GHEORGHIU, CONSTANTIN V

GHEORGHIU, CONSTANTIN V., bishop, novelist, diplomat (1916–22 June 1992). He fled Romania in 1944, settled in France, and published his best-selling novel The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1948). The novel is a denunciation of Nazism and Communism (English trans. 1950), and became a film. He has also published a biography of Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras (q.v.) in French (1969). Gheorghiu was ordained priest in 1963 and in 1971 became the bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in France.