Last week, the news broke that Sean Penn is directing a movie about January 6. Penn has written the script and is set to direct Bradley Cooper in the movie, which is set during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
At almost the exact same time that the Penn news was dominating the media, a book was published. It is called Witness to Beatitude: Seven Romanian Greek Catholic Bishops Under Communism.
I put these two items together to emphasize what conservatives know all too well. Our culture highlights celebrities and flashy or controversial stories and ignores left-wing crimes and themes of the religious persecution of Christians. Sean Penn was eating up all the social media oxygen last week. Witness to Beatitude will probably sell a few copies and be forgotten.
This is a shame, because Witness to Beatitude - which was a bestseller when it was published in Romania in 2019 - is a gripping story about faith. It would make a great movie, the kind that Hollywood would have made fifty years ago. I plan to talk about the book at the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival.
I am also inviting Sean Penn to the festival. Yes, Penn is a far-leftist, but what has always separated the right from the left is that the right is open to debate and welcoming the other side to come on our shows and participate in our events. We think we have the better side of the argument and aren’t afraid to mix it up with liberals. We don’t spike stories because they don’t fit our narrative.
I also want to encourage Penn to make a film about Witness to Beatitude - or at least fund a documentary. Authors Francisca Băltăceanu and Monica Broşteanu explore the lives of seven bishops in the Romanian Greek Catholic Church, which was outlawed under communism. In 1948, the Soviet-imposed government in Romania determined that the Romanian Greek Catholic Church no longer existed. It detained and tortured its bishops: Vasile Aftenie, Valeriu Traian Frenţiu, Ioan Suciu, Ioan Bălan, Alexandru Rusu, and Iuliu Hossu. It also detained numerous priests, including Tit Liviu Chinezu, who was secretly consecrated bishop at the request of the papal nuncio. The seven men were put in the infamous Sighet prison. In 1969, Iuliu Hossu, the last to survive, was made a cardinal in pectore by Pope Paul VI.
The communists hated the Romanian Greek Catholic Church in particular because the church had a leader, the pope, of moral authority outside the country. Authors Francisca Băltăceanu and Monica Broşteanu:
To borrow some expressions from that time period, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” could not tolerate a religious community whose supreme leadership was situated outside its borders: in the context of the Cold War between the two “camps”—the socialist camp and the capitalist camp or the so-called “imperialists”—it was said that the Vatican played a preeminent role in the latter. Furthermore, within the ideology of “proletarian internationalism,” there was no room for the national sentiment which the Transylvanian School nurtured by developing national identity and culture. Therefore, the fate of the Uniate Church was sealed in this kind of logic: it had to be “liquidated.” In passing, let us note that the true masters in Romania in the years following World War II, and particularly after the abolition of the monarchy on December 30, 1947, were the Soviet Communists, since the country was in reality under the occupation of the Red Army.
“The Church,” they go on, “had to be weakened before it was given the death blow: many priests and canons were dismissed for economic reasons or forced to retire, others were arrested for no reason, new parishes could not be created and those already created were no longer funded, some buildings were expropriated and Church funds were confiscated, the Catholic press was suppressed, and the state was intervening more and more with Catholic schools in anticipation of their final abolition.” Sounds like the new political power just elected in New York City.
In “a work of Stalinist-socialist engineering [that] bears heavy consequences even today,” the communists claimed that the Orthodox Church 0 the non-Catholic Christians, were part of the repression. As newly unearthed archives reveal, this was a lie. “Much the same way as it was done in Ukraine, in Romania, they needed to give the impression that the repression of the Greek Catholics came in some way or other from the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, the documents prove that all the orders with respect to this operation were given exclusively from the Securitate and were signed by the sinister leaders of the Stalinist terror of those years: Teohari Georgescu, Alexandru Drăghici, Gheorghe Pintilie, Alexandru Nicolski, Mişu Dulgheru, and many others who followed in their steps.”
On June 2, 2019, Pope Francis inscribed the names of the martyred priests among the ranks of the blessed during a Mass celebrated in a place the Field of Liberty in Blaj.
What a film this would make! “The story of these seven martyrs is a page in the history of the Greek Catholic Church,” Băltăceanu and Broşteanu conclude, “which passed through the Calvary of Romania’s communization.” They end with this: “One might go so far as to say that the Greek Catholic Church’s descent into the catacombs was in fact a time of strengthening. Because they risked their lives with every liturgical celebration or with every celebration of the sacraments, the priests and those around them became more and more motivated, and there was a strong yet discreet solidarity that bound them together.”
On July 24,1948, the Greek Catholic bishops sent this letter to the faithful:
Our ties with the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, are not human establishments that we can do and undo; they are divinely established, and we have the duty for their sake, when needed, to endure humiliations, beatings, threats, maybe even prison and poverty because that is what it means to glorify Jesus our God: it means to prove that our love is without lie, it means to stand firm now and to undergo the agony of a passing suffering in order to obtain an eternal glory that is beyond all measure (2 Cor. 4:17), because the sufferings of the present moment cannot be compared to the glory that will be revealed for us (Rom. 8:18).
This is the film Sean Penn should make. I will convince him of this at the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
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