Motivation:
The 20th century was one of countless tragedies. Two world wars and decades of totalitarianism have sent millions to graves without crosses. The earth was filled with bones and holy relics. So is the Romanian land, a land teeming with saints and anonymous heroes!
Why do we want to follow in their footsteps? For one simple reason: we owe them our present!
If today we have all the freedom to express our faith and our convictions, it is thanks to all those who fought in a Christian way against tyrannies of all kinds, whether they were humiliated, tortured or exterminated in public or on the unknown roadsides, in interrogations, camps, dungeons, labour colonies, in the mines, at the front, in the mountains, during deportations, forced residences, in the countryside or in exile.
Therefore, the initiative “Happy the Prisoners” is motivated by the need to know and honour the new martyrs of the Romanian Orthodox Church and the heroes of the nation, who defended the ancestral faith and the Romanian nation at the cost of their freedom and their lives under the four persecutions that raged “from the Nistru to the Tisa”: the Carlist dictatorship, the Horti occupation, the Antonescu dictatorship and, above all, the Communist dictatorship. From the first shell fired for Romania’s independence in the First World War to the last shell that burst in the chests of the martyrs who shouted “freedom” in the 1989 revolution, we search the books and archives for those who are the light of the Romanian nation before God. Together with the saints of the ages, they are our models of life. At the same time, the “Happy the Prisoners” portal is also a memorial to all the victims of communism, be they former political prisoners, deportees or collateral victims, a memorial from which those responsible for this national tragedy will not be absent.
We took the first step in 2011, on the Feast of the Annunciation, when we officially launched this project. Since then, we have worked hard and with love to get to know the martyrs who passed through the communist prisons. We don’t stop at them, but they have attracted us in a special way. Their dramas moved us to tears, their courage and sacrifice moved us to the depths of our hearts. But each of these shining faces has sweetened and brightened our souls. They all deserve our honour and we all need their friendship, for they are now intercessors with the Lord. From them we learn how to be witnesses of Christ today, for “only by turning to the past will we have the strength for today’s deeds”1. Today it is our turn to bear witness to Christ before the world!
Purpose:
This project is first and foremost a theological research aimed at helping to know the Christian spirituality of the Carlist, Antonesian and Communist prisons, for the good of everyone’s soul. However, we cannot talk about the martyrdom and spirituality of Christians in the trials of the 20th century without knowing the historical context in which they were born and formed as human beings. And since the history of this century has often been distorted and then grossly falsified during the 45 years of communism, we are trying to repair the distorted history, to recover the forgotten and to present it all in the light of theology, because a history of humanity in which God, its teacher and director, is ignored is only a blind history. Therefore, the present approach is also one of historical research, of knowledge and acceptance of the recent past of the Romanian people. On the other hand, prison memoirs and prison poetry were born out of the suffering of the prisons, the latter being the ashes of universal literature. Its essence is profoundly Christian, but it does not lack an artistic form, original and of particular sensitivity. Thousands of verses were inscribed on the cold walls of the cells, thousands of hours of solitary confinement were spent learning these poems, because they were the food of thousands of souls tormented by hunger. That is why this project is also a cultural one, designed to ennoble and sensitise the soul, both to national values and to human suffering in general.
Even though we are simple people, without intellectual pretensions, we try to weave this work harmoniously, between these three levels, to be closer to the truth of Christ and therefore closer to each other.
So help us, God!