Part 2 in the two-part series offered by Dr. Ionut Biliuta in his continuing examination of the recent canonizations in the Romanian Orthodox Church.
On 23 July 2025, the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate issued a statement in which it distanced itself from the fascist paraphernalia (the green flag of the Iron Guard) displayed at the tomb of Fr. Ilie Lăcătușu during the first liturgy performed there after his canonization. The statement also highlighted the reasons for Lăcătușu’s canonization: his imprisonment for defending the Orthodox faith during communism, as well as the relics and miracles attributed to him. Ilie Lăcătușu was one of the sixteen new male saints canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Holy Synod during its session of 11–12 July 2024, as confessors and defenders of the faith under communism, in preparation for the centennial anniversary of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate in 2025. Half of these new confessors and martyrs of the Orthodox faith during communism had fascist and antisemitic pasts, and most of them suffered imprisonment and persecution from the communist state, not because of their staunch spiritual resistance, but rather for political crimes committed even before the onset of communism in Romania.
One of these former members of the Romanian fascist movement known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Iron Guard, was Fr. Ilie Lăcătușu. He was born on 6 December 1909 in the village of Crăpăturile, in southern Romania, into a poor family; his father was the local church’s reader. As many Orthodox readers hoped to see their sons become priests, young Ilie pursued his education at the St. Nicholas Seminary in Râmnicu Vâlcea (1923–1930), followed by theological studies at the University of Bucharest (1930–1934). On 1 September 1934, he was ordained as a priest by Bishop Vartolomeu Stănescu of Râmnic-Noul Severin (1875–1954) and began his pastoral career. The symbolic geography in which the young priest chose to serve, Vâlcea County and eastern Oltenia, coincided, by the mid-1930s, with areas where the Romanian fascist movement concentrated its propaganda among local schoolteachers and Orthodox priests. In addition, the interwar secret police (Siguranța Statului) described Bishop Vartolomeu as a dedicated supporter of the Iron Guard, who appointed legionary priests throughout his bishopric to positions of authority.
According to these documents, as well as his later testimonies given in the early 1950s before communist Securitate officers, Lăcătușu converted to fascism in 1936. Over the years, he organized three legionary organizations (nests) in his parish at Buicești village and others in neighboring villages, coordinated legionary marches to attract unaffiliated youth, and engaged in propaganda for the legionary electoral list in the general elections of December 1937. It remains unclear how he survived the fall of his bishop and the anti-legionary purges launched by King Carol II after the establishment of his personal dictatorship in February 1938. He resurfaced in September 1940 during the short-lived National Legionary State, when the Legionary Movement was in power. During this period, Fr. Lăcătușu embezzled funds from the youth organization formed during the authoritarian regime of King Carol II and forced the professors of the high school in Gura Motrului to organize themselves into a legionary nest, while students were compelled to join the “bundles of friends,” the basic cells of the legionary youth organization known as the Brotherhoods of the Cross. Although no professor enlisted, he collected the financial contributions for the movement anyway.
A violent man emboldened by access to unchecked power, Lăcătușu organized local groups of enforcers to beat those who were reluctant to join or pay contributions to the Legion and compiled lists of the Legion’s enemies who were to be executed as “traitors” once the movement achieved total political control in Romania. The Legion attempted to overthrow General Ion Antonescu, their political partner, through a violent rebellion on 21–23 January 1941. As a key member and sector leader, Fr. Lăcătușu mobilized legionary members in his area to storm and occupy government buildings, communication posts, and police stations. Surrounded by the army in Strehaia with the legionaries he had assembled, instead of resisting as legionary circulars instructed, he disbanded his men and fled. Questioned by the police regarding his legionary activity before and during the rebellion, he falsely claimed that he had joined the Legion only in 1940 and had had no intent to perpetrate violence against state institutions during the January uprising.
In 1942, Fr. Lăcătușu served as a missionary priest in Odesa and in the village of Șerșenița (Râbnița County), in the territories acquired by Romania during the Second World War in occupied Ukraine, known as Transnistria. His deployment was part of a policy initiated by the regime of Ion Antonescu, which allowed legionaries to rehabilitate themselves before the law by serving either as missionary priests (for Orthodox priests) or as frontline combatants on the Eastern Front. Under an agreement between the Romanian head of state, Marshal Ion Antonescu, and the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate, legionary priests could “rehabilitate” themselves for minor political offenses associated with fascist activism by completing an eight-month term as missionaries in the region. Several ethnic and ideological prejudices shaped the pastoral outlook of these fascist missionaries. They viewed the region through a “Judeo-Bolshevik” lens, assuming that all inhabitants were Soviet atheists and in need of forceful re-evangelization. Their missionary practices included aggressive Romanization through the introduction of Romanian in the liturgy, the teaching of religion in Romanian schools, forced baptisms, and participation in a broader colonial mindset that framed their actions as those of a superior race. The colonial and xenophobic mindset promoted by the Romanian state normalized the use of Slavic and Jewish forced labor to restore churches and monasteries or to work agricultural estates for the missionaries’ benefit. Priests were not permitted to bring their wives or children to Transnistria, a situation that created significant moral vulnerability for men in their thirties or forties. Widespread promiscuity, the taking of local Slavic or Jewish concubines, and relationships with Jewish women in exchange for protection from deportation to forced labor became common, to the extent that even Romanian military authorities condemned such behavior. A clergymen labelled by the secret police of multiple political regimes as a hardcore “womanizer” as Lăcătușu could hardly remain immune to the license granted by the authorities, that of acting as a sexual predator with no fear of penal retribution for his deeds. As bureaucratic participants in a system of terror that starved millions of Ukrainians and exploited them as forced laborers, Orthodox priests in Transnistria monitored their parishioners closely and reported any acts of “Bolshevik” solidarity between Slavs and Jews. Fr. Lăcătușu followed both state and ecclesiastical directives closely, acting with severity toward his parishioners. His zeal was rewarded after eight months with permission to return to Romania and resume parish service in Oltenia.
After returning home, Fr. Lăcătușu demonstrated a marked capacity for adaptation to changing political regimes. Following the end of the war and the Sovietization of Romania, he opportunistically joined the Romanian Social Democratic Party (PDSR) in 1946 and participated as a member in its merger committee with the Romanian Workers’ Party (PMR) in 1948. This shift toward the political left appears to have been motivated by survival rather than conviction, at a time when former legionary priests and missionaries in Transnistria were at high risk of imprisonment. Excluded from the PMR in 1949 and arrested for his legionary activity on 19 July 1952, he was detained until 26 April 1954, when he returned to his former parish. Arrested again on 1 July 1959, he received five years of administrative detention, part of which he served at the Periprava labor camp in the Danube Delta. According to the testimony of Fr. Justin Pârvu, a fellow prisoner and legionary hieromonk, Lăcătușu performed his first miracle there: “I remember a remarkable incident in the Danube Delta in which Father Ilie played a crucial role. On 30 January, we were sent to the canal to cut reeds in the winter cold, essentially a death sentence. We were ordered to bring out two bundles each. It made no sense. At first, we hesitated. But Father Ilie spoke firmly and encouraged us: ‘We must go in; otherwise, they will shoot us. The Virgin and the Three Holy Hierarchs will bring us out unharmed.’ We stayed in the water for about three hours. It was minus 30 degrees Celsius, with ice 20–25 cm thick. Yet we all survived. Suddenly, the sun appeared, and an extraordinary warmth set in. Our clothes dried quickly, as if by a stove. No one fell ill. It was a miracle, and it was due to Father Ilie’s prayers.” The emergent hagiography, however, intersects uneasily with another archival layer. On 30 November 1961, Lăcătușu signed an agreement to collaborate with the Securitate under the codename “Păun Ion.” Although his personal file contains limited documentation, corroborating evidence from other surveillance files indicates that he provided information on fellow detainees, including former legionary clergy. His collaboration appears motivated, at least in part, by material incentives and the prospect of improved treatment. Released in 1964 amid a general amnesty, he was gradually reintegrated into ecclesiastical life, serving as a priest until his retirement in 1978. He died on 22 July 1983, not before prophesying that his wife would pass 15 years after him and that she should be buried in the same grave.
The posthumous transformation of Lăcătușu into a saint pivots on the discovery, on 29 September 1998, of his allegedly incorrupt body following the death of his wife. Initially, ecclesiastical authorities interpreted the phenomenon with caution, even suspicion, associating incorruptibility with possible spiritual ambiguity rather than sanctity. Following a documentary broadcast on national television shortly after his exhumation, which visually documented the discovery of his relics and emphasized their purported incorruptibility, popular interest expanded dramatically. Confronted with growing crowds of Orthodox believers seeking access to the relics, the family opted to display his remains in a glass coffin within a private cemetery chapel. In this process, Lăcătușu’s body, rather than his biography, became the central locus of devotion, catalyzing the formation of an expanding devotional network in which multiple actors (his family, fascist monastic circles, and the Romanian Orthodox Church) instrumentalized his emerging hagiography in accordance with their respective interests. While the family retained clear material incentives in exhibiting the relics, surviving fascist figures from the communist prison system, most notably Archimandrite Justin Pârvu of Petru Vodă Monastery, interpreted the alleged incorruptibility of Lăcătușu’s body and the miracles attributed to it as moral and theological validation for their broader project: the recognition of all legionary martyrs as saints within the Romanian Orthodox Church. Only subsequently, under the cumulative pressure of popular devotion, sustained media exposure, and the consolidation of a post-communist cult of “prison saints,” was the body itself re-signified as incontrovertible evidence of holiness. Within this emerging framework, sanctity functioned as a mechanism of discursive closure: once recognized as a saint, an individual, irrespective of prior political commitments, became effectively insulated from critical scrutiny. This dynamic facilitated the retroactive legitimization of the fascist Legion, reframing it not as a political movement but as a spiritually regenerative force within Orthodoxy. In line with this reinterpretation, the earliest attempts to construct Lăcătușu’s hagiography and to produce his iconography originated at Petru Vodă Monastery, which, from the mid-1990s onward, operated as a principal institutional hub for promoting the cult of legionary martyrs. Over the last few decades, numerous collections of miracles, frequently including claims of healings from cancer and other terminal illnesses, were published with financial backing from fascist sympathizers and Orthodox monastic institutions. Testimonies circulated that his body retained warmth or that his eyes opened to meet the gaze of supplicants. Such narratives systematically marginalized or effaced the most contentious aspects of his biography, including his fascist activism, alleged participation in the Holocaust, collaboration with the Securitate, and moral transgressions. Instead, fascist hagiographers foregrounded the miraculous dimension, which proved effective in attracting large numbers of believers and consolidating a durable base of popular devotion.
When the Orthodox Church ultimately canonized Fr. Ilie Lăcătușu as a priest and confessor of the faith, at the initiative of Patriarch Daniel, the decision reflected a convergence of institutional, political, and theological considerations. For nearly four decades, ecclesiastical authorities had hesitated to endorse the sanctification of figures with explicit fascist affiliations. However, the contemporary resurgence of fascist and ultranationalist ideologies within the Romanian political sphere altered this calculus, emboldening the Holy Synod to act. At the same time, the canonization functioned as a strategic concession to a vocal fundamentalist and ultranationalist constituency within the Church, aimed at fostering internal cohesion between the episcopate and these radical subcultures. Moreover, the decision signaled a tacit alignment with ultranationalist political actors advocating anti-Western, pro-Russian, and revisionist agendas, some of whom had actively supported the canonization of legionary figures through their parliamentary platforms.
At a deeper theological level, the canonization of such figures must be situated within the broader nationalist paradigm that has shaped the Romanian Orthodox Church since the interwar period: namely, the systematic effort to render Orthodoxy and its spiritual thesaurus more explicitly “Romanian,” rather than universal or receptive to the normative frameworks of modernity. The ultranationalist ecclesiology articulated during the interwar years and subsequently radicalized under the national-communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu rested on the premise of an ontological interdependence between nation and Church, whereby Romanian identity and Orthodoxy were construed as mutually constitutive and inseparable. In the early 1990s, this ecclesiological model underwent further consolidation and expansion. Orthodox clergy increasingly functioned as agents of nationalization, particularly among younger generations, while the imperative of “Romanianizing” extended across all domains of ecclesial life: institutional structures, liturgical practice, theological discourse, and artistic and architectural production. This process manifested in highly visible symbolic forms. The national flag appeared on liturgical vestments and within iconographic programs; Christ himself was, in some representations, depicted ascending to heaven enveloped in the Romanian tricolor; and newly constructed churches were expected to conform to architectural idioms deemed authentically “Romanian,” such as the Moldavian style associated with St. Prince Stephen III the Great (1438/1439–1504) or the Wallachian/Brâncovenesc style linked to St. Martyr Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu (1654–1714). These stylistic prescriptions were justified as expressions of a putatively continuous and normative national tradition. At the same time, this ultranationalist theological framework served important institutional functions. It underwrote processes of administrative centralization and clerical bureaucratization by promoting a cohesive public theology organized around the principles of unity and political homogeneity: one Romanian Patriarch, one Romanian nation, one Romanian Holy Synod, one national cathedral (notably, one that does not conform to the very “traditional” architectural styles it ostensibly promotes), and one unified clergy, without political dissent or say in any decision taken in the Church. The rhetoric of national-religious unity thus operated not only at the symbolic level but also as a mechanism of institutional consolidation and hierarchical control. On hagiographical grounds, this ecclesiology had direct consequences for the construction of sanctity. It facilitated the deliberate nationalization of the liturgical calendar (Synaxarion) by systematically promoting Romanian saints as embodiments of a sacralized national history. Within this framework, moral and political ambiguities, including fascist affiliation, antisemitism, or other forms of ethical compromise, were frequently subordinated to a different set of implicit criteria. Access to the expanding cohort of “Romanian saints” increasingly presupposed adherence to a recognizable ideological profile: pronounced anti-communism, entrenched ultranationalism, and, often, symbolic or biographical association with rurality as a marker of ethnoreligious authenticity. In this configuration, anti-communism, ultranationalism, and rural origin functioned less as incidental traits than as structuring principles that shaped inclusion within the Synaxarion itself.
The case of Ilie Lăcătușu thus illuminates the complex processes through which sanctity is constructed in post-communist Romania. His canonization reflects not merely the recovery of religious memory after decades of repression, but also the selective reconfiguration of the past, in which political violence, ideological extremism, and moral compromise are subsumed under the redemptive category of anti-communist suffering. In this sense, Lăcătușu is less an exceptional figure than a paradigmatic one: a “saint for all seasons,” whose biography accommodates, and ultimately reconciles, mutually incompatible historical narratives.