Destinul post‑carceral al părintelui Ioan Iovan, în contextul recalibrării relațiilor Stat‑Biserică în perioada regimului Ce
Abstract
Using memorialistic and documentary sources (files from the archive
of the former Securitate and the Department of Cults), the study aims to analyse the
anti‑Christian repressive policies of the communist regime in Romania in the context
the recalibration of the relations between the political power and the Orthodox Church,
throughout the 4 decades of communism. The starting point of the analysis comes from
the biography of priest Ioan Iovan (1922‑2008), one of the “exceptional” figures of
anti‑communist memory; he was the priest‑confessor of a monastery (Vladimirești,
Galați) that asserted itself as a centre of Christian resistance against communism. The
anti‑communist intransigence of priest Ioan Iovan, as well as his theological practices
brought him into conflict with the church authorities, who regarded him with suspicion,
precisely because his stance affected the fragile balance that the Church hierarchs
were trying to maintain in relationship with the state. Iovan was arrested in 1955 and
sentenced to forced labour for life, while the Vladimirești Monastery was abolished by
the regime. Throughout his detention, he continued to be the ferment of religious life in
the prisons he transited, strengthening the Christian dimension of the prisoners’ moral
resistance in prison. After his release from prison in 1964, he continued to perform
religious service clandestinely, keeping in touch with the former nuns of Vladimirești,
an activity that attracted reprisals from the regime, leading him to be imprisoned
for two more times during the 1970s, a time when the Ceaușescu regime claimed that Romania had no more political prisoners. In the end, he managed to be even be
reaccepted within monasticism, not without constant suspicion directed against him,
without the right to perform religious service, and being constantly tracked by the
Securitate until the fall of the communist regime.
