Valeriu Gafencu

Valeriu Gafencu was born on 24 January 1921 at Sângerei, in Bessarabia, and died on 18 February 1952 in the prison-⁠hospital at Târgu Ocna, aged thirty-⁠one, after almost twelve years in prison. Many former prisoners and believers call him "the saint of the prisons", a name given by Nicolae Steinhardt. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; his cult is contested by some historians and others because of his legionary past, and his name is not among the sixteen twentieth-⁠century saints canonized by the Synod in July 2024.

He grew up in a family of Bessarabian intellectuals; his father, Vasile, had supported the union of Bessarabia with Romania. He attended the lyceum at Bălți. In the summer of 1940, when Bessarabia was occupied by the Soviet army, he crossed the Prut and enrolled in Law at Iași. According to his own statements, he joined the Legionary Movement at sixteen and led its youth organization, the Brotherhoods of the Cross, at Iași. After the rebellion of January 1941 he was arrested; in December 1941 a military tribunal of the Antonescu regime sentenced him to twenty-⁠five years of hard labour, for legionary activity.

He was held at Aiud (1942-1948), then at Pitești, Văcărești and, from 1950, Târgu Ocna. In prison he underwent, according to those who knew him, above all Ioan Ianolide, an inner change: he read Scripture, the Paterikon and the Fathers, confessed and communed regularly and turned to the prayer of the heart, which he said unceasingly, especially in the isolation of the punishment cell from 1943. The Way of a Pilgrim was his guide. The same accounts show that he taught others forgiveness and rejected the idea of revenge. In 1948 a Soviet representative, regarding him as a Soviet citizen as a Bessarabian, invited him to go to the USSR; he refused.

In the autumn of 1949 he had his first haemorrhage, from pulmonary tuberculosis. Ill, he was transferred to Văcărești and then to Târgu Ocna, which, according to his companions, spared him the re-⁠education of Pitești. At Târgu Ocna he was in room 4, for the gravely ill, with lung cavities, pleurisy, appendicitis and rheumatic pains. Those who knew him speak of his serenity, of prayer that continued in his sleep and of the way he looked at the jailers and at the "re-⁠educated". His confessor, an ordinary priest, said after his death that his confession was a thorough examination of the depths of the soul. He said he wished to have no moment of doubt, so that Satan might not come and take his soul at that very time.

Ianolide recounts that on 18 February 1952, about one in the afternoon, while it was snowing, Valeriu said to him: John, carry the spirit onward. God has worked here. Then he said: It is finished. He was buried in the prison cemetery; the exact place is not known.

After 1989 the testimony of Ianolide, Steinhardt and other prisoners made Gafencu a figure venerated by many groups of believers, and the name "saint of the prisons" came into popular use. The story of the streptomycin he is said to have given to the pastor Richard Wurmbrand is told by some and doubted by others; historians cannot confirm it. Others stress his legionary membership, which he did not publicly renounce, and ask for caution. The Romanian Orthodox Church has not canonized him; his veneration remains one of the faithful.