Rome, Italy, Mar 28, 2004 / 22:00 pm
In an article entitled, "The Gulag Archipelago in Romania: The Story No One Has Told Before," the noted Vatican expert from L'Espresso, Sandro Magister, will release tomorrow an exclusive testimony of an Eastern Catholic priest who spent sixteen years in communist prisons "at the limits of the imagination."
The testimony was delivered at the presentation of the book, "Faith and Martyrdom: The Eastern Catholic Churches in Twentieth Century Europe,” which took place at the Vatican on Tuesday, March 23.
According to Magister, the account of Greek Catholic priest Tertulian Ioan Langa’s imprisonment "is both spiritual and very concrete - part Solzhenitsyn, part ancient martyrology. It unfolds between the mystery of iniquity, pressed to the limits of the imagination, and the mystery of grace, with the ‘Holy Providence’ that works through the hands of the unsuspecting jailers."
"At a time when the word 'martyrdom' is much abused, being applied as well to the 'shahid' Islamists who blow themselves up in order to commit massacres, this is a testimony that helps to recover the truth. It is absolutely not to be missed," Magister writes.