Hilarion Argatu

Ilarion Argatu, born Ioan on 2 August 1913 at Valea Glodului, in Suceava, was a priest, then archimandrite, renowned confessor and exorcist at Cernica Monastery. He died on 11 May 1999. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; after the exhumation of 2006 the faithful venerate his body, found almost whole.

He was born into a large family, moved from Maramureș in the eighteenth century to keep its faith. He attended the Seminary at Dorohoi and Theology at Cernăuți and, in parallel, the Military School at Bacău, being a sub-⁠lieutenant of border guards. On 10 November 1940 he married Georgeta Mihăilescu, a priest's daughter, and they had five children; the same year he was ordained priest at Iași. From 1946 he served at Boroaia, where he wished to build a church. Because he did not respect the restrictions imposed by the authorities, he was declared an enemy of the people. On 18 July 1948 he escaped arrest and went into hiding, with a price of three hundred thousand lei on his head. According to the accounts kept, he stayed hidden sixteen years in barrels, barns, attics, a cornfield and under the floor of his own house, without even his children knowing, and five years after the first arrest warrant he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment. He was pardoned in 1964 and discovered by the militia on 13 February 1965; interrogated, he was released and given the Boroaia parish again. With the blessing of Metropolitan Iustin Moisescu he laid the foundation stone of the church on 22 June 1969, and the building was finished in 1970; the church was consecrated in 1977.

After his wife's death, in 1972, he received monastic tonsure at Antim in January 1973, with the name Ilarion, spent a few years at Căldărușani and his last nineteen years at Cernica, as confessor of the community. There he performed services of exorcism for hundreds of people, beginning with the Akathist of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Liturgy, blessing of water, the holy oil and the prayers of Saint Basil the Great. After 1990 he was called to other countries in Europe and to the United States. He built a church in his native village and gave the Romanian community in Israel a plot at Jericho.

He died on 11 May 1999, aged eighty-⁠six, and was buried at Boroaia, in a crypt in the narthex of the church, beside his wife. In May 2006, at exhumation, the body was found almost whole, though the coffin had rotted. The faithful placed him in a reliquary with a glass lid in the narthex, and in the churchyard stands a statue of him.