Father Domingos Soares talked back to Bishop Carlos Belo when the bishop took him to task for being directly involved in independence politics and resistance to the Indonesian occupation.
This gentle pastor, one of several priests murdered by Kopassus (special forces) militia and military, was the only priest in East Timor who actually joined the resistance. His liberation theology - which he learned in the mountains with the people and not at the "very conservative" seminary in Portugal where he was educated - was based on the idea that "God wants his people to be free. Therefore God wants East Timor to be free."
A clearly tired and strained Father Soares told a group from Ireland and South Africa, several days before East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence, of the many death threats he had received. Those threats were carried out at his own house yesterday, where he was sheltering a group of Timorese. Militiamen told him to stand aside. "You will have to kill me," he is reported as saying before he was shot dead.
Father Soares had told us how Bishop Belo had upbraided him for neglecting his pastoral work and for being an activist in the National Council for Timorese Resistance (CNRT) and before that in Fretilin, the resistance.
But he saw no conflict between his two roles, replying to his bishop: "You support dialogue. You are a Nobel bishop of human rights," he explained in the CNRT office on the palm-lined seafront of Dili days before East Timor's referendum.
The offices had been proudly opened only days before being wrecked by pro-Indonesian thugs.
Father Soares was also in trouble with his nephew, Mr Constantino Soares, who is an Indonesian appointed bupati (mayor) in the regency of Ermera, south of Dili. They had not been talking lately, the bupati told me later. "I try to convince him," he said.
One of the few educated leaders of the CNRT, Father Soares was intensely concerned about the difficulty of reconciliation after independence - particularly for 6,000 Timorese who serve in the Indonesian military. When they approached him, he told them: "You must ask for conscience again. Ask God."
There had been genocide on both sides, he said, particularly in 1975 as the Falintil guerrilla army resisted the Indonesian invasion.
"With colonialism all is negative, but with Portugal much was learned. With the Indonesians there is no high culture," he said.
The difference was that with the Portuguese the people learned to eat with a knife and fork "but the Indonesians eat with their hands", he added.
The Indonesians were "only destroyers of our initiative. They starve us and don't help us," he told his visitors who included Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and former chaplain to the ANC.
Father Lapsley, who lost both his hands in a letter bomb attack in 1990, said the meeting had been especially significant for him as a fellow priest who had struggled for the independence of his people.
Father Soares said South Africa had a special place in his heart because of former President Nelson Mandela's initiative in meeting the resistance leader, Mr Xanana Gusmao, when he was in Cipinang Prison, Jakarta. And he said Ireland was the first western country to help the Timorese struggle, said Mr Joe Murray of AfrI (Action from Ireland), another member of the group.