Saint Ilie Lăcătușu, the Confessor, was originally from Vâlcea County, born in the village of Crăpăturile (now Țepești), in the commune of Tetoiu, on 6 December 1909, the great feast day of Saint Nicholas the Hierarch. He was the second of seven children born to the church cantor Marin Lăcătușu and his wife, Maria 1. This modest peasant family from Tetoiu had a deep devotion to God. Consequently, the young Iliuță grew up with the same love for prayer and the Christian faith.
His father also had another son, named Petre Lăcătușu, who fell heroically in the battles at Cotul Donului (1942).
After attending secondary school in his home town, the young Ilie Lăcătușu enrolled at the ‘Saint Nicholas’ Theological Seminary in Râmnicu Vâlcea in 1923. On graduation in 1930, he was awarded his diploma with first-class honours “for the spiritual qualities that set him apart from his peers”. Between 1930 and 1934, he studied at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest. Whilst still a student, he married Ecaterina Popescu, a schoolteacher from Gorj (in March 1931). The wedding took place at his parents’ home in the village of Țepești. This marriage was blessed by God with five children.
On 1 September 1934, he was ordained a priest at St Nicholas’ Church in Osica de Jos (Olt County), where he served until 1 November 1934, when he was transferred to the village of Buicești (Butoiești commune, Mehedinți County). A happy period in his life followed, during which he devoted himself entirely to his ministry and to raising his five children.
During the Legionary regime, he was co-opted into the Legionary movement, but his involvement was limited to community initiatives, as he recalled in a statement given to the Securitate in 1954: “We were told in a persuasive tone that it was appropriate for us too to lend our support to that party which looks after the interests of the Church and the country and which fights for the justice of the many; and, as such, we too were acting in the general, public and communal interests […] We held several meetings and took decisions to complete the small footbridges in the commune that had been started but were in a state of disrepair, to clear the road of snow, and to collect scrap metal and pig bristles, dividing our tasks among different sectors of activity.” The priest was active in the Legionary Movement until January 1941.
When Ion Antonescu gave the order for the army to cross the Prut and enter the war against Soviet Russia, Father Lăcătușu, together with His Eminence Nifon of Oltenia, was part of the Romanian Orthodox Mission that brought the word of the Holy Gospel to Bessarabia.
From the summer of 1942 until the following spring, Father Ilie Lăcătușu, a missionary, preached the word of the Lord in Odessa and then at the Church of ‘Saint Michael the Archangel’ in Șerșenița (Râbnița, Transnistria), a parish with 4,000 souls.
During the Bolshevik period, the parish church had been turned into a political club. Father Lăcătușu refurbished it and furnished it with icons, vestments and liturgical objects, so that on 3 November 1942 he reconsecrated it. As a priest, he distributed religious items to the faithful, organised initiatives to provide firewood for the poor, set up a canteen for orphaned schoolchildren, taught religious education in schools, and from 1 January 1943 he also served as a locum tenens for the neighbouring parish of Grabova.
In 1943, Father Ilie Lăcătușu served at a church in Râmnicu Vâlcea, where several letters remain which he received over the years from those he had ministered to there, who lamented the loss of a gifted priest. It was not until 1944 that he returned to his family (his wife was ill) and to ministering at the small church in Buicești 2.
With the establishment of communism in Romania, a wave of arrests among priests followed. On the basis of slanderous statements made by two members of the Workers’ Party, alleging that the priest was “engaging in divisive activities in the locality”, a case was brought against him in 1949. However, the Securitate’s investigation proved the contrary.
Father Ilie Lăcătușu experienced the harsh reality of the totalitarian state’s concentration camps. The priest’s sister, Filofteia, recalls that the Securitate agents would take him away at night from his home in Buicești and lead him, blindfolded, to the interrogations taking place in the cellars of the Securitate headquarters in the Craiova region. Amid the wave of arrests targeting former local Legionary leaders, on 19 July 1952, Father Ilie Lăcătușu was sent for questioning at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Following a search of his home, 59 copies of the priestly magazine Renașterea were confiscated.
According to the denunciations, Father Ilie Lăcătușu is said to have held the position of ‘Legionary cell leader’ during the National-Legionary government. A cross-check of the documents contained in the files compiled by the former Securitate reveals that, in November 1940, Father Lăcătușu was reportedly appointed head of the Legionary sector to which he belonged, though without engaging in political activism. Securitate investigators greatly exaggerated the priest’s ‘Legionary activity’, and he was ultimately sent to a labour camp for 24 months. According to CNSAS documents, Ilie Lăcătușu did not carry out any “Legionary activity”, his presence being purely formal.
Until October 1952, he was assigned to the M.A.I. “Galeșu”, and from October 1952 until the end of August 1953, he was assigned to the M.A.I. “Peninsula” labour camp (in the notorious priests’ brigade). It should also be noted that no conviction was ever issued in his name. As his health had deteriorated, from 1953 the priest was transferred to Târgu Ocna prison, where prisoners unfit for labour were held. From there, he was taken to Onești (from September 1953), where he was assigned to Work Unit 0680; he was released from there on 26 April 1954. Throughout this period of detention (re-education), he was subjected to forced labour, which he carried out pursuant to Administrative Decision No. 680/1952 of the Ministry of the Interior.
After two years of detention, Father Lăcătușu returned to his parish in the village of Buicești. The atheist regime’s persecution of Father Lăcătușu was not to end there. He was constantly monitored by the Securitate. His file contains reports showing how the priest was constantly surrounded and assisted by the chairman of the People’s Council, the local Party secretary and the Party instructor; the latter, in November 1957, asked him to consecrate the well in front of the town hall. It was precisely such displays that troubled the repressive authorities. Sermons with “double meanings” were recorded with great zeal, such as the one delivered on 7 April 1957: “People should pay their quotas so that the Lord’s Resurrection does not find them in a state of displeasure and so that they do not face trouble.” On 1 July 1959, he was arrested again on the basis of an administrative sentence, namely Ministry of Internal Affairs Order No. 10052/20.07.1959, and was “assigned” to work in the Danube Delta, in Periprava, where he was part of “Work Unit 0830” (in the group of priests from Oltenia) and, from October 1959, in Salcia. The priest’s health deteriorated. In Periprava, he met another great spiritual guide of the Romanian people, Father Justin Pârvu, who wrote a series of memoirs covering the four years he spent in detention alongside Father Ilie Lăcătușu.
Father Justin Pârvu said that the labour was designed solely to break the will of those who were there and to physically exterminate them. He recalls the day on which the Three Holy Hierarchs were being celebrated, when they were taken out to cut reeds on a freezing day and were forced to enter the cold waters of the Gerar. He said that Father Ilie Lăcătușu encouraged his fellow prisoners, and, following their prayers, a warm and blessed sun appeared in the sky. After they came out of the water, they dried their clothes and were thus able to return to the camp completely dry, and no one fell ill 3.
Often, the prisoners would fall into despair and want to take their own lives, for they could no longer bear the prison regime and the harshness of the torturers’ punishments. Each time, Father Ilie encouraged them to resist these temptations from the enemy.
Father Ilie Lăcătușu was released on 6 May 1964, but was placed under house arrest in the village of Bolintin, Titu district, where circumstances forced him to work as a bricklayer until December of that year.
On Christmas Eve, on 20 December 1964, Father Ilie returned to his priestly ministry, first at the parish of Gârdești (Necșești, Teleorman County), where he renovated the valuable church painted by Nicolae Grigorescu. He served there until the first day of August 1970, after which he transferred to the Parish of Cucuruzu (Răsuceni, Giurgiu County), where he retired, at his own request, on 11 January 1978 (at the age of nearly 70) and took up residence in Bucharest. Throughout this time, he was constantly monitored by the repressive authorities.
The priest’s sister recalled seeing her older brother, ‘Uncle Popa’, as she called him, at their mother’s funeral at the ‘cemetery in the valley’ in the summer of 1977.
The suffering he endured in the gulag of the totalitarian state severely undermined the priest’s health. Towards the end of his life (which he had predicted beforehand: if he did not die by 22 July, he would live for another two years; he also said at that time that when his wife died, 15 years later, she should be buried beside him) found him in a hospital bed in Panduri. He fell asleep in the Lord on 22 July 1983 and was laid to rest in the family crypt at Giulești Cemetery in Bucharest. When his wife also passed away, on 29 September 1998, the priest’s remains were exhumed. Those present at the funeral ceremony witnessed a marvellous sight. His body had not decayed, but gave off a scent of myrrh, proof of Father4’s holiness.
The priest’s successors requested that priests and hierarchs both at home and abroad perform services of absolution. From 1 May 1999, 40 services of absolution were held at Frăsinei Monastery after the Divine Liturgy, in accordance with church regulations, led by the hieromonk Ghelasie Isihastul. On the occasion of the one-year memorial service following the exhumation (29 September 1999), in a solemn atmosphere, His Grace Father Teodosie Snagoveanul, Vicar Bishop of the Archdiocese of Bucharest, read a prayer of absolution for any grave sins or anathemas that might prevent the body from decomposing. On 6 February 2000, Metropolitan Serafim Joantă officiated at a religious service including prayers of absolution. The body remained incorrupt, and as a result, the Patriarchate opened a canonisation file for the priest, granting permission for the crypt housing him to be opened.
News of the discovery of Father Ilie Lăcătușu’s relics spread throughout the country, and he was honoured by the faithful as a saint.
Archimandrite Ioanichie Bălan said of Father Lăcătușu: “Father Ilie Lăcătușu, a native of Vâlcea County, was a devoted servant of Christ who spent many years in prison and suffered as a martyr. In the autumn of 1998, 15 years after his death, he was found whole and incorrupt in his grave, as a sign that God had accepted his sacrifice and numbered him among the righteous’5”.
Father Calciu-Dumitreasa referred to his holiness with the following words: “All the signs point to the holiness of Father Ilie; the popular veneration and piety which his relics inspire in the people serve to continue the holy preaching which he carried out whilst he was still alive; they serve to strengthen people’s faith and, through it, to glorify God with a power a thousand times greater than that which was evident whilst the saint was alive. There are so many good priests who, during their lifetimes, fostered holiness amongst their parishioners, many of them suffering or dying in prisons. Who remembers them? Only their surviving families and friends. In Father Ilie Lăcătușu, God bestowed something more: incorruptibility, a holy fragrance and, above all, the power to preach the Word even after death through the miracle he performed with his body6”.
Father Justin Pârvu testified: “Father Ilie Lăcătușu must be honoured as a saint, for he is a powerful argument against materialism and idolatrous error. Prayers may be offered to him at any time, for the saints are the true testimonies of our Orthodox life, even in the times in which we live”7. The first icon of Saint Ilie Lăcătușu, the Confessor Priest, was painted on the outer wall of the church at Petru Vodă Monastery, where the abbot was his former fellow prisoner, Archimandrite Justin Pârvu. Currently, the relics of Father Ilie Lăcătușu are in the crypt at the “Dormition of the Mother of God” cemetery in the Giulești district of Bucharest, where he was laid to rest. His incorrupt body was placed in a new glass coffin so that it could be viewed by anyone.
On 4 February 2025, I had the joy of attending the proclamation of the 16 saints canonised in 2024 at the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest. Among the 16 Romanian Orthodox holy fathers, spiritual guides and confessors of the 19th century was the priest Ilie Lăcătușu from Vâlcea, whose feast day is 22 July. This historic event took place at the conclusion of the Divine Liturgy officiated by His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel to mark the centenary of the Romanian Patriarchate. Members of the National Ecclesiastical Assembly also attended the service, and hundreds of the faithful gathered on Metropolitan Hill.
Father Ilie Lăcătușu loved people deeply and, for their salvation, chose the way of the Cross, remaining in the memory of those who knew him as a model of a life lived in the service of the Lord. Many believers, priests, monks and even bishops, both from Romania and abroad, come to pray, to seek his intercession and to venerate his holy relics.
- 1
The biographical details and family photographs were provided by the priest’s sister, Filofteia Lăcătușu (born 12 February 1929) from the village of Țepești, in the commune of Tetoiu, following an interview on 28 July 2020.
- 2
“Saint Ilie Lăcătușu, the New Confessor from the Communist Prisons. The Saint with his complete relics from Romania”
- 3
Saint Ilie Lăcătușu…, 2019, p. 97.
- 4
The Life of Father Ilie Lăcătușu, in The Akathist of Father Ilie Lăcătușu, Bucharest, Areopag, 2012, p. 5.
- 5
Archimandrite Ioanichie Bălan, ‘Confessors of the True Faith in Romania who suffered in prison for the love of Christ (between 1948 and 1964)’
- 6
Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa, The Life, Miracles and Akathist of Father Saint Ilie Lăcătușu, Bucharest, Areopag Publishing House, 2011, p. 19.
- 7
“The Words of Father Justin Pârvu”