Father Gheorghe Calciu (November 23, 1925 – November 21, 2006)
I spoke of Your testimonies before kings, and I was not ashamed (Psalm 118:46).
Father Gheorghe Calciu was born in the Danube Delta,
in Mahmudia, where the propitious blend between the land’s richness and
the sky’s beauty reflected into the pious hearts of the countrymen. That
blessed place, which Father loved tenderly until the end of his life,
fostered the love for God and nation in his soul —a love which later
brought him as far as the confession of martyrdom.
Since the time he was in school and while yet a
student at the Spiru Haret High School in Tulcea, Father chose to serve
the suffering; exceptionally gifted in literature, famous among
colleagues and teachers, who were predicting a bright career in
literature for him, he decided, to everyone’s amazement, to go to
medical school to help those in pain.
Yet his calling was a different one: he was to become
a physician of souls after a spiritual “internship” of twenty-one years
in the communist prisons.
Arrested in 1948 when he was a third year student at
Bucharest University’s School of Medicine, he was interrogated in the
Security’s basements and then sent to the Piteşti Prison, where the
Christian youth was put through the dehumanizing experiment of
re-education. Under the devastating realm of torture and fear, his soul
was broken, but only for a while. At the so-called re-education trial of
1956, with a martyr’s courage, Gheorghe Calciu rejected the Security’s
frame-up, pointing at the real authors. The punishment was detention in
the casimca, a sort of an underground vault meant for
extermination. But God saved him, and after his release in 1964, he
attended the Literature and Theology Schools in Bucharest, becoming a
priest and a professor at the Theological Seminary.
In 1978, when the atheist authorities ordered the
demolition of the Enei Church in Bucharest, Father Gheorghe Calciu’s
voice rose with the strength of that of the prophets of old, reproaching
the wrong-doing and calling people to faith. His “Seven words for the
youth” uttered then on the porch of the Radu-Vodă Monastery became the
indictment counts for a new conviction. Pulled from the midst of his
students and family, he was again sent down into the hell of communist
prisons with a ten-year sentence.
Through pressure from the Romanian Diaspora in the
West, he was released in 1984 and sent into exile in America. After a
few years of difficulty and deprivation, Father managed to set up an
Orthodox community in Washington DC akin to those in which the first
Christians lived, when “those who believed were of one heart and one
soul” (Acts 4: 32).
Father Calciu’s attempt to return to Romania for good
after 1989 did not succeed. Perhaps because “no prophet is accepted in
his own country” (Luke 4:24). But his last wish of being buried in his
native land was fulfilled. His much-tried body rests now in the cemetery
of the Petru-Vodă Monastery, and his soul rejoices together with the
Romanian martyrs in the ineffable light of Christ’s Kingdom.
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