"God is not in books" (Fr. Roman Braga)

Fr. Roman Braga, a survivor of torture in Communist prisons, shows us how the experience of the prisoners helped them to find God inside themselves.

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Fr. Roman:

"God is not in books.

I learned this lesson in prison. God bless the communists because they put the priests in prison.

The priest needs a little imprisonment because it is a wonderful experience there. Father said that I was in a solitary confinement for almost 3 years. So, I was just by myself in a small cell, surrounded by 4 walls, I didn’t have anything to look at. For 11 years I didn’t see a pencil, a piece of paper, because communist imprisonments are not like American prisons with TV, library and champagne on New Year’s day. They wanted, especially the intellectual class, to be destroyed, to become beasts, like animals and they didn’t give them anything to read. But that is the mystery: instead of becoming like animals we became ourselves.

When you are free you are the slave of the books, so many books, I have to read all of them… you don’t have time to be yourself because you are made out of quotations…

And there is no book, nothing else… you have to go somewhere… you don’t have any perspective to look at, the windows are very high, you couldn’t even touch them, they were very small… and you have to go somewhere… and you go inside…"