Arsenie Boca

Arsenie of Prislop (secular name Zian Boca, ; 29 September 1910 – 28 November 1989) was a Romanian priest, theologian, mystic, and artist. He was persecuted by the Romanian Communist Party. He is venerated as a saint in the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Born in Vața de Sus, Hunedoara County, he died at Sinaia Monastery and was buried at in Silvașu de Sus village. In a poll of the Romanian public conducted by Romanian Television in 2006, Boca was voted 79th among 100 Greatest Romanians.

Studies and formation Boca was born in 1910, in Vața de Sus; his parents, Iosif and Cristina, gave him the first name Zian. which, she said, influenced Boca's paintings at the church at Drăgănescu, wherein the spectre of Jesus Christ rises from the rock covering the grave. Niculescu's accusations were fervently denied by the Arsenie Boca Foundation, in an article by Dutu Florin. The article accuses the novelist of intentionally "falsifying Fr. Boca's biography" by using second-rate accounts from a Securitate file, embellished by her own imagination.

According to Ionuț Daniel Băncilă, Boca was not an antroposophist, but he got highly regarded by anthroposophists; they believed he was clairvoyant and mystically enlightened. Boca lambasted occultism and spiritualism, but not specifically Anthroposophy. |2=DRSS Deva to DRSS Ploiesti, 21 November 1953, DRSS Cluj to DRSS Hunedoara, 6 June 1953

After World War II, he was arrested in July 1945 in Râmnicu Vâlcea by the Securitate secret police and detained for several days. Once the Romanian People's Republic was installed in Romania, Boca was persecuted by the authorities and the regime's secret police, the Securitate. He was arrested and imprisoned several times for allegedly helping the Romanian anti-communist resistance movement. As reported by Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu in a 1999 interview, General Dumitru Coroamă, a resistance leader who was based in Sibiu, travelled in the fall of 1947 to Sâmbăta de Sus Monastery and met Boca, with whom he planned various resistance activities. In June 1948 Boca was arrested and detained at the Securitate facility in Făgăraș. After being released in November,

In September 2019 Fr. Arsenie Boca was proposed for canonization.

stated that Boca is "neither a saint, nor a heretic", and therefore should not be canonized. He also states that Boca was lightly punished by the Communist regime with "just a few months of prison".

The Synodal decree of canonization of him and 14 other new Romanian saints was released 4 February 2025.