Vladimir Ghika

Prince Vladimir Ghika was born on 25 December 1873 in Constantinople, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire, into the Romanian princely house of Ghica, a family that had furnished several hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia. His father, Ioan Grigore Ghica, served as Romania’s diplomatic representative at the Ottoman court and later as a minister in Bucharest; his mother, Alexandrine Moret de Blaremberg, was of French origin. Baptized in the Romanian Orthodox Church, he received a cosmopolitan education in Romania and in France, studying law, political science, medicine, philosophy, and theology in Toulouse, Paris, and Rome. Family bereavement and his own periods of illness sharpened a religious seriousness that would shape the rest of his life.

In 1902 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, a step that made him a living symbol of encounter between the Latin West and the Christian East. For some two decades he remained a layman. He devoted himself to the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and to other works of charity among the sick and the poor, wrote and lectured on the reunion of the separated churches, and travelled in Europe and Asia in support of that cause. In Catholic circles in France and Italy he became known as a prince who had chosen the service of the destitute rather than a conventional diplomatic or court career.

On 7 October 1923, at the age of forty-nine, he was ordained a priest in Paris by Cardinal Louis-Ernest Dubois, archbishop of that city, and was incardinated in the Archdiocese of Paris. He exercised his ministry among workers and the poor in the southern suburbs, notably at Villejuif, while also serving Romanian Catholics and promoting charitable institutions. In the following years he divided his time between France and Romania. After the outbreak of the Second World War he remained in Bucharest, where he assisted refugees, the wounded, and people threatened by racial persecution, and continued a discreet pastoral ministry under increasingly difficult conditions.

After the communist seizure of power in Romania he refused opportunities to leave the country. On 18 November 1952 he was arrested by the Securitate and accused of treason, essentially for alleged contacts with the Holy See and with Western diplomats. He was imprisoned at Jilava, near Bucharest, and subjected to interrogation and the harsh regime of political detention. Weakened by age and by ill-treatment, he died in that prison on 16 May 1954.

Pope Francis approved his beatification as a martyr. The rite was celebrated in Bucharest on 31 August 2013 by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, acting in the pope’s name. Blessed Vladimir Ghika is commemorated on 16 May. He is remembered as a priest of princely birth who joined a concern for Christian unity to a concrete option for the poor, and who chose to remain with his people under persecution.