Cristina Miloş

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

cristina_milos@yahoo.com

 

 

With God in the Inferno

 

 

Abstract: Richard Wurmbrand and Iuliu Hossu are two of the prelates who experienced the ordeals of communist imprisonment. They reached the conclusion that faith in God provided the only possible escaping from the atrocious reality of detention. In prayer and by reading about the lives of other martyrs, Richard Wurmbrand, a faithful missionary of Christ, prepared his soul for the imprisonment experience long before his actual confinement. Thus, he was able to sublimate his condition and transform the underground into Christ’s true church. Cardinal Iuliu Hossu kept communicating with the member of his diocese indirectly through the liturgies held in prison, in silence and loneliness. Both Wurmbrand and Hossu survived the tortures of the communist regime by salvaging and retaining intact their inner faith.

Keywords: Romania; Communist regime; prison; torture; survival; faith; God; Richard Wurmbrand; Iuliu Hossu.

 

“Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over”

Luke 24:29.

 

 

Subdued to the demands of the communist regime in order to create a new man at any cost, a great number of Romanian prelates lived the painful experience of prison whose main purpose was reeducation through physical and psychical torture. Whereas for some of them this meant death, for others psychical mortification and madness, for others still it meant survival, possible only in light of the search for solutions to escape the atrocious reality they were experiencing. For the evangelical Pastor Richard Wurmbrand and for Cardinal Iuliu Hossu the solution was faith in God. In a liturgical and memorial manner, Iuliu Hossu’s memoirs make up a testament destined to “his beloved diocese”. His desire was that these notes reveal God’s kindness that accompanied him all along the suffering road, a deep hardship for the whole Greek-Catholic church, forced to the union with the Orthodox Church. But this was a trial that did not escape God’s control and its result was the rebirth of the Church, according to the biblical verse, “The Lord disciplines those he loves”. Richard Wurmbrand’s testimony talks about both his inner reality as it reveals itself in the darkness of the underground cell and about people who “in times of greatest sufferings reached the highest peaks of spiritual love and beauty”.

 

Preparation for suffering

 

Iuliu Hossu started his missionary activity on the battlefront in 1914 wearing the

military priest coat; he was a forerunner of his faith in God and in the future national union of the Romanians and then he continued to fight for faith even in the communist prisons. The terrors started on 28 October 1948, when after declaring the Decree of Excommunication of the 37 Greek-Catholic priests who intended to break the relation of the Romanian Greek-Catholics with the Church of Rome at the order given by Stalin, he was arrested and brought at the Dragostavele villa, where he was closely watched.

The waves of arrests were made on different pretexts (as the gathering of the delegates for the union of the churches), one of them being that they did not demand Maniu’s death sentence. The proposal to collaborate with the Secret Police did not spare him. But he refused to give up the moral principle he believed in, “our belief is our life, even if this means death not only life, as the Prime-Minister Groza would answer him regarding his refusal to be named (Orthodox!) Bishop of Iasi, “if it would mean only life…”

During the unjust arrests, the unreasonable circumstances, the promises that were made but broken which was the Security’s way to keep the so-called order for fear of losing control, as Groza would explain the interdiction of the right of speech of the arrested, Iuliu Hossu considered that there was only one thing that remained true, the Apostle Paul’s words who said that the Word of God is not chained, but on the contrary, it gives freedom to those who are chained. Cardinal Hossu’s inner freedom relied on the Word of God, that freedom whose value he would deeply appreciate when he would be physically “tied” by the walls of the jail. The night of his arrest at his brother’s residence reminded him of the night of Jesus’ capture, like a thief caught by the power of darkness[1]; he considered himself honored to walk on the Golgotha road. He encouraged others and he encouraged himself with a passage from Matthew, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of ages”, and that is why the Church, similar to the motions of a boat, is shaking from one side to the other, but it shall not sink.

For Wurmbrand the preparation for imprisonment meant reading the stories of some martyrs and time spent in prayer; he was preparing for torture “like a soldier in peaceful times for the trials of war”. However, in the face of all adversity, he did not ask for the cup to be taken away from him, but to bear this cross in order to be a witness for Christ there. He thus assumed the position of an apostle, and his arrest came in answer to his prayers.

 

Faith

 

The bishop’s first reaction in the cell was to kneel and give thanks to God for receiving the honor to be chained for his faith. The soul overwhelmed by faith is like an invincible city in which the power cannot get in unless the believer allows it. The road of the cross is “an opportunity of spiritual meditation, of getting in the deep and of raising on top, of acquiring all that here had a much stronger echo, the song of praising God, of all that I was living and of how I was living, wrapped in the light of the connection I was having.”[2]

Wurmbrand experienced that spiritual meditation in the loneliness of his cell, which helped him live “beyond faith and love, rejoicing in the Lord”[3]. If Lena Constante refused to think of God and of Satan in those 8 years of detention, Wurmbrand meditated both on God and on Satan and he questioned himself al the time. Pictures with a strong Dostoievskian and Faustian effect represented the sign of “getting in the deep” through which he checked the authenticity of his identity in Christ about whom he had preached for so long in times of liberty.

Bishop Hossu’s isolation in the monastery at Caldarusani as elsewhere, the distance of what was happening in the outside world, brought him even closer to God. His faith was not just a superficial, inexperienced, dull, hypocritical faith, (declared in the period in which not all the Greek-Catholic church bishops were arrested and while he was still rejoicing freedom), but that kind of faith for which he would testify in the following seventeen years in prison, the kind that would be strengthened through suffering. For Wurmbrand both isolation and torture were means to reach such a spiritual height, so close to God that “the shining of His light was hard to bare – I was running away in my thoughts”[4]. If in the book of Hebrews apostle Paul defines faith as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see”, Wurmbrand and Hossu escaped from the tough historical reality exactly toward these things that “we do not see”.

The deepest pain came from being unable to attend the holy liturgy. They were not allowed to read any book, all the less the Holy Bible, everything was happening in the depth of their inner world, the dialogue with God was greatly spiritual and they were uttering the liturgy as a “precious prayer”, all the prayers they had in their minds were so valuable and they were saying them daily, because it was then that they were retreating in the depths of their souls.

Prayer, talking to God was not a solution to resort to only in times when they had no dialogue partners. Rather, as Hossu said, it was a way of life. “The most precious prayer was the life lived and dedicated to the Lord there”[5]. They were not allowed to keep any religious object, not even those made by themselves or prayer books and because they were forbidden to pray loud or in a whisper, the only voice that nobody would stop was “the voice of the soul”. They were missing the mass, and the Sunday gathering, but what was left was the holy confession and the spiritual Eucharist, thus remaining strongly united with Christ. It had been nearly evening, but God was still with them in their cell, they “the peaks of reaction”, “the criminals”, “the foes of the nation”, as they were often called, in the same way as Luke and Cleope had been accompanied by God on the road to Emmaus: “In the shade and in the light we tumbled down all of a sudden/ we were in Heaven and the heaven was in us both! – / when we woke up in the waterside, it was late… and all / the light of the world had gathered in us!”[6]

None of them lived a deeper spiritual experience than the one they had in prison; up to then they did nothing but train for the challenge they were going to face. According to the regime, the dissidents had to be re-educated; until they reached that point of brainwash, their value was the same with the animals, therefore they were treated accordingly. When Bishop Hossu got imprisoned together with other bishops, the welcome retort of the guard at the gate was “We are putting the bulls in the stable!”. Under these circumstances they could keep their humanity staying closely connected to God and that is why they felt encouraged and comforted by the Lord, the consolation growing bigger in compensation to the harm done to them: “the comfort was growing as the years were multiplied”.

Going beyond the fear of death and holding “closely the hand of God” they encountered a kind of peace and quiet above all understanding, accomplishing the verse which reads, “Do not be afraid, just believe”[7]. The power of faith set them free of the fear of death, their bodies were weakened by constant hunger, but their soul strengthened “and set in the true freedom”.

 

Relating to One Another

 

The authentic, living church was in prison too. They did not believe that the church of Christ was the material, perishable reality, but that the church of Christ was the community of the believers, “the reality tried by my soul”, Hossu said “and found in the depths of your souls, like in the first centuries, in this reality unsurpassed by any nation of the world I put my faith”[8]. The love for others is not a unidirectional love, only for those in the diocese, but the godly love for the neighbour thorough which one could forgive and love man, not sin. For this reason Wurmbrand tried not to judge the executioner, but to put himself in his shoes, not for subscribing subtly to harm, by accepting cooperation, only in order to understand him as a man. He fought to remain a faithful servant to God and at the same time to lead others to Christ, talking as apostle Paul did, to everyone according to their own understanding, with the Marxists he became like one of them, with the atheists he became like one of them, etc.

The two main words he would find out about in prison free and fast, the physical freedom they were denied and the lack of forgiveness seen in the look of all prisoners, everything had to go by fast in order not to have time to notice anything.

For the first time, driven out from prison, the prisoners were without glasses and they were feeling like “coming from a different world”. The danger of the impossibility to readapt to the society they had left (family, friends, etc) pursued every convict who went through the atrocities of reeducation, even if he survived. Meeting again those whom they shepherded was a real reason of joy, not forgetting to keep fighting for the rehabilitation of the Church.

The power of prayer remained the same after the years in prison ended. The faith in God was not a solution for survival only in prison, but their faith was their life and after that, they saw their suffering in prison being favorable not only for themselves and their own relationship with God, but for others too. “Lord, please let the seed scattered by your servants in the deep soil bear fruit on the road we are walking with Thy help”[9].

 

 

Notes