“Father Liviu Brânzaș was formed by the flame of faith, on the anvil of suffering”

Could I say (with the pride we have when it comes to a person whose name has a special resonance) that I knew Father Liviu Brânzaș? It would be risky, because I saw him only once, in the early 90s, at an A.F.P.P.R. congress, when I spoke to His Holiness during a break. And yet I feel entitled to say that I knew him, remembering how he came to me, simply and directly, as if we had known each other forever.

I sat quietly in my pew, for the break had nothing to bring me out of the gym: I wasn’t smoking, I wasn’t thirsty, I didn’t feel like talking. I watched in slight bewilderment as the priest who had opened the Congress with a moving prayer, after which the whole plenary had sung our familiar Psalm “God is with us…”, turned to me. Like an outpouring of light, a pleasant looking priest came towards me, with a flash of a smile on his noble face. I only knew that his name was Liviu Brânzaș and that, like so many others, he had spent many years in prison under the harsh Bolshevik persecution. It seemed to me that I was waiting for him with the emotion of finding a good friend from whom fate had separated me for too long.

Undoubtedly, Father belonged to that category of people who are specially created for light, for joy, for the happiness of others. Although you are seeing them for the first time, you feel that they have been your friends for as long as you can remember. You feel in their gentleness a kindness with which they would like to embrace you, you sense in their gentle smile something of the mystery of a boundless goodness, ready to help you without price. Their discreet sympathy gives their words a pleasant sweetness that gives you confidence and courage. Father Liviu Brânzaș was such a person. His way of being betrayed a great love for people. He would surround you with a serene gaze. In his radiant smile, in his calm and warm words, in the firm grip of his hand, you could feel a sincere heart, without any detours, carrying that piece of heaven that will be given to you without question. I will reproduce, as far as my memory allows, the dialogue that took place between us. I will do so with the devotion and metanoia befitting this gentle and fearless shepherd.

Fr. Liviu – I know who you are and I assume that you know who I am. So please allow me to skip the formalities of protocol and ask you some direct questions.

Aspazia – Gladly, I am honoured to answer to the best of my ability.

Fr. Liviu – Oh, I have no intention of subjecting you to a philosophical tirade. I know that you have spent many years in prison and have been through many prisons. I would be happy if you met a group of students from Beiuș and if you could remember them.

Aspazia – Yes, I clearly remember the most beautiful of them. Her name was Ani Onel and she was perfect. Still a teenager, she was mercilessly subjected to the ruthless regime of the communist dungeons, along with the adult women. Once she worked in the Romanian sewing workshop, which I coordinated. It was a feast for the eyes and the soul to see her bow gracefully over the national shirt, which she skilfully decorated with our beautiful Romanian motifs. She was of a perfect beauty, a diaphanous spring, lost in hell: a fairy’s face, fairy’s hands, a fairy’s fate locked in the cave of the ogre dragon.

Fr. Liviu – Here is a truly tragic fate! A teenage girl in the hell of the communist prison is an angel kidnapped in hell. When I heard about the death of my pupil Liță Sasu, I felt from that moment on that all my sufferings were nothing compared to the supreme sacrifice of this flower, crushed by the devil in the springtime of life. I can’t explain how Corneliu Coposu could say that the anti-communist women fighters (legionnaires) joined this fight out of repression. They were so ugly that they felt the need to show themselves in this way!

Aspazia – I don’t know what made him say something so inelegant and, above all, untrue. I can assure everyone that it was not out of a repression and that there are many “beauties” who carry the “stigma” of the communist dungeons with dignity and conviction. Ani Onel, with her perfect, angelic beauty, categorically contradicts him; indeed, I have not seen a more beautiful face among those who remained outside the anti-communist struggle.

Fr. Liviu – I would like to ask you another question and I would like you to answer me honestly. What do you think: are we victorious or irrevocably defeated?

Aspazia – Several answers are possible, but since you ask for honesty and not theories, there are some of us who are complete victors. I don’t mean those who have simply survived, but those who have managed to overcome suffering. Because it was given to us, it was impossible to take it away, to dominate it, and then we appropriated it. We have appropriated it with everything, we have shared it, we have shared it as a mystery, as a blessing, and so we have managed to fill its trees with love. What an unexpected joy when we realised that Jesus was with us and in His supreme agony gave us a drop of His sorrow! What greater honour than to share in the sacrificial suffering of the Calvary! Jesus was the centre and we were the circle around Him. And the closer we came to the centre by accepting suffering, the closer we came to each other. A benevolent river of love flowed among us and prison became heaven and pain became a blessing.

Fr. Liviu – True, true! That’s how it was for us. In prison we lived a fragment of the agony of that dramatic night in Gethsemane. We were condemned to pain and no one in heaven or on earth could take pity on us. It seemed as if the star of hope had fallen from the sky into the abyss of nothingness, and yet, from the depths, a commandment led us to the heights. Cold, hunger, imprisonment, chains, shackles, beatings, isolation, forced inactivity, constant confinement, any contact with the broken reality outside, all these forms of destruction and dehumanisation bit at our being. We carried the cross, we climbed this unceasing ordeal with determination, and no one helped us to lay down for a moment the burden that was crushing us. In that empty place we could not put down the cross for a minute. It had to be carried unceasingly, and it was only possible to carry it because the soul had long since stopped knocking at the gates of temporary freedom. It knocked with faith and humility at the gates of heaven. The prisoners seemed to be Sikhs who had undergone the ultimate asceticism for inner purification and transfiguration. They longed for heaven, for salvation; the asceticism imposed on them became a mystical asceticism. It was not a withdrawal from life, but a transfiguration of it. It was a transcendence of the struggle, the longings, the efforts, to a higher spiritual level. This mystical experience, this school of transfigured suffering, was a miracle.

***

The comrades repopulated the hall. Father left me, murmuring the last sentence addressed to me:

– I have taken off my striped jail garments to put on the priestly garb, the most honourable uniform in this atheistic and totalitarian age, but the most difficult to wear.

I looked at his face for the last time, and I don’t know why it seemed to me that bitterness was hidden deep in the wrinkles at the corners of my mouth. Father Liviu Brânzaș’s last words said everything about him, they were an inexpressible synthesis of his personality. I shouldn’t say more. But I cannot refrain from pointing out that Father Liviu Brânzaș was forged by the flame of faith, on the anvil of suffering. He became a “friend of pain”, in the sense of the monk Moses the Athonite.

“He who is the friend of pain does not know what it is to receive blows. The friend of pain is the friend of all who suffer”.

With heroism, without fanfare, Father Liviu Brânzaș quietly carried out his feverish work as a priest.

(Aspazia Oțel Petrescu – Rost magazine no. 31 of September 2005)

* All the ideas expressed by Father Liviu in this dialogue can be found exactly in His Holiness’ book “Ray from the Catacomb”.