ABSTRACT
After the visit of the Russian Patriarch Aleksii to Bucharest in 1962, the Romanian Securitate, one of the most fearful state security services in the Eastern Bloc, recorded the words of Bishop Antim Nica, the vicar-bishop of the Patriarchate, who revealed his intimate thoughts to a close friend. Bishop Nica claimed that he ‘felt great satisfaction’ knowing that Aleksii was elected patriarch despite being a former colonel in the tsarist army, having an anticommunist education and coming from a bourgeois family. In his own words, the bishop declared:
[ … ] only God knows what is in his soul; this is the fate of all Orthodox bishops who have to be docile, servile and devoted to anti-religious communism, but traitors and meagre to their own souls.1
