Claudiu-Lucian Topor (”Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University Iasi)
The oppressive regime in Romania installed after 1948 paid particular attention to priests, cults and churches. The communist authorities in Bucharest tried to dislocate the Catholic clergy from the clerical body in an attempt to change the profile of the Roman Catholic Church into a national, state-controlled church modeled on the Romanian Orthodox Church. From the very beginning, a bitter struggle took shape – between the Catholic clergy and the oppressive apparatus of the communist state. The priests had warned their parishioners that the communist regime would severely test their faith. In a climate of terror, many Catholic bishops became victims of the Securitate. Who then could fight to preserve these values? It was against this backdrop of abuse of power that I discovered Bishop Anton Durcovici. His case is presented in the documents of the former Securitate. He seemed to come from another era. He was born in 1888 in Deutsch-Altenburg in Austria and had suffered the rigors of civilian imprisonment during the Great War. With the establishment of the communist regime (1947), the monsignor’s condition began to change for the better. This coincided by chance with his election as bishop of Iasi. It was a new and honorable position from which he later proved himself a defender of the Catholic faith and a servant of God who would not bow to the regime’s attempts to change the church canons. His acts of solidarity could not fail to attract the attention of the Securitate, in a context in which this new institution of oppression had been informed about the revolt of the Catholic faithful in Moldavia. The bishop of Iași was soon placed under surveillance and an intelligence dossier regarding him was established. It is the accusations in this dossier, his arrest and interrogation, as well as the circumstances of his death in Sighet (the landmark prison for the victims of communism in Romania) that we intend to investigate in the course of this presentation. We consider Bishop Durcovici to be a symbol of the struggle for freedom and an emblematic character, whose posterity still shows civic concern for encouraging the study of the totalitarian terror and of the experiences of oppression.