Download the complete Resume in PDF

His Eminence Metropolitan Nicolae was born in the city of Constanţa on April 15, 1967, to his parents Nicolae and Victoria, both now asleep in the Lord. He attended elementary school in his native city between 1973 and 1981. He attended the first two years of high school at the Mathematics & Physics High School in Constanţa, after which he transferred to the Meteorology High School in Bucharest, where he obtained his baccalaureate in 1985. After he graduated from high school, he did his mandatory military service in 1985-1986. Feeling the call toward the priesthood and the monastic vocation growing stronger and stronger, he decided to answer this call and follow this vocation. In 1988 he was admitted to the Andrei Şaguna Orthodox Faculty of Theology in Sibiu, which at that time was the only school to admit high school graduates. After four successful years he defended his degree in theology with the dissertation, “The Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Metropolitan John Zizioulas.” Starting in May 1993, having successfully passed the doctoral entrance examination, Fr. Nicolae attended doctoral classes until 1994 under the supervision of his adviser, the V. Rev. Fr. Prof. Dr. Ilie Moldovan; during that time, he wrote the following seminar papers:

1. The Collective Unconscious in C.G. Jung’s Works, Seen from the Point of View of Orthodox Moral Theology.
2. Self-Cognition according to the Ladder of St. John of Sinai.
3. The Sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the faithful according to St. Cyril of Alexandria.

Between 1992 and 1994 he taught Religion in Bucharest, where he had moved after high school. In 1994 he received a scholarship to the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, where he attended the Faculty of Catholic Theology and finished a  graduate degree in June 1995. Between 1995 and 2001 he attended doctoral classes at the same Faculty where, on November 10, 2001, he defended his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Matters of Psychology in the Works of Evagrius Ponticus” and obtained the degree of Doctor in Theology.

During his years of study, in order to combine theory and practice, study and priestly ministry, he decided to enter the clergy and was ordained in the spring of 1997 first as a deacon, then as a celibate priest, by His Eminence Metropolitan Serafim of Germany and Central Europe, with whose benediction he then established and served the parish of the Nativity of the Lord in Stuttgart, Germany. Thus, his missionary activity among Romanians from Stuttgart and its environs combined serving God with serving people. In the same time period, Fr. Nicolae was the representative of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the Dialogue Committee for European Integration of the Conference of European Churches (Brussels).

After receiving the prestigious academic title at the end of his graduate studies, Fr. Nicolae returned to Romania where, on December 18, 2001, he took his monastic vows at the Radu Vodă Monastery in Bucharest. From then until he came to America he was patriarchal secretary...(read more)