sabău – (1914 – 2008), defender and confessor of the right faith” in Altarul Banatului, Year XXVI (LXV), Series Nine, No. 4-6, April-June 2015, pp. 113-119)
[1] Adrian Nicolae Petcu, “Father Sabău under atheist persecution” in “Lumina”, Bucharest, No. 77 (3074) Year VI, Friday, April 3, 2015, p. 6.
[2] “About the Christian family”, speech given by Father Ioan Sabău in Deva, on the evening of 20 October 2005, in “Învierea”, Timișoara, no. 20/15, October 2011, p. 3, supplement “Rock of Life” of the “Oastei Domnului”.
[3] Idem.
[4] Adrian Nicolae Petcu, “Father Ioan Sabău under atheist persecution (II)”, in “Lumina”, Bucharest, no.79 (3076), Year VI, Monday, 6 April 2015, p. 7.
[5] Idem.
[6] Florin Dobrei, The Orthodox Churches of Hunedorea, Eftimie Murgu Publishing House, Reșița, 2011, p. 261.