A priest who died of cold and hunger in a Communist prison will be beatified as a martyr in Romania.
Archbishop Ioan Robu of Bucharest, president of the Romanian bishops’
conference, said the sanctity of Mgr Vladimir Ghika had “given us an
important new example of a life lived for Church and faith”.
Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for
Saints’ Causes, is scheduled to celebrate the beatification Mass in
Bucharest’s Romexpo exhibition centre on Saturday.
Archbishop Robu said that Mgr Ghika would represent many other
“unknown and unrecognised Christian martyrs” who died in Romania during
four decades of Communist rule, which ended in December 1989.
“This latest beatification proves the Church doesn’t forget those who
generously gave their lives in this way, whose testimonies can still be
understood and valued by contemporary society,” the archbishop said.
Mgr Ghika was born on December 25, 1873, in Istanbul, where his
father was Romania’s representative at the Ottoman court. He was one of
six children in an Orthodox family. He studied in Paris and in Toulouse,
France, his mother’s home country, and received a theology doctorate in
1898 at Rome’s Dominican College.
He was received into the Catholic Church on April 15, 1902, but was
persuaded by Pope Pius X, whom he knew personally, to remain a lay man
in order to evangelise more effectively among non-Catholics.
After aiding the sick in Thessaloniki, Greece, he moved to Bucharest,
where he founded Romania’s first free clinic, as well as a hospital and
sanatorium, before returning to France to care for the displaced and
wounded during the First World War.
In 1921, he was awarded the Legion of Honor for helping restore
France’s diplomatic ties with the Holy See. On October 7, 1923, he was
ordained in Paris and was authorised to conduct liturgies in both the
Latin and Eastern Catholic rites.
He befriended prominent Catholics such as writers Jacques Maritain
and Paul Claudel while ministering in the rough quarter of Villejuif. In
the 1930s, he also travelled widely in Europe, Asia and the Americas as
a representative of Pope Pius XI.
Mgr Ghika returned to Romania at the outbreak of the Second World War to organise help for refugees and bombardment victims.
Having rejected advice to leave the country after the Communists
seized of power, he was arrested on November 18, 1952, for refusing to
break ties with the Vatican, and survived more than 80 violent
interrogations before being sentenced to three years’ incarceration at
Romania’s infamous Jilava prison, where he died, emaciated, on May 16,
1954.
May 16 will be celebrated as his feast day.
“Although these terrible events happened long ago, I think a story like this still speaks to us today,” Archbishop Robu said.
“Martyrdom isn’t just a phenomenon of Christianity’s first centuries –
people gave their lives for the faith in recent memory and are still
doing so in large numbers now.”
The archbishop said it had taken much effort to document Mgr Ghika’s
case because of the systematic destruction of evidence and erasing of
records under Communism.
“Fortunately, the Church has a long memory, although there’ll always
be many other martyrs whose stories won’t be recorded,” he said.