Blessed are those who have sacrificed for us

The bloody Christmas 1989. There has perhaps never been another to put together, on the scale of an entire country, the greatest joy with the most terrible sorrow.

Everything we have achieved in the course of our history has been dearly paid for. And our emergence from the zodiac of an aberrant dictatorship has cost us much blood, more than any other. This blood binds us to them forever. We do not have the right to forget those who testified in our name that spring December! They, the martyred heroes, no longer belonged to us, they were our spokesmen before humanity and our atoners for our sins before God.

Their blood, their sacrifice binds us. They died with God’s name on their lips. We find their crosses scattered on the streets of Bucharest, Timișoara, Sibiu, Brașov, Târgu Mureș, Brăila… They are all worthy of our gratitude and our prayers, from the infant who died in his mother’s arms to the old man whose bullet took only a small part of his life he had left. It is not a lukewarm and fleeting remembrance that they expect from us, but involvement in the work they have begun, the fulfilment of their hopes, a purifying inner transformation, an increase in community love, a departure from selfishness and convenience, lest, as has often been said, there be, ‘sin for bloodshed’. If we were more, more intensely mindful of them, of the meaning of their sacrifice, perhaps our world would look different today.

Their death, with which they too have trodden “before death”, according to the parable of the One who sacrificed everything, obliges us, first of all, to gather more and more fervently around God, in His Church. Only this can truly save us, by salvation we mean salvation.

Let us congratulate those who then departed from this world, because by their martyr sacrifice they were granted, as the Church says, the “good answer” of the One who does not leave unpaid even the cup of water given to the thirsty. What about us? Where do we go? Their gaze follows us reproachfully! May God comfort them!

(Costion Nicolescu – Salt of the Earth, Doxologia, Iași, 2011, p. 490)

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