'You have no power to fight me. I risk nothing, because I have nothing to lose - not work, not money, not even my freedom." Cardinal Alexandru Todea, who died on May 21st on just short of his 90th birthday, addressed these words to the Romanian secret police in 1979, when they tried yet again to suborn him and force him to recant.
Twenty-eight years earlier, on January 31st, 1951, they had burst into the flat where the then bishop, recently consecrated in secret, had been hiding for two years, following escape after his first arrest. He heard them coming, and bolted into a hole under the floorboards. They could not find him, but knew he had been there, so they occupied themselves playing cards above his motionless body, thinking they were awaiting his return.
Deep into the night, a specialist search unit found him, stuck head first in his hideout. Thus began four decades of imprisonment, house arrest or confinement to his town of Raghin, in Transylvania.
After the execution of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu on Christmas Day 1989, Alexandru Todea, by then 77, began a new life. Over the next 2½ years, before a stroke paralysed him, he worked ceaselessly for the restoration of the legality of his Byzantine-Rite Catholic Church and the restitution of its property, which the Communists had confiscated and transferred to the Orthodox Church 40 years earlier.
Alexandru Todea was born on June 5th, 1912, near Targu Mures, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father was a shepherd who tried to persuade him that his life would be on the land. He made his own way to Blaj, where the Assumptionist Fathers befriended him and sponsored his theological studies, which were so successful that he was sent for seven years to Rome.
Ordination to the priesthood of the Byzantine-Rite Catholic Church followed his return in 1939, though it would be more than 50 years before Rome could proclaim him Cardinal Archbishop of the region.
Metropolitan Alexandru Nicolescu of Blaj recognised Father Todea's calibre and invited him to become his secretary. From 1940, he was professor of theology at Blaj, and, from 1945, chairman of the Raghin deanery. He became a bishop in 1950.
Once imprisoned by the Communist regime, which was entrenched in power after Romania became a Soviet satellite in 1948, Alexandru Todea emerged as one of the most outstanding of a generation of clergy in the Soviet bloc whose rock-like endurance ensured the survival of their faith. Humiliation - as head of the latrine brigade (though he continued to hear confessions, broom in hand); torture - standing in chains in the baking sun for seven days almost without food and water; isolation - during his decades of house arrest: none of these could break his spirit.
Immediately after Ceausescu's death, he set up contacts with the new regime, and was received by Professor Dumitru Mazilu, vice-president of the National Salvation Front, to whom he broached the problem of the restitution of church rights. The meeting went well, but frustrations were to follow, and Alexandru Todea never did win his case; the Orthodox Church wanted each parish to hold a local referendum, which was unacceptable to him. He insisted that the government had confiscated them, so the government must give them back.
However, Alexandru Todea was a peacemaker, and constantly urged Orthodox and Catholics to concentrate on the common spiritual values which united them. His approach found sympathetic ears in the person of Pope John Paul II, and was a key factor enabling the Pope, in 1999, to make his historic first visit to a predominantly Orthodox country.
Alexandru Todea could not be at the airport to greet the Pontiff, but the first words the Pope spoke on Romanian soil were a tribute directly to him: "The Communist regime suppressed the Church of the Byzantine Romanian Rite united with Rome, and persecuted bishops and priests, men and women, religious and lay people, many of whom paid with blood for their fidelity to Christ. Some survived the torture, and are still with us.
"My heartfelt thoughts turn to the worthy and beloved Cardinal Alexandru Todea, who spent 16 years in prison and 27 under house arrest." The Pope went on to honour the confessors and martyrs of the Orthodox and other churches. But the charity of his statement would have been unthinkable without the groundwork laid by Cardinal Todea. He was one of the 20th century's spiritual giants.
Cardinal Alexandru Todea: born 1912; died, May 2002