The Lenten sermons of Father George Calciu, originally addressed to Orthodox seminarians and students in Romania, are just as appropriate to the young people of America and the Western world in general. His words will strike a responsive chord in the heart of any young person who is awake or ready to awaken to the call of Christ to this corrupt last generation of mankind.
In the Communist-dominated countries of the East this call is jammed by the atheist control of education, the press, and all the means of public expression. In the West there is little of such open persecution of faith in God, but the spiritual atmosphere is not as different from that of the East as it might seem. The same unbelief and unremitting worldliness are pounded into the heads and hearts of young people in the West in almost every public institution and medium; the same violence and rebellion disturb young souls that know no other way to express their need and frustration; and religion, although outwardly free, has become a private and subjective matter that does not move society as a whole and is generally seen by young people to have no particular power or significance for their lives. The name of Christ—unlike the situation in the East—can be freely pronounced, but most often it is associated with a religion of dead formalism or, at best, of subjective revivalism, and at worst of a self-centered exploitation of religious feeling.
The Christ of Father George Calciu is quite different. He calls to the suffering, longing but unfulfilled hearts of young people who would believe in the whole Christ of Orthodox faith if only they dared, or if only someone would dare to preach Him to them, together with the call to Christian commitment and acceptance of the path to salvation which He has given us in His Church.
These talks were originally given on the Wednesday evenings of Great Lent in 1978, in the chapel of the Bucharest Orthodox Seminary where Fr. George was a professor. They aroused great interest and controversy (as described partially in the Eighth Meditation), thereby revealing the potentiality for an Orthodox revival among the suffering Romanian people that is very close to what is happening in the Soviet Union, where the talks of Father Dimitry Dudko have had a similar effect.
Father George’s situation in the Romanian Church (the new calendarist Patriarchate, the “official” Orthodox church of Romania) is virtually identical to the situation of Father Dimitry Dudko in Russia before the latter’s arrest in 1980. He accepts the authority of his bishops but energetically preaches the truth and righteousness which they refrain from preaching because of their concordat with the Communist government; and in doing this he cannot help but criticize the bishops and question the very nature of their co-existence with the government. He writes: “Should they (the bishops) truly be Christ’s apostles on Romanian soil, then we will be their firm disciples. If one single bishop had been by our side, we would not have helped in the destruction of the Enea church.”
As might have been expected, Father George was not left long to speak freely to the Orthodox youth of the Romanian Church. No stranger to Communist prisons (where he spent 18 years before being released in 1964), he was arrested again in March, 1979, and after severe and long beatings he was sentenced to ten years in prison. When his wife was allowed to see him in 1980 he was almost blind, severely emaciated, apparently drugged, and barely able to recognize her. He has been subjected since then to periodic interrogations and torture but has not broken down and “confessed.” According to the most recent information, he was moved in 1981 to a prison in Bucharest and is apparently near death there at the age of 55.
While we in the free Russian Church Outside of Russia have no communion with the enslaved Patriarchate in Bucharest, our attitude towards fearless preachers of Christ’s truth like Father George can only be positive, as the “Decision” of the Synod of Bishops has recommended with regard to the positive events within the Moscow Patriarchate (“Decision” of the Synod, Aug. 12/25, 1981; full text in The Orthodox Word, no. 98).
Orthodoxy today, despite the often serious differences that separate many of the local Churches, is still one, and a genuine spiritual manifestation in one Orthodox Church cannot but affect believers elsewhere. Thus, the voice of Father George is not for Romania only. What young man whose heart is burning with the love of Christ and His True Church in America—or any other land where Orthodoxy has taken root and begun to grow—will not be moved for his own people when he hears Father George say:
“Our people are a ripe harvest, waiting to be gathered for Christ. But where are the worthy harvesters? Be harvesters! Be pastors! And above all, pray to God to give this nation good harvesters who will not love parents and children more than Christ.”
“If in a single year we were to see one thousand priests graduate, full of the spirit of sacrifice, priests as Christ would have them to be, then in less than one year the spiritual face of our country would be changed. ”
One can only pray that the young Orthodox people of America, and all those whose hearts are ripe for genuine Orthodoxy, will pay heed to these messages from the suffering Orthodox soul under the atheist yoke and respond to them by shaking off the worldly enticements of these decadent times and at last taking seriously the Orthodox faith which is given too easily to us here, thus making the beginning of the genuine, committed Christianity which this land so desperately needs.
May it be so!
By Hieromonk Seraphim Rose
The Orthodox Word, Vol. 18, No. 1, January-February 1982, pp. 16-19
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