“Father Liviu knew how to show up when you needed him most”

Many of us knew him. He knew how to show up when you needed him most, and otherwise he had an answer for everyone when he was wanted, especially by young people. Soft and hard – he looked at you with a serene face, perhaps prematurely grey, and spoke to you with such conviction that it was almost impossible to resist. Sometimes he would be sad that you couldn’t understand something so obvious, and then he would sit with you for hours. If you were not captivated by his words, perhaps by the poems he wrote when others would have hoped for nothing, or if not by those, then by the notebooks of memories he collected from the children he catechised in a time of catacombs, or simply by his presence.

He loved to win a man for God, but also for the values of his nation. In one of the rooms of such a complex soul, you were sure to find your library. And you knew what to expect from this man, simply because you knew that he was waiting for you. A piece of advice, an encouragement, it was hard not to be a push forward, or in Noica’s words, towards becoming something…

When we called him and he knew that we needed him, he joined us as a priest in the liturgical pilgrimage to the Church of Horea or to the “Colindul Eroilor”. The last time, on 16 December 1997, God gave us a rare frost. Father took us from the brewery – where the first martyrs fell in ’89 – to the top of the hill, to the heroes’ cemetery. After the memorial service, on a wintry evening, lit by tiny candles that stubbornly resisted the wind, hidden in frozen hands, Father gave perhaps the shortest and most powerful sermon of his life. And for the students it was his last. A word of fire, a living word… That’s how we knew you. God bless you, Father Liviu.

(ASCOR and the Student Union – Filocalia Magazine, September 1998)