ROMANIAN HOLY MARTYR- DOCTOR-PRIEST

 

Another Romanian is SERVANT of GOD MARTIN BENEDICT, who was born in the municipality of Nicolae Bălcescu, Galbeni, in 1931, to peasant parents. After attending elementary school in his home town (1938-1945), he entered the Conventual Franciscan seminary in Hălăucești in 1945. He continued his studies there for three years. Once the communist regime began to persecute the Catholic Church and the schools were nationalized, he completed his high school studies in Bacău and subsequently enrolled in the Medical Faculty of the University of Lași, where he graduated in 1957.

He worked as a doctor in Răducăneni, Tătăreni, Bacău, and finally at the hospital Onești (from 1962 until his death). In 1972, he became seriously ill from an intestinal disease. He underwent three surgeries within a few days. Although the doctors expected that he would soon die, he overcame the disease. Everyone felt his recovery was miraculous.

 At that time, his sister Varvara moved in with him. She was also a clandestine religious, like her brother. After continuous contacts with the Conventual Franciscans, especially Friar Gheorghe Patrascu, he decided to continue his preparation for religious life and the priesthood. Under the guidance of Friar Gheorghe, the then incognito Minister Provincial of Romania, Martin secretly completed his novitiate year. He made his temporary profession in 1976 and his solemn profession some time in 1979.

 Due the historical circumstances, no records were kept, so the precise date is unknown. On September 14, 1980, in Slănic, Moldova, he was ordained a priest by a Greek Catholic Bishop who would later become His Eminence Alexandru Cardinal Todea, Archbishop Emeritus of Făgăraş şi Alba Iulia, Romania.

Friar Martin continued working at the hospital, without the secret police discovering his religious profession and priestly status. He created a small chapel in his apartment, where he would celebrate daily Mass. The faithful used to call him “the doctor who prays a lot” because of his continuous prayers and “our fatherly doctor.” He was not only concerned with the physical health of his patients but also with their souls, urging them to pray, to confess and to regularize their married life.

He particularly fought against abortion and defended the dignity and inalienable rights of all human beings. He also contributed toward the construction of some churches despite the hostility of the communist regime which was then in power.

He made a pilgrimage to Rome for the beatification of the Romanian Capuchin Franciscan, Friar Geremia da Valacchia (known secularly as Jon Stoika). During the beatification Mass, on October 30, 1983, Friar Martin participated, disguised as a layman. He read some intentions of the prayers of the faithful, and added some improvised reflections, that constituted a warning to everyone in the audience. He was thus recognized as a priest by the secret police, which began his  persecution, arrests, interrogations, even attempts to poison him and  run him over with a car. These persecutions lasted until his death, on July 12, 1986.

A year later, water from a well next to his family house in his hometown began to smell and taste of roses. Galbeni soon became a pilgrimage destination and this development was deeply troubling to the secret police. However, all attempts to stop the flow of the faithful failed. Rumors of miracles and inexplicable healings were spreading and people started to pray to Friar Martin with great devotion to ask for his help and grace. Friar Martin’s memory remains very much alive among the lay faithful and the friars of today’s Province of St. Joseph, Spouse of the B.V.M. in Romania.

Friar Martin’s process for canonization began on April 14, 2007. 

MODEL FOR EASTERN EUROPE IN CRISES

 

 

Friends of ours were recently in Romania (a country I would have liked to visit, especially to bird) which caused me to find this saint.

BL. VLADIMIR GHIKA was a Romanian diplomat and essayist who, after his conversion from Romanian Orthodoxy became a priest of the Catholic Church. He was a member of the princely Ghica family, which ruled Moldavia and Wallachia at various times from the 17th to the 19th century. He died in prison in May 1954 after his arrest by the Communist regime of Romania.

Vladimir Ghika was born on Christmas Day of 1873 in Constantinople. His father was Ioan Grigore Ghica, diplomat, minister plenipotentiary in Turkey. His mother, Alexandrina, was born Moret de Blaremberg into a Flemish-Russian family. He had four brothers and a sister. He was the grandson of the last Prince sovereign of Moldavia, Prince Gregory V Ghika, who ruled from 1849 to 1856. 

 In 1878, in order to give a good education to the children, the family moved to Toulouse, France. There, they frequented the Protestant community, because the Orthodox church was not represented in the area. Vladimir received his Degree in Law in 1895, after which he attended the Paris Faculty of Political Science. He also studied Medicine, Botany, Art, Literature, Philosophy, and History. He returned to Romania due to an attack of angina pectoris, continuing his studies in Romania.

The future blessed was an alumnus of the College of St. Thomas, the future Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Angelicum, in Rome. In 1898, he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology. At the Angelicum, he completed a licentiate in Philosophy and a Doctorate in Theology in 1905. Soon converting to the Catholic faith.

Vladimir wanted to become a priest or monk, but Pius X, a family friend, advised him to give up the idea, at least for a while, and to dedicate himself to secular apostolate instead. He became one of the pioneers of the lay apostolate.

After returning to Romania, he dedicated himself to works of charity and opened the first free clinic in Bucharest called Mariae Bethlehem. He also set the foundation for a great hospital and sanatorium named after Vincent de Paul, founded the first free hospital in Romania and the first ambulance, thereby becoming founder of the first Catholic charity work in Romania.

 He was dedicated to patient care while participating in health services in the Balkan War in 1913, without the fear of cholera in Zimnicea. He was also in charge of diplomatic missions among the Avezzano earthquake victims.

On 7 October 1923, Vladimir was ordained a priest in Paris by Cardinal Dubois, Archbishop of the city. He served as a priest in France until 1939. Shortly after  he was ordained, the Holy See authorized him to celebrate the Byzantine Rite. Prince Ghika thereby became the first bi-ritual Romanian priest.

On 13 May 1931, the Pope appointed Father Vladimir to be an Apostolic Protonotary, but he was reluctant to accept it. He worked worldwide, (speaking 22 languages)  including Bucharest, Rome, Paris, Congo,Tokyo, Sydney, and Buenos Aires, among others. Later, in jest, Pope Pius XI called him an "apostolic vagabond". 

He traveled to dangerous war zones to care for the wounded and refugees as well as victims of cholera epidemics. During World War I, the Vatican gave him diplomatic assignments on top of his humanitarian work. It is said that Pope Pius XI gave him an assignment to go to Russia to convert Lenin, but when he arrived, Lenin had just died. 

Most of these global missions were financed through personal wealth.

On 3 August 1939 he returned to Romania, where he was caught in the Second World War. He refused to leave Romania at that time so that he could be with the poor and sick, and he did so even when the Allies began bombing Bucharest, where he lived.

As World War II ended, the Soviet Union positioned itself to take over exhausted neighbors such as Romania. With writing on the wall that the new communist leadership being imposed would not be friendly to property owners or priests, Vladimir Ghika’s family urged him to leave alongside others fleeing communist oppression.

The priest’s response was typically sacrificial: “If God wants me here, then here I remain.”  

He even passed up a spot on the king’s own train (Romania was a constitutional monarchy), which left the country for good in December 1947, when the communists forced King Michael to abdicate or die.

Between 1948 and 1952, every Catholic bishop and auxiliary in Romania was arrested and jailed. The new regime set out to create a new Catholic hierarchy, appointed by the political power and no longer loyal to the Holy See. The project failed, as each Catholic cleric chose punishment over capitulation.

Bl. Vladimir was arrested on 18 November 1952, because of his support for the Catholic Church in communion with Rome and his opposition to the schismatic church that the regime was creating. He was charged for "high treason" and threatened, beaten, tortured and processed. Eventually, he was imprisoned at Jilava Prison on 16 May. Throughout his internment until his death on May 16, 1954, he was a medical and spiritual doctor to the inmates, especially the young.

Thirty direct witnesses testified to the Blessed’s holiness while in jail, where various sociopathic torture techniques were employed to get him to confess to being a traitor for communicating with the Vatican.

He  was starved. He was beaten. Guards ordered dogs to attack him. He was tortured with electric shocks and strangulation. A firing squad was assembled to shoot him, but it was all a game, as they used blanks; it was a sick stunt to make him confess. He didn’t. Eventually, he lost his eyesight and hearing as a result of brutality. He died in 1954 due to the treatment to which he was subjected.

On 27 March 2013, Pope Francis declared Vladimir to be a martyr. He was beatified on 31 August 2013. 

Archbishop Ioan Robu of Bucharest said at his beatification:

“His limitless charity extended to all people, of all faiths, everywhere. His capacity for forgiveness was infinite too. Most inspiring to me was his ability to see God in all things.” 

A true model for the Church in eastern Europe today as it faces so many challanges, sitting next to a country at war.

RICH BLACK EARTH

 

A Poem for the People of Ukraine

Bomb the walls till they are rubble;
Bomb the rubble till it’s bricks;
Bomb the bricks till they are pebbles;
Bomb the pebbles till they’re sand—
But grains of sand are numberless,
Riding the wind, enduring sun, unthirsting,
Grand in dunes, erasing kingdoms,
Grinding engines to a halt,
Counting time in timeless rivers,
Becoming pearls in oyster shells.

We are the people,
A timeless reckoning like sand,
Hard and myriad like pebbles,
Blocks for building like the bricks,
Scarred and witnessing like rubble,
Rising mighty like the walls—
Hymn and culture, ritual,
Palace, plaza, aqueduct, maidan,
Legend, testament, and creed;
We are Kyiv and Kharkiv, Mariupol,
Warsaw, London, Sarajevo,
Nanking, Masada, Leningrad;
Once we were Tenochtitlan.

You are Ozymandias, and we are sand
And song—
You are the stones removed and cast away,
And we the rich, black earth. 

Frederic S. Durbin – American

Painting: Alex Kalenyuk- Ukraine

FATHER AND SON- ART FOR UKRAINE

 

 

Another Ukrainian artist who just popped into my search is IRENAEUS YURCHUK. 

He was born in Ukraine during World War II and raised in Upstate New York. He moved to New York City to earn an Architecture degree from The Cooper Union and graduate degrees in Urban Design and Planning from Columbia University.

He has participated in group exhibitions in North America and Europe, and his works are held in private collections in the US and abroad.

He worked professionally as an urban planner until 2010, when he turned to art full-time.

 Much of his new work is a response to Russia’s 2022 military invasion of Ukraine.

(Paining to left: "Kharkiv Forever")

 “Over the years my work has evolved to combine multiple-image photography with drawing and painting, using a variety of digital editing and physical montage techniques. This includes adjusting inkjet images by applying acrylics, watercolors, pastels, markers, colored pencils together with selected collage materials to achieve a desired effect.”

The Ukrainian Institute of America states: The dense matrix that occupies Irenaeus Yurchuk’s paintings appears both constructed and organic. Like the cultural and historical architecture they evoke, these vague photomechanical records have grown from some originating seed into a pulsating mass whose boundaries are indeterminate and fluctuating. While his approach is characterized by a modernist recombination of photographic fragments into wholly abstract combinations, Irenaeus Yurchuk augments his surfaces with chromatic paint media and other materials to engineer a detailed diagrammatic figuration. The final effect proves a stunning pastiche of image, pattern, color and texture.

                       Painting to right is :”Angel of Kharkiv”

 

Irenaus' son DORIAN YURCHUK  was born in 1970 in New Jersey. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, while also attending classes at the New School for Social Research and at Harvard University. 

In 1998, Dorian was awarded the degree of Master of Architecture, History and Theory Option, at McGill University. His current research centers around the link between laughter and healing, as evidenced in sources such as Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel and Joubert's Traite di Ris. Dorian's travels have taken him from Anchorage to Kharkiw, and he has difficulty staying indoors. He now works at an architectural restoration firm in New York City where he beholds, probes and reconstructs facades for a living.

In contrast to his father, Dorian Yurchuk develops rituals, creating objects, reliefs and illustrations that operate between painting and sculpture, and further establish new realms for visual exploration. Multilayered in their direct and indirect intents, these works are resonant with Yurchuk’s occupational and perceptual past, incorporating objects and remnants from the building trade and using these elemental materials to create works imbued with a poetic spirit residing between order and chaos, creation and destruction.

Dorian’s grander two-dimensional compositions are created as turbulent renderings by an inveterate outdoorsman responding to topographies from above and below.

OUR FOUNDER IN THE WORLD OF CRISES

 

                                                          Connie Kittok

Thursday is the feast of our patron and founder, ST. BENEDICT. In the past 20 years he has become popular in many circles. We ask ourselves why is Saint Benedict so important for us today? Certainly our own country and the whole world needs a patron to get us out of the moral, political and human confusion that is wreaking havoc across the globe, from war, wretched politics, poverty, crime, and plain bad decisions in all areas of our culture.

 Pope (St.) Paul VI wrote Pacis Nuntius (1964), an Apostolic Letter by which he names Saint Benedict as the principle patron of all of Europe.

 “Messenger of peace, molder of union, magister of civilization, and above all herald of the religion of Christ and founder of monastic life in the West: these are the proper titles of exaltation given to St. Benedict, Abbot.”

In 1980 letter sent to the Benedictines on the 1500th anniversary of monastic life, St. John Paul II wrote:

Man’s face is often wet with tears impelling him to pray, but these tears do not always spring from sincere compunction or excessive joy. For often tears of sorrow and disturbance  ow from those whose human dignity is disregarded, those who cannot achieve what they justly desire, and who cannot do the work that suits their needs and talents.

St Benedict lived in a civil society deformed by injustices. The human person frequently counted for nothing and was treated as a criminal. In a social structure drawn up in orders, the most wretched were segregated and reduced to slavery. The poor grew poorer, while the rich grew richer and richer. Yet this remarkable man willed to found the monastic community on the prescriptions of the Gospel. He restored man to his integral condition, no matter what social order or rank he came from. He provided for the needs of each according to the norms of a wise distributive justice. He assigned significant duties to individuals, duties which cohered aptly with other duties. He considered the conditions of the weak, but left no room for easy laziness. He allowed space for the cleverness of others lest they feel hemmed in, or rather, so that they might be stimulated to give their best. Thus he removed the pretext of a light and sometimes justified murmuring, and brought about the conditions of true peace....

Europe became a Christian land chiefly because sons of St Benedict gave our ancestors a comprehensive instruction, not only teaching them arts and crafts but also infusing into them the spirit of the Gospel which is needed for the protection of the spiritual treasures of the human person. The paganism which was formerly drawn over to the Gospel by the many hands of missionary monks is now spreading more and more in the Western world, and it is both the cause and the effect of the loss of the Christian way of esteeming work and its dignity.

Unless Christ endows human action with a constant lofty meaning, the worker becomes the slave –a special kind of slave unique to modern times– of profit and industry. On the contrary, Benedict affirms the urgent necessity of giving a spiritual character to work, enlarging the purpose of human labor so that it can escape the excessive application of the technical arts and the excessive greed for what is useful to one’s self."

                            (Painting: Stephen Whatley- England)

ACCEPTANCE

 

A prayer most relevant for our age!

“Mother of Christ,
help me to be willing
to accept the suffering
that is the condition of love.
Help me accept
the grief
of seeing those whom I love suffer,
and when they die
let me share in their death
by compassion.
Give me the faith
that knows Christ
in them,
and knows that His love
is the key
to the mystery of suffering.
Help me,
Blessed Mother,
to see with your eyes,
to think with your mind,
to accept with your will.
Help me to believe
that it is Christ
who suffers in innocent children,
in those who die in the flower of life,
in those whose death is an act
of reparation,
in those who are sacrificed
for others.
Remind me
that their suffering
is Christ’s love
healing the world,
and when I suffer for them
and with them,
I too am given the power
of His redeeming love.”

 

Caryll Houselander (d. 1954)

 Art: Mother of God

          Ivan-Valentyn Zadorozhny - Ukraine, 1987

                

PATRON OF ADDICTIONS

 

It seems there is a saint for every ill in our society and one who is called the patron of alcoholics will next year in Ireland celebrate the 100 anniversary of his death.

VENERABLE MATT TALBOT was born in 1856 in Dublin, Ireland into a poor working-class family. He was the second of 12 children, nine of whom survived beyond infancy.  He grew up surrounded by poverty and alcohol abuse during Ireland’s Great Famine.

He left school when still a  child and began working for a wine seller. It was there that he began drinking excessively, becoming an alcoholic at the age of about 13.

 His life spiraled and revolved around his next drink. He was often found in the bar, fighting, cursing, swearing, stealing, anything for a drink.

One incident that caused him shame for the rest of his life, was during his days on the drink he stole the fiddle of a street musician. He sold the instrument and used the money to buy the drink. After achieving sobriety, Matt tried to find the man from whom he stole the fiddle to pay him for the instrument. Unsuccessful in locating the victim of this theft, Matt donated the money to have a Mass said for the fiddler.

 After hitting rock bottom, Matt went to his mother, who had prayed unceasingly for her son’s conversion. He told his mother that he was going to take a pledge to stop drinking. She told him not to take it if he was not going to keep it.  He responded. "I will keep it by the grace of God”. He then went to Confession, making the pledge, and the next day received the Eucharist. He never drank again for the rest of his life. 

He was guided for most of his life by Michael Hickey, Professor of Philosophy in Clonliffe College. Under the professor's guidance, Mattt's reading became wider, studing Scripture and the lives of the saints. 

 After his conversion, Matt tried his best to make amends to the people he had hurt during his fifteen years as an active alcoholic. He paid back money to those he had borrowed or stolen from.

Matt never married but cared for his widowed mother until her death. He became a secular Franciscan, frequented the sacraments, and prayed the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross. He worked hard at his jobs to earn money to give to needy friends and neighbors and to charitable institutions and the missions. He lived simply, patterning himself on early Irish monks. He even became a mystic and practiced harsh penances.

 After 1923, Matt’s health began to fail and on Trinity Sunday, 1925, in the midst of a heat wave, he collapsed on his way to the 10:30 am Mass at the Dominican church in Dublin. It was only after his death, when penitential chains were discovered on his body, that attention was drawn to his life journey. The archdiocese opened an inquiry into Matt's holiness in 1931, and he was declared Venerable in 1975 by Pope (St.) Paul VI.

He never forgot his struggle though. He once said to his sister, “Never think harshly of a person because of the drink. It is easier to get out of hell then it is to give up the drink.” He then continued, “For me, it was only possible with the help of God and our Blessed Mother”.

Even after 100 years, Venerable Matt Talbot’s life continues to inspire those who battle addictions, showing the possibility of recovery, redemption, and the capacity to change, regardless of past mistakes.

 

Art:

Top: Terry Nelson

Middle: Noreen Flynn. Cathedral of SS Peter & Paul, Ennis, Ireland

Bottom: Terry Nelson- 2019