In the Belly of the Beast. Confessing Christ into the Prison darkness

Communism filled heaven with saints, Father Arsenie Papacioc used to say, an affirmation doubled by a previous confession coming from metropolitan Dosoftei of Moldavia: among Romanians there are saints…only they were not looked for. Crossing the two affirmations results in a vectorial responsibility of contemporaneity to recover the archetypal memory of the Church, memory constructed on the experience of martyrdom in the communist prisons. The symposium invites you to investigate the ways of recovering those moments of intense spiritual experience from the perspective of martyrological hagiography. The encounter between the atheist political philosophy of the communist imported from the Soviet Union through the distorted introduction of the anthropology of homo sovieticus and Christianity on Romanian land involves persecutions and inflictions in which great consciences were sifted. People having different affiliations from a religious, political, social or cultural point of view have created a dogmatic and martyric conscience of the twentieth century. Who are the confessors? What was their experience in knowing their own self in a direct relation with Christ and the values of Christianity? Does suffering open a new way of understanding ecumenism?