The life of the Father with the name of a feast day, Crăciun (Christmas) Oprea

Childhood

Crăciun Oprea was born on 17 June 1925 in the village of Cărăsău (Bihor), near the Codru Mountains, to Crăciun Oprea and Saveta Oprea. Joyful and holy as a feast, was not only his name, but also his custom, because all his life Father cherished it as a feast and perfected it through an honest and pious life, but also through hard sufferings that purified his soul like gold in a crucible. From his parents he received a fine Christian upbringing, marked by good sense, honesty and, above all, the fear of God. Describing his childhood and the goodness and devotion of the Romanian peasants in his village, Father Crăciun says the following: “I come from a village in Bihor with 500 houses; all the time I was young, I knew that there were only 4 drunkards. Now I don’t know how many there are. And there were only 2 or 3 women who were not honest. …In our Christian families, when we were fasting and on St. Mary’s Day and Christmas Lent. If you had seven cows with milk, you put the milk in earthenware pots, and on Christmas Eve, those who did not have a cow or a pig, tasted what they got from those who had, so that on Christmas Day they would all be brothers and with full bellies, and with Holy Communion and the associated things, so that they would all be one family. This is a tradition that we should bring back”.

He finished primary school in his native village, then continued his studies at the Normal School of Oradea from 1931 to 1940, and then at the Dimitrie Țichindeal Normal School of Arad from 1940 to 1947. Father often spoke highly of this confessional school, where, from teachers of great moral character, he learned not only the love of the Church and the teachings of the Saints, but also the love of the nation, which was going through great difficulties and trials, surrounded by many enemies who wanted to destroy its faith and its being. Here is what Father confessed about this school: “Who among you does not know Eminescu, who praises Țichindeal? In the villages where there were teachers who had graduated from Dimitrie Țichindeal’s school or from the church, they spoke Romanian during the breaks and taught in the church and in the school in our language and as seriously as possible. In the state schools, on the other hand, the teachers forced the children to speak Hungarian during breaks”.

God save him from the horrors of the war, which left many victims in these territories longed for by their pagan neighbours. In 1944, the front was in our village,” recalls Fr. “The army came to our village and we fled because we had learned from a relative that if you were caught you would be taken to make trenches. So we ran somewhere on the Crișul Alb, near Gura Honcii”.

Youth sacrificed in honour of the Church and the nation. His arrest

After graduating from the Arad Grammar School, he enrolled at the Arad Theological Faculty in 1947. Ilarion Felea, a renowned professor of theology, became his spiritual mentor and confessor. Fr. Crăciun had a special love and devotion for Fr. Felea, from whom he received many salutary teachings that sustained him spiritually during the difficult years of trials. He was a devoted disciple both during his life and after his martyrdom in the prison of Aiud, so that Father Crăciun, as a holy duty, managed to bring to light the manuscript volumes of Father Felea’s mystical theology, under the title “Towards Tabor”. Having him as a model of life, he also urged his disciples to follow the life and teachings of Father Ilarion Felea, of whom he said: Father Stăniloae himself said of Father Ilarion Felea, who died in Aiud on 18 September 1961: “As a priest, Father Ilarion Felea surpassed me.” And he said this not only out of humility. Another priest, who knew Father Ilarion when he was rector in Arad and it was customary for the students to go to Liturgy in the cathedral on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays and to the chapel on the other days, testified after the 90s: “Father Ilarion Felea was very natural at every Liturgy. During Vespers, when he would fall down in the church and recite Psalm 50 or other prayers, he would lead the whole church in prayer. People could feel the sincerity and the spirit of prayer that possessed him. When he confessed, he’d make the confessor stand up, because most information comes through the eyes, and that’s how you feel how sincere the man is. Father Ilarion was my confessor, that’s why I know he confessed while standing up.”

But the communist uprising that had taken hold of the Romanian people unleashed a fierce persecution against all those who loved Christ and the values of our ancestors. All those who were noble branches of this nation, who could have enlightened by deed, by word, were arrested, so that the people outside were plunged into the darkness of atheism and ignorance. But the light of the confessors in the communist prisons shone brighter than the shroud of the security cellars, which unwittingly turned the prisons into monasteries of unceasing prayer. We will also learn about these realities from the sufferings and confessions of Father Crăciun. Even if Father Crăciun avoids talking about the great spiritual achievements he experienced there, we have a duty to shed light on the deeds of God’s chosen ones, so that they may be an example for Christians to live by. Most of the time Father was humble and spoke more about other suffering brethren, but some testimonies of his personal experience have been preserved, either in conferences or in various discussions and conversations, which through the good will of Father and God have been recorded by us, the humble.

I was saying the Lord’s Prayer and I didn’t know that they were beating me.

The young Crăciun was arrested by the Securitate in the street, in the dormitory of the theological faculty. “They took me away,” said Father Crăciun in Father Justin’s cell, “and four or five thugs were waiting for me in a nationalised house. I was a teacher in a boarding school in the faculty and they took me from the table hungry – they “fed” me afterwards – and as soon as I came in they threw me and the others, you know, down. I put my hands together and said “Our Father”, not once, but repeatedly. I didn’t know I didn’t know that they were beating me. After the investigation, Father Crăciun was sentenced by the military court in Timișoara for “conspiracy against the social order”. We are now going to recount an incident that Father Crăciun used to blame on another prisoner (either out of humility or because they were similar cases), but twice Father himself confessed that it was about him. “But the following happened to me: they were investigating me on the basis of the statements of other colleagues, and knowing that I had run away, they set me up. Before the trial they give you permission to look at the file to see the charges against you, and when I looked at it, I found that the people who were investigating me, when they turned the pages, two of them stuck together, because if they were going to judge me by what was there, they would have given me 25 years. And it turned out that they gave me two years. I attributed this miracle to the prayers of Father Arsenie” (Father Arsenie Boca was also being investigated and arrested at the time. Fr. Arsenie would speak to him later).

From Arad he was taken to Oradea and then to Timișoara. Here, Father Arsenie continued, “there were 20 people in the cell, all pupils or students. They gave us three loaves of bread to share. They did it specifically to fight for food. There were always disagreements: one had a bigger piece, another a smaller… At a certain time, in the evening, he would lock us up. And if you died, they wouldn’t open the door until the morning. On the first day, after the evening lock-up, we invited the other colleagues to pray. We read the Akathist of the Mother of God. At that time we also had a small prayer book. And we prayed. As soon as we started this prayer routine, this religious meditation, there was no more division. And when this atmosphere of prayer began, they all forgot that they were locked up, they all became brothers again. For months I stayed like that, I didn’t even think about when I would get out of prison. It was more tempting to feel the joy of the grace of our sacrifice than the thought of being released”.

At Pitești and Gherla

The most difficult period, the ordeal of his imprisonment, was the time he spent in Pitești prison, where he spent almost a year. In Pitești, in August 1949, he was imprisoned in the southern wing of the prison, in cell 9, on the first floor, next to the room of the great torturer Țurcanu. Until 23 August 1949, the prisoners had a more liberal regime; the prison guards let the prisoners loose in the corridors through the prison administration. They even treated and respected them, because they knew what moral and spiritual values were imprisoned. After 23 August, by order of the superiors, they were locked up in their cells and called bandits. “And to the toilet we had to go at a jogging pace, in the conditions that were there, and we were beaten cruelly, mercilessly. And then the re-education began again with a group of students who were made to believe that they would be ministers if they could kill others with their companions. The team was called Țurcanu’s team. They started beating us for everything. For months they only gave us cabbage boiled in its own water. We didn’t have beds, we slept on a piece of iron or on the floor, in a heap. Some of the prisoners, frightened and mentally broken, decided to join the side of the torturers, the Communists. But the poor things had already been re-educated and no longer had any free will. That’s when the enmity began and brother had brother to be killed”.

Many of those re-educated later recovered and showed strong acts of martyrdom, but Father Christmas never gave in to re-education, on the contrary, he tried to save the other brothers by encouraging them: “My good people, if you have decided to break away from the others and adopt this attitude, that is up to you. But I want to tell you one thing. I don’t know how you can be re-educated in the communist way – to act like an atheist – after you have had a Christian education. How that can be done, I cannot understand!” Unable to compromise and afraid of strengthening others, he was transferred to Gherla and then to Canal. “The regime was the same in Pitești and in Gherla,” says the priest. I was in the penitentiary, the others were in prison for life, divided by floor. The hospital was divided for the whole staff. I had a colleague who studied philosophy and theology, and because he studied theology, they put him on the hospital bed as Christ on the Friday of the Passion. They made a great mockery of him, he didn’t confess, but others who were there told me”.

At Canal, a wonderful premonition

After another year in Gherla, he was taken to Canal for correctional work. Father confessed that when he arrived at Canal he was so weak that he could barely drag his feet, and yet he had to do this inhuman work that is hard to imagine today. Forced to finish his shift or be taken to prison, Father became seriously ill but received no medical help. “Here in the back,” Father pointed out, “I had a localised rupture of the muscle fibres. How I got it: I was working on the canal to Mamaia. There you had to load a wagon, every man for himself. If you didn’t want to, God only knows what would have happened to you. The soil was clayey, it was very greasy. It was so greasy that the earth we dug up with a pickaxe would stick to the pickaxe. It would come off hard. And when I threw it, the muscle fibres under my left shoulder blade came off. I couldn’t get dressed. The shirt was only held on by a Macedonian so that I could take it off. I couldn’t. He put me on the cart for a month because I could work with one hand. My father saw me on crutches; he had come without permission, because they didn’t give him permission to come here to the hut. And he came home and was so happy to see me that he died a few weeks later”. “I dreamt of my mother when she died. She told me in my dream that I still had 7 years to serve in prison.” The father didn’t know that his mother had died until he was out of prison, but she appeared to him in a wonderful way. He also appeared to him in a wonderful way on Christmas Eve 1954 and told him that he would be in prison for three more months. And so it happened.  On the day of the Annunciation, exactly three months later, he was released.

Father had conquered death countless times because God had a plan for him, he had a mission to come out of prison and enlighten the souls that were under the cinders of sin. He was also on the verge of death after an operation on his leg, which had become infected due to poor conditions, and in this case Father was not medically cleared until the day of the operation. He was so weak that the guards took bets on when he would die. And they failed to kill him. What kept him alive, Father confesses with great defiance: “I learned the prayer of Jesus at the canal. In the evenings we said it together, then for days and nights, and none of us died or became crippled. But we didn’t realise what it was doing until we got out.  And those who were not believers realised the importance of prayer and practiced it.”

The liberation

After eight years of harsh imprisonment, Father Crăciun was released from the Annunciation and placed in Aiud prison. Instead of going straight home, he decided to go to the bishop’s office to get his papers in order, as he wanted to finish his theology studies. God guided his steps and he managed to enrol at the Faculty of Theology in Sibiu. We learn this from Father’s account: “The Bishop had been to my home village, where he was an autodidact who knew the Bible by heart, at that time he was Vicar Archpriest in Oradea. I’ll never forget him, and he gave me his blessing to continue. Not only that, he arranged for me to get my first state scholarship. In Arad I stayed with a colleague who had only been there two and a half years. He had already been ordained, and I stayed with him for two or three days, helping him with a few things around the house, and before he left he told me: “Many years have passed, and you may not find everyone at home. He knew for sure that I wouldn’t find any of them”.

He continued to confess to Father Ilarion Felea until 1958, just two weeks before Father Felea was arrested. “And this Ilarion Felea was condemned,” says Father Crăciun, “for the following reason – his indictment is as follows: Why, after 1948, did you dare to educate the youth in the Church of Arad, in the Cathedral? Because when the Church separated from the State, the power was in the hands of the State and the Church was no longer allowed to educate. That was the charge. He was condemned for many years and died in prison”.

Priest of God, skilful confessor

Another spiritual figure who marked his life was Father Arsenie Boca, to whom he had a special devotion. He met Father Arsenie personally after graduating from the Faculty of Theology. At Father Arsenie’s insistence, he married a young woman, Anișoara, from the village of Cinciș, a close disciple of Father Arsenie. Although Sister Anișoara was eager to wear the habit, Father Arsenie firmly told the young woman that she would do more for God in the world than in the convent. On 16 February 1962 they married and in November 1964, with the decree pardoning political prisoners, Fr. Crăciun was ordained priest by His Holiness Bishop Teoctist, the future Patriarch of Romania, for the parish of Hăjdău with branches in Goleș, Dăbâca. In December 1973, with the blessing of His Eminence Visarion, it was transferred to the parish of Cinciș to continue the construction of the church there. In 1984, the church in Cinciș was completed with its painting and consecration. In 2011, he completed the work on the Museum for the Preservation of the Frescoes from the Historical Monument Church in the village of Cinciș Vechi, now under the lake.

Father renovated many churches in the area, proving himself, together with the Mother Priestess, to be a true builder. But Father was not so much a builder of material churches as a builder of living souls. Because of his life pleasing to God, because of his love for the faithful, many young intellectuals, silent priests, who saw the grace of God shining in him, began to ask him to be their confessor. From then on he dedicated his whole life to the faithful who came to him for advice or to relieve their souls of thoughts and worries. Father Crăciun never tired of serving his neighbour, giving his soul for each one. With the strong conscience of a servant of the Church and of the Romanian nation, he worked in the formation of characters, especially in the formation of priests, together with Father Ioan Sabău, Father’s soul friend and brother in suffering. He tried very hard to convince the hierarchy to establish schools for the spiritual formation of priests, but unfortunately in vain. We believe that Father himself formed many priests to carry on his model of Christian life. Wanting to do more for the revival of spiritual life in Transylvania, he tried to build a monastery on the site of his parish, as he had been advised to do by Fr. Arsenie Boca, who had come to his house in Cinciș and said that a monastery should be built there. Together with his wife and his spiritual sons, and with the blessing of His Grace Timothy, he built a museum complex which houses frescoes and icons from the old church, which was swallowed up by the lake, and above it some huts intended for monastic life, in which some monks now live.

His departure

Plagued by the illnesses that had afflicted his body since his imprisonment, Father Crăciun found it increasingly difficult to meet the needs of the parish. With his body weak but his soul ever young, Father seemed to lose track of time, running like an athlete of Christ in search of someone to win on the road to salvation, forgetting to sleep, to eat or to send someone to light his fire in the cold stone church in winter. With the fire of love in his breast greater than the suffering of his body, Father listened to the needs of his spiritual sons and worked hard for the priestly ministry until the last moment of his earthly life. This is what he had hoped to do on Palm Sunday, even though he was seriously ill and had recently been hospitalised. But the Lord had another plan. The Lord wanted to place the wreath of flowers on his weary head. And so he died, gently, sleeping serenely, with a face as pure as a child’s, carrying in his soul the pillars of good deeds, singing as if Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

Thus the Church of the Romanian nation has been enriched with another supplicant in heaven. We hope that he will intercede for the sons of this nation before the throne of God, who listens to those who have suffered for His name. Amen.

(Material from Petru Vodă Monastery – Attitudes Magazine No. 23, June 2012, Year IV)