The purpose of this essay is to make known the personality of one of the most famous Orthodox priests, Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa, who publicly opposed the communist authorities in Romania at the cost of losing his freedom, while the vast majority of his colleagues preferred silence, and some of whom went even further, becoming collaborators of the new political regime. I will use the descriptive method to highlight the profile of an authentic confessor of the Christian faith in times of persecution and marginalization of those who wanted to remain faithful to the tradition into which they were born. In the first part, I will refer to the suffering he endured in communist prisons in his youth (1948–1964) for the ‘guilt’ of conspiring against the ‘social order’, a label given to all those who opposed the dictatorship. The terrible beatings, the sufferings which they were subjected to daily, the diseases, and the malnutrition made even the strongest lose their faith and transform themselves from victims into executioners. We will see how all of this affected the hero of these lines and how he managed to come to his senses, to rediscover his own Christian identity, even when he was on the edge of the abyss, on the border between life and death. In the second part, I will show how God, the One who saved him from the brink of suicide and strengthened him in faith during the years spent in the Romanian gulag, will transform him from a simple priest into a symbol of resistance to communist atheism. When the demolition of churches in Bucharest began, he publicly protested through seven sermons delivered to students during the seven weeks of Easter Lent, despite opposition from both the state and the Church. The latter, instead of defending him when he was sentenced to imprisonment, disowned him and excluded him from the ranks of the clergy.
Nicu Dumitrașcu (Thu,) studied this question.