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 two years.
After a mocked trial, he was sentenced to 25 years’ hard labour for “conspiracy against the social order”, as was his brother Virgil (b.: 25 Dec. 1926; d.: Apr. 1998). Like other Romanian families, the father, Ioan Brânzaș, and his two sons, Virgil and Liviu, were imprisoned for the “crime” of believing in God and wanting their country to be free.
Like his brother Virgil, he would suffer the tortures of communist prisons for 13 years: Oradea, Jilava, the Cavnic lead mine, Gherla and Aiud. In Aiud he participated in the great hunger strike, after which he was disciplined and sent to Gherla, in Zarca (solitary confinement).
In Aiud, he had the opportunity to spend several months in the same cell as Father Dumitru Stăniloae, with whom he remained in contact after his release from prison. Father Stăniloae (as well as the other priests Liviu Brânzaș met during his imprisonment) brought him immense spiritual benefits, guiding him in the spirit of the ancestral Orthodoxy.
He was released in 1964, along with all the political prisoners, but from the Aiud prison.
In 1968 he was admitted to the Theological Institute of the University Degree in Sibiu, and after the first year of studies he was ordained priest, already married with a daughter.
He was parish priest for 22 years in the parishes of Iacobeni, Tureni and Suceagu. During this time he refused to submit to the ban on catechising children, because he considered the Christian component of education to be a fundamental and defining aspect of the Romanian nation.
From the first congress of the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Romania, he became the confessor of the congresses of the aforementioned Association. Gifted with a penetrating verbal style and the talent to “put his finger on the wound”, his words on these occasions were declared “documents of the congress”. He was a lively columnist in newspapers and magazines, always defending his convictions.
He died on Thursday 3 September 1998, just five months after his brother Virgil.
In 1999 the book “Witness in a moral trial” was published, which contains most of his articles published in various newspapers and magazines, as well as some of his speeches at the A.F.P.P.R. congresses.
(Ray from the Catacomb)