Monastic Life and Ministry
According to the Romanian synaxarial account, Gerasimus was born Gregory to devout Christian parents and entered the Monastery of Bogdana at the age of twelve. He pursued monastic formation at the seminaries connected with Neamt and Cernica before settling at Tismana, where he received the monastic name by which he is now commemorated and was ordained priest.
The same account relates that, at the age of twenty-five, he was made abbot of the Arnota Monastery for two years following a severe fire there, later served as librarian and accountant at the Cernica seminary, and was sent to the village of Pasatel in Transnistria for missionary work. He was afterward recalled to Tismana, the monastery of his profession, to serve as its abbot.
Imprisonment and Death
The synaxarial account states that he was arrested by order of the regime on the feast of St. John the Evangelist, when he was thirty-five, and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Sources name his places of detention as Aiud, the Danube–Black Sea Canal, and finally the prison hospital at Targu Ocna, a sanatorium for tubercular prisoners. Throughout his imprisonment he is said to have continued his priestly ministry in secret, hearing confessions and giving communion to fellow inmates.
He died at Targu Ocna in 1951; sources give the date of his repose as December 25, while the Church commemorates him on December 26. A fellow prisoner who kept vigil beside him in his last hours describes him as gravely ill and able to communicate only by gesture and whisper, making the sign of the cross as he died. His remembered motto was 'Love those who persecute you.'
The Witness of Forgiveness
The episode for which he is best remembered is preserved in the testimony of the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who was imprisoned alongside him. By this account, the officer who had tortured Gerasimus was himself later arrested, beaten, and brought dying to the same prison. With the last of his strength, supported by two other prisoners, Gerasimus went to the man's bed, caressed his head, and told him that he forgave him with all his heart, adding that if the Christians forgave him, Christ would forgive him also.
It is this act of tending and forgiving his torturer, set against the background of the communist prison system, that the Romanian Church holds up as the heart of his martyric witness.
