Fr. Nicolae Grebenea (en)

“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 […]

Fr. Nicolae Grebenea – a man of high moral standing

A star has gone out! On 2 July 2006, Father Nicolae Grebenea left this world. Believing that he had fulfilled his mission here on earth, God sent his angels to raise his tormented soul to heaven, healing the pain of his body, weakened by three persecutions: Carlist, Antonescian and Communist. He was born in Rășinari, the ancient Romanian village at the foot of Sibiu Mountains, on 25 October 1905. He was the eighth of nine children. He was orphaned at the age of six. As his book “Memories of Darkness” shows, he had a difficult childhood. He attended primary school […]

Father Nicolae Grebenea – biography of a great confessor

23 and a half years of political imprisonment under three dictatorships In the silence of the night. What I wanted to say and didn’t. Who he was and what he did, this frail man with a radiant face, unnoticed by anyone. Marginalised, humiliated, forgotten, ridiculed, moved and sent from place to place as if by some diabolical hand, Father Nicolae Grebenea knew how to enjoy every moment, every piece of life, every little thing that was so precious to him. We came home from Iași marked and burdened by the departure of our dear father and, as a matter of […]

Father Nicolae Grebenea – a life of a valiant fighter, martyr and confessor

It’s difficult to portray Father Grebenea in a few words. A fighter, a man of historical character, a writer of mystical and religious character, Father Grebenea combines all these faculties, and hence the difficulty of writing the word that His Holiness asked me to place at the beginning of his book. Much can be said about Father Grebenea, because he is a man who has lived the life of a courageous fighter, with a religious, moral and spiritual creed, a martyr and a confessor. I met him in difficult times, in the monastery of Cavnic. I believe that all the […]

The high humanity of Father Nicolae Grebenea

Of course, the unusual course of events keeps us far apart, even though we profess the same faith and serve it undividedly, so that although we should meet, even unwillingly, at short intervals, it happens that we do not see each other at all. Personally, however, I cannot reconcile myself, and I admit my guilt, with the distance that has led me not to cross my steps with those of Father Nicolae Grebenea for a long time. It’s hard to accept that after spending so many years with a comrade in the same prison, and after laying your bones on […]

Father Nicolae Grebenea – he spread light around him until the last moment

Time has no patience! A few more months on earth and Father Grebenea would have added a year to the hundred he had already counted. But his “veil” was fulfilled and the “Patriarch” went to live forever with the righteous. I have begun this invocation with the above phrases because they belong to the one we are invoking. I remember that once, in the terrible dungeon of Aiud, when he was talking to us about suffering and its meaning, some of us, his younger “disciples”, asked him with some annoyance: “Well, well, Father, but this nightmare we are living, when […]