Blessed Vladimir Ghika
Join me today to meet a martyr who defied the KGB.
Name: Prince Vladimir Ghika, or Ghica
Life: 1873- 1954
Status: Blessed
Feast: May 16
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The year was 1957, and there were still a few hours until dawn.
The Romanian political prisoner was waiting for the morning.
Prisoners at this prison were put to work, and the day before a sheet of metal had fallen and crushed one of his hands. The doctor had taken one look and made his diagnosis: the hand would need to be amputated. But the man was only a prisoner, so the doctor was not going to amputate outside of business hours. The man had been sent back to prison for the night, to endure the pain of his hand until morning.
And as he waited, he suddenly had the impression that he was not alone. He looked over and saw a man he had known before they were both arrested by the communists. He was a small man with a mane of white hair and a long beard. It was Monsignor Vladimir Ghika.
That was a little bit surprising, since Vladimir Ghika had been martyred three years earlier.
The international adventure that was the life of Vladimir Ghika had begun when he was born on Christmas Day, 1873, in Constantinople, modern Istanbul in Turkey. Vladimir Ghika was a prince, although his family no longer actually ruled anything. His grandfather had been the last prince of Moldavia, ruling the region of the East of modern Romania, modern Moldova, and some parts of modern Ukraine.
The people who would come together in the new nation of Romania had long been ruled by the Ottoman Turks. In 1877, Vladimir’s father had fought the Turks and helped the country of Romania to win national independence, afterward taking on important posts in the grateful nation. Meanwhile, Vladimir and his siblings were educated as befitted princes, which is to say they received an international education. Vladimir’s mother took her children to Paris.
In Paris, Vladimir’s personality began to develop. He wasn’t a very large man. He wasn’t very healthy. He would struggle with various health problems his whole life, including brutal migraines that often kept him from sleeping at night. But these problems did not slow him down. Vladimir was a man of tremendous energy, and he showed it in his studies, easily absorbing languages and history, and developing a talent for drawing. He also began to grow more and more interested in questions of faith.
Vladimir’s family was Orthodox. Yet the more he thought and read, the more Vladimir felt drawn to Catholicism. He didn’t feel he was giving up the tradition in which he had been raised, so much as he was bringing it to its final conclusion.
Now since the Ghikas were princes, their status gave them access to power. Vladimir’s brother entered the diplomatic service. Vladimir Ghika was less sure about his own destiny. He knew he wanted it to include the Church. He went to Rome to study philosophy and theology, graduating with a doctorate in theology. But when he looked into becoming a priest, he was turned away.
If he was going to be a layman, Ghika could still devote himself into charitable works. He organized and built a hospital staffed by nuns in Bucharest. It turned out that he had built it just in time for the Balkan Wars that preceded World War One. Ghika went to work in the hospital that he had built, working with such a ferocious focus that the king of Romania recognized his efforts with a military decoration. During the First World War, Ghika worked as a diplomat. He found that the role suited him. He spoke many languages, and as a prince he could move effortlessly in the most elite circles. After the war, he became Romania’s envoy to the Vatican.
But Vladimir Ghika still felt drawn to the priesthood. He was now 50 years old, and, at 50, he finally became a priest. That was when his life became much more complicated.
Father Ghika was an unusual priest because he so well understood the Orthodox world. He was given the faculties to celebrate both the Latin Rite and also the Byzantine Rite, making him a sort of ambassador to the East. But the Church soon realized the potential of Father Ghika. As an aristocrat, he was used to command. Ghika had proven that he could build complex things, like his hospital. He picked up languages easily, and he had a diplomat’s ability to work with difficult people. The Church put him to work.
Father Ghika was sent to Paris to build up a parish church. The Carmelites needed help setting up in Japan, and he went to work with them there. In his off hours, he befriended the intellectuals of Paris, including Jacques Maritain, who reintroduced the world to the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas in his neo-Thomism. Ghika liked to meet the Maritains when he could, but he was so often on the move. He would be sent to help in Buenos Aires and Manilla. He travelled to China, Australia, and the Congo.
Father Vladimir Ghika was not looking for any promotions, but the Pope was taking note. Much to Ghika’s distress, the Pope appointed him as Apostolic Prothonotary, so that he was now Monsignor Ghika.
It was during these years of work that reports of mysticism and miracles began to be associated with Father Ghika. My favourite story is from one of his first trips to Japan, where he was invited to meet with the Emperor Hirohito. As the two men spoke, some impulse made the Emperor tell Ghika about the thing that was weighing on him. He had no son, and he was wondering whether he would ever have one. Ghika gravely told the emperor that he would pray for him. And then, completely breaking protocol, Ghika stepped toward the emperor, drew the sign of the cross on his forehead, and blessed him. There was a shocked silence in the room, the only sound being the Imperial Guard drawing their katanas. But the Emperor raised his hand and calmed the situation. And as it happened, nine months later, the future Emperor Akihito was born.
As the 1930s passed, the world prepared to go to war once again. When the Second World War broke out, Monsignor Ghika returned to Romania. He felt he was needed there.
After initial uncertainty, Romania decided to join the Axis powers, throwing everything they had at the Eastern Front in the hope of keeping the communists at bay. It would not be enough. By 1944 Romania was facing the prospect of Soviet invasion. King Michael I desperately tried to switch sides, but it was too late, and the Soviets began a brutal occupation of Romania, assimilating the nation into the Soviet Union.
Many of Romania’s aristocrats fled the country. The worse things got, the more determined Monsignor Ghika was to stay. He had been working in his hospital through the war. Now it seemed to him that his people needed him more than ever. Soon after the war, there was a famine in Moldavia. What better place for a Ghika to be than among the people his family had ruled for so long?
But the Iron Curtain was falling on Romania. Back in Paris, Ghika’s friends grew increasingly concerned. By 1947 the communists forced King Michael to abdicate. In 1948 the last group of aristocrats left the country. There was a place for Ghika among them, but he decided to stay.
Soon after, the communists took possession of the Ghika family home where Monsignor Ghika had been living. He found a room in the hospital that he had built. But the KGB’s attention was now on the energetic old priest. They were actively watching him through 1952. The next year, a message came that a sick man had asked for Monsignor Ghika to come and speak with him. The message was a KGB trick. As the old priest walked to the appointment, a dark van pulled up beside him and he was bundled into it, taken away as a prisoner of the KGB.
The KGB wanted Ghika to sign a statement that said he was an agent of the Vatican. It wasn’t true, and Ghika refused. And so the KGB interrogated and tortured him to get the answer they wanted.
Only a few years earlier, in England, George Orwell had grown disillusioned with the Soviet Union and had published his book about totalitarianism, 1984. In the story, the main character learns that every man has some deep and irrational fear. For the main character, it is a fear of rats. The main character is broken by his fear and learns to love Big Brother, and Orwell’s dark suggestion was that the totalitarian state could use the psychology of fear to break anyone, to matter how good or strong he might be. The KGB’s investigation had found out Vladimir Ghika’s secret fear. Ghika wasn’t at all afraid of dying. But he was terrified of one particular way of dying. He had a deep, lifelong terror of being hanged.
And so, the KGB told Ghika that if he did not sign the document, they would hang him. And when he refused, they set up a system that would allow them to hang him, making him feel as though he was choking until the last second, when the pressure would let up. It was everything Ghika had feared. But then, unlike Orwell’s main character who was alone, Ghika did not face the KGB alone. Years before, he had written a little book of reflections about the Christian walk with Christ. One of them read:
I’m confident in You, just not in me. My only way to be confident in myself is to be grounded enough in You. (My translation)
And so, despite his fears, Monsignor Vladimir Ghirka found the strength to refuse to sign the document. And so the interrogation went on. The KGB mock-hanged him again, and again, and again. By the time they finally gave up they had done it 83 times.
Eventually the KGB had tried everything, even sending an agent dressed as a priest to hear Ghika’s confession, but Ghika had recognized that the man was an impostor.
Ghika wasn’t going to confess, and so his case went before a Soviet court. The trial was a mockery of justice, and Ghika’s court-appointed lawyer only asked him one question: what are you accused of. But when the lawyer began speaking, Ghika surprised everyone by standing up and roaring that the lawyer did not speak for him. He insisted on representing himself. Eventually the court had to be adjourned. Of course, there was no question of the court finding him innocent, and the judge simply overruled Ghika’s attempt to represent himself. But that had never been his point. Ghika had noticed that there were other priests awaiting trial. On the way out, he explained,
“I did this to teach you not to be afraid of them.” (Gotia translation)
Monsignor Vladimir Ghika was found guilty. The punishment was three years hard labour. He was now 80 years old.
He was sent to a prison in which the prisoners lived together, in a dim underground holding room designed for 120 men, but housing 200. The room was damp, dark, and unsanitary. The was no heat in the winter.
But we know a little bit about this period of Ghika’s life from a young man who met him soon after he arrived in prison. The young man asked whether there was news from outside, and when they would be free. Ghika gently told the young man to be patient, they would be free. In the young man’s case, it was true in the sense that he would leave prison and, eventually, become a secret priest himself. But, as the young man later recalled, he had the uncanny sense in talking to Ghika that this man was free. He was perhaps the freest man the young man had ever met.
Over the course of the next year, Monsignor Ghika did what he could to cheer the other prisoners. He had travelled more than most. Now he would help prisoners pass the time by telling them about the Congo, about Japan, about China, about Australia. But the prison conditions were taking a toll on his health. Like many saints, he saw death coming. Years before he had written a short reflection:
“The time we spend in prayer is borrowed Eternity.” (My translation)
In his last days, his only interest was in prayer.
After Vladimir Ghika’s death, the process to recognize his sanctity and his martyrdom began almost immediately. Many people who met him had felt they were speaking to a saint. Ghika’s friends in France started the process that would lead to official recognition in 2013.
Meanwhile, in Romania, Vladimir Ghika remained an inspiration, a ghost in the Soviet machine. And so it was that, three years after his martyrdom, Blessed Vladimir Ghika went to see the man with the crushed hand. The man said that Ghika blessed him, and then faded into the dark of the early morning. And when the man finally got to the hospital, and the doctor who had diagnosed his crushed hand the day before unwrapped the bandage, the doctor started to berate the guard for mixing up the prisoners. This obviously wasn’t the same man the doctor had seen yesterday. This man’s hand had no sign of injury at all.
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Great story. A life worthy of emulation.