From a peasant background, Colan completed high school in Brașov, followed by a period of wandering during World War I that saw him in Sibiu, Bucharest, Moldavia, Ukraine and ultimately Bessarabia, where he advocated union with Romania.

Entering the clergy in 1934, he soon became bishop at Cluj, remaining there when Northern Transylvania temporarily became Hungarian territory during World War II.

[1] He attended primary school in his native village before enrolling at Sfântu Gheorghe's Hungarian-language Sékely Mikó College, where he completed one year (1906–1907).

Most of them did not intend to join the priesthood, but attending the seminary did offer a temporary exemption from service in the Austro-Hungarian Army, which had recently begun operations in World War I.

Following the Romanian Old Kingdom's August 1916 entry into World War I, he and several other young Transylvanian intellectuals, among them Oțetea, crossed the border into Romania.

Next, he ended up in a Ukrainian village, near Yelisavetgrad, where, together with other refugee Transylvanians who included Ion Agârbiceanu, he organized a church choir that delivered responses in Romanian to the priests' Slavonic.

Encouraged by Nicolae Bălan, Metropolitan of Transylvania, he attended postgraduate courses in Protestant theology at the University of Berlin from 1921 to 1922.

[11] On numerous occasions, the temporary authorities barred him from making pastoral visits and blocked the publication of certain church periodicals.

Colan suffered due to the expulsion, imprisonment and killing of clerics and laymen in his diocese, as well as their forced conversion from Orthodoxy.

[13] Elected and enthroned as Archbishop of Sibiu and Metropolitan of Transylvania in May 1957, he guided the activities of the clergy, the theological institute and the church's publications.