His Eminence Metropolitan Antonie Plamadeala Falls Asleep in the Lord

Sibiu - With great sorrow the Romanian Patriarchate announces that His Eminence Metropolitan Antonie Plamadeala, Archbishop of Sibiu and Metropolitan of Transylvania, entered into eternal life on the evening of August 29.

The funeral service will take place in the Metropolitan Cathedral in Sibiu on Thursday, September 1, at 12:00 noon, and will be presided over by His Beatitude Patriarch Teoctist along with members of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Burial will take place on Friday, September 2, at 12:00 noon at the Brancoveanu Monastery in Sambata de Sus.

His Eminence Antonie Plamadeala was born on November 17, 1926, in the Bessarabian village of Stolnicene in Lapusna county, and was given the baptismal name Leonida. He studied at the Theological Seminary in Chisinau (1937-1944), at the Nifon Seminary in Bucharest (1944-1945), at the Theology Faculties in Bucharest and Cluj (1945-1949), and for the doctorate at the Theological Institute in Bucharest (1956-1959). From 1968-1970 he took courses in theology and philosophy at Heythrop College at Oxford, where he received his doctorate in Theology in 1971.

In 1949 he was received into the monastic community of Prislop with the name Antonie, and was ordained a hieromonk the following year. In that same year, he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in absentia for anti-communist activity; he was arrested in 1954 and imprisoned in Jilava until 1956 when he was set free. On December 27, 1970, he was ordained patriarchal vicar bishop with the title "Ploiesteanul," having as his responsibility the external church relations and financial sectors of the patriarchal administration.

In 1979, the Electoral College of the Romanian Orthodox Church elected him as Bishop of Buzau and then, in 1982, as Archbishop of Sibiu and Metropolitan of Transylvania. He represented the Romanian Orthodox Church at many conferences, congresses, symposia, international intra-Orthodox and ecumenical meetings, and attended many of the General Assemblies of the World Council of Churches and meetings of the Presidium and Central Committee of the European Conference of Churches as a delegate of our Church. He also participated in many sessions of the International Commission for Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church.

He is the author of many books, studies and articles published both in Romania and abroad. He was a member of the Romanian Writers Union. He contributed to the restoration of a number of historical church monuments among which we especially mention the renovation, during unfavorable times, of the Brancoveanu Monastery in Sambata de Sus (founded by the Holy Martyr Voivod Constantine Brancoveanu), where he established an academy, a center of Transylvanian Orthodox culture and spirituality.

In 1992 he was elected an honorary member of both the Romanian Academy and the Academy of Sciences in Chisinau. For his enduring and fruitful activity he received many ecclesiastical and cultural distinctions and titles from a number of prestigious church and lay institutions.

With Metropolitan Antonie Plamadeala’s passing into eternal life, the Romanian Orthodox Church has lost a great hierarch and scholar, a lover of the Church and the Nation, an model of patience and wisdom. May God grant him peaceful rest, and may his memory be eternal!

THE COMMUNICATIONS AND PRESS OFFICE OF THE ROMANIAN PATRIARCHATE