“He proved to be a man and a priest at the same time, clearly superior to others”
I also stayed with the priest Grebenea Nicolae, whom I had left at the Baia Sprie mine. He was originally from Rășinari. He was the son of a Moț and had just been ordained a priest when he went to prison. He was also a veteran of Aiud. He remained the same warm soul. Communicative, witty and at the same time deeply rooted in Christian spirituality.
Nicolae Grebenea had a profound knowledge of Christian dogmatic theology and Orthodox mysticism, as well as of patristics and the lives of the saints. In a word, everything that belongs to a priest called to shepherd souls. Although he bore the burden of so many years of hard imprisonment, in his heart beat the hope of better days for the nation. He was a follower of Orthodoxy, of the Romanian people.
As luck would have it, we had another priest in our cell, Sima Valeriu, from the parish of Mesteacăn, apparently from the Zalău area. The meeting between the two gave us the opportunity to learn about some events that we had heard about through the press and indirect sources. The priest Sima Valeriu was a Greek Catholic. We witnessed their conversations about the unification, or more precisely, the return of the Romanians of the Greek Catholic rite to the Orthodox Mother Church, or the unification with the Church of Rome.
Father Sima Valeriu had participated as a priest in the celebration of Alba-Iulia, when the act of the return of these faithful to the Orthodox Church was completed. Father Grebenea asked him for more details (which he gave) about the event. I noted that everything happened according to the perfect good will of the participants – delegates from all areas with faithful belonging to this rite. He was asked to give such details because, after a while, Fr. Sima returned to his original position and gave up his grace. He withdrew from the house of the Lord and did not serve at the altar. On several occasions he criticised the very act in which he had taken part. Father Sima’s diametrically opposed change of position upset Father Nicolae Grebenea, who initiated a fundamental discussion on the subject. I was present when a competent theologian, and at the same time a Romanian, explained this sensitive issue, especially to the Romanians of Transylvania, divided along confessional lines. He, the priest Grebenea, demonstrated the usefulness of the union of the two Churches, more precisely, of the return of all to the motherland, to the ancestral Church. To Sima Valeriu’s reply that the union with the Church of Rome was a great good for the Romanians of Transylvania, because it hastened the culturalisation of the broad Romanian masses and the awakening of national consciousness, Father Grebenea answered him on the spot. The Romanians were Orthodox from the beginning, and it was only the historical conjuncture that led them to make a break and, in certain respects, to join the Catholic cult. Now that we are living in a different conjuncture, it is necessary for all Romanians to return to the Church. He also recalled that throughout history several attempts had been made to catholicise us, but without success. There was another argument that surprised us. It was a recent argument that the priest Sima Valeriu could not face.
Recently, when we were on our mobile phones, the news came that a Romanian from Transylvania had been arrested. He was notorious. He was Greek Catholic, so united. At the insistence of some, he did not want to return to his ancestral church, but preferred to join the Roman Catholics. He lived in a commune with a mixed population. There was a Roman Catholic church in the village, attended by Hungarians and some Germans. The Romanian’s wife used to go to this church. Once she wanted to go to confession and receive Holy Communion. The priest, a Hungarian, also spoke Romanian. After the confession, he gave the woman a canon to pray to God for the reunification of Transylvania with her homeland, Hungary. The Romanian woman shuddered and answered: “Well, Father, I am Romanian and our Ardeal is united with my homeland! When the Hungarian priest saw that he had been discovered, he made it clear to the Romanian woman that this was what he meant. From that moment on, she never again entered the church where the service was held in Hungarian. Nor did her husband, who later, when he went to prison, told his wife all about it. When the priest Valeriu Sima heard this, he was clearly dissatisfied.
The rather delicate issue of the Romanians’ confession in Transylvania was the subject of much discussion in the cells. Father Grebenea, an Ardelian himself, was a man who knew how to argue the healthy point of view in the dispute between the people. He proved to be both a man and a priest, clearly superior to others.
(Nicu Păun – The Mountain of Suffering, European Institute Publishing House, Bucharest, 1997, pp. 270-272)