Cardinal Mureşan, minister in secret before communism’s collapse in Romania, dies at 94

Cardinal Lucian Mureşan, major archbishop of the Greek Catholic Church in Romania, died Sept. 25, 2025, at age 94. / Credit: Mihai Andrei, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

ACI Prensa Staff, Sep 26, 2025 / 15:58 pm (CNA).

Cardinal Lucian Mureşan, major archbishop of the Greek Catholic Church in Romania and a priest who was secretly ordained during persecution by the communist regime that fell in 1989, died Sept. 25.

According to Vatican News, Mureşan died at his residence in Blaj, Romania, after several months of illness. He was 94.

Mureşan was created a cardinal at the age of 80 in 2012, during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. This type of designation, when one has already surpassed the age to be an elector in a possible conclave, is a papal recognition of the service to the Church offered by the recipient.

Who was Cardinal Mureşan?

Lucian Mureşan was born on May 23, 1931, in Transylvania, in Ferneziu, a present-day district of the city of Baia Mare in Romania, into a family of 12 children.

Following the suppression of the Greek Catholic Church in Romania by the communists in 1948, he had to abandon his high school studies and, for a time, his priestly vocation, to train professionally as a carpenter.

In 1955, the bishop of Alba Iulia, Márton Áron, admitted five young Greek Catholics, including Mureşan, to the theological institute of the Latin rite Catholic Church in that diocese.

In their fourth year, Mureşan and the others who entered with him were expelled from the institute by the Department of Religious Affairs, thus beginning the onslaught by the Securitate, the secret police of President Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist regime.

For 10 years, he worked in the road and bridge maintenance department in the Maramureş district, but he continued to study theology clandestinely.

On Dec. 19, 1964, Mureşan was ordained a priest. He also carried out his ministry clandestinely, working in youth and vocation ministry. After the death of Bishop Ioan Dragomir in 1986, he led the Eparchy of Maramureş.

One of Mureşan’s last public speeches when he was already ill was at the commemoration of Cardinal Iuliu Hossu, blessed and martyr under the communist regime in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

Among other things, Mureşan said that in the martyred cardinal’s testimony, he had found the strength “to forgive and love those who persecuted him.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.