Fr. Liviu Brânzaș (en)

Short biography of Father Liviu Brânzaș

Fr. Liviu Brânzaș was born on 16 December 1930 in the village of Sâniob, Bihor County, the third of four children (Virgil, Sabina, Liviu and Cornelia) of Ioan and Ecaterina Brânzaș. He attended the first primary classes at the school in Sâniob until 1940, when he and his family sought refuge in Finiș after the fall of the Nazi dictatorship. There he continued his primary education. He attended the “Samuil Vulcan” high school in Beiuș, a Romanian and Christian high school. On 15 November 1951 he was arrested for anti-communist activities, after having been hidden in the mountain villages for […]

A short stay at Father Liviu Brânzaș’s icon

Twelve were chosen to follow Him for three years, once they had been called, sharing with Him labour, hardship, scorn and every kind of privation. And one of them was found to betray Him, hastening His Passion and Crucifixion. He said to the Apostles: “Take the Holy Spirit; whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins you retain, they are retained”. And “go and preach My Gospel to all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”… The time will come when everyone who kills you will think he […]

A crusader’s journey from dungeon to shrine

…Fr. Liviu Brânzaș ran away from external relationships, looking for another self in his invisible being. We were able to get closer to each other and reach a correspondence of souls. We didn’t know then what life would bring us, what God’s plan was. The desire to get closer to Him, to feel Him alive in our being, gave us the opportunity to share our moods and longings towards the summit of the Cross, which we wanted to climb without murmuring. The appetite he had for the act of spiritual knowledge gave me the opportunity, as in Târgșor, to take […]

Fr. Liviu Brânzaș, a forgiver and a man of prayer for eternity

Fr. Liviu Brânzaș, a gentle man, showed a lenient attitude towards the mistakes of others. None of us who knew Fr. Liviu then and there were surprised when, after ’89, a white-haired man in a cassock appeared at our reunion. It was Fr. Liviu Brânzaș, our beloved and long-suffering brother, who even now, after so many years of physical and moral pain, was forgiving and praying to God for forgiveness. (Cornel Onaca – Witnesses and Martyrs, Imprimeriei de Vest, Oradea, 2000, p. 84)

“I believe that suffering in prison made Father Brânzaș so good”

Sometimes I look back with nostalgia and joy in my heart on my childhood years, which were marked by so many events, but the most important of all was that I had the opportunity to learn, along with other children, what religion is. Those wonderful hours of soul reunion we spent in church were a gift from God to us. Of course, this was unwanted by those who didn’t want us to know what religion was, by those who didn’t want us to know the word God and what it meant. The atheists who ruled the country did not want […]

“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 […]