he surpassed expectations by paying off all debts to creditors of years past and re-establishing his printing press's credibility on the market. In the spring of 1940, he handed over the printing press, now debt-free, to the newly established Metropolitanate of Craiova. He refused to go to Craiova, being aggrieved at the disestablishment of the Râmnic Diocese on November 7, 1939. In recognition of his merits, achieved over a decade and a half as a priest, the authorities of the Râmnic Diocese awarded him all priestly honorifics (sakellarios, iconon and iconom stavrofor with the right to wear a red girdle); he was also elected to the Central Council of the General Association of Romanian Clergy. The Minister of Religion, upon the proposal of the Metropolitanate of Craiova, awarded him the "Cultural merit First Class for the Church". Archbishop and Metropolitan of Iaşi The future Patriarch Justinian owed his ascendancy within the church hierarchy to the fact that he had helped the Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej to hide in the parish house at St. George's after the latter's escape from the Târgu Jiu internment camp in 1944. As the prominent Communist Ion Gheorghe Maurer later recalled, "After we passed Craiova by car, about 30 kilometers on, we stopped in a village where we were kept by a priest who was himself the Communists' man. The car went back to Craiova and we stayed in that village about three days until another car from Bucharest came, to take us to the capital." There are 15 references to Justinian in the book In God's Underground by Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor imprisoned by the communist regime. Wurmbrand was in constant trouble with the authorities because of his outspokenness towards the regime but he credits Justinian on using his influence in the early days of his Patriarchate to ensure he was allowed to keep his license to preach. However, later he describes Justinian as having become "wholly a tool of the Party". The Metropolitan of Moldavia, Irineu Mihălcescu, who had been elected to his position on November 29, 1939, was ill and in serious need of a young, energetic and capable person to help him rebuild the diocese, gravely affected by war damage. The vicar bishop Valeriu Moglan Botoşăneanul was old and could barely handle the administration of Spiridonia, a large hospital in Iaşi. In the spring of 1945, Metropolitan Irineu asked the Ministry