A Fierce War: Being Catholic in Russia

There may be as many as 200,000 Catholic believers among Russia’s population of 145 million. As the Russian Orthodox Church has sought in recent years to reassert its primacy as the “one, true church” within Russia, Catholic believers have come under increased pressure. Patriarch Alexii II last year cast the situation in rather grim terms:
“A fierce war for minds and souls is going on. The future of our state depends on who wins this war.” On the occasion of Easter, the holiest of Christian holidays, Russian Life
asked noted Russian journalist and author Ilya Stogoff, a practicing Catholic, to offer some thoughts on Catholicism in Russia today.

A few  years ago,
I went to

Moscow on business for a day, was soon free and had no clue how to spend the remaining hours until my train. I’d done the mausoleum and had no desire to roam the bars. So I decided to stop in at St. Ludwig’s Catholic Church.

I sat scrutinizing the icons. 

I didn’t notice them entering the church. There were three of them: tall, hook-nosed, with long black curly hair. They were wearing sackcloth coats, but had no shoes—the men stood on the stone floor, their feet bare.

They were bent in prayer before the altar for a long time, then they straightened up and began to sing Latin hymns loudly and beautifully. Their voices were high and pure. 

When they finished singing, they turned and went out the door. Strange as it may seem, outside that door was a dull grey late-twentieth century mega-city.

I bent over to my neighbor in the pew:

“Who were they?”

“Monks from the Order of the Lions of Judas. Pay no attention, they always look like that.”

Russia is an Orthodox country. The first legal Catholics appeared in Russia just 300 years ago. On December 2, 1705, Tsar Peter I published an ukaz which for the first time allowed the construction of Catholic churches in Russia, and allowed priests, monks and missionaries of these churches to travel about the empire.

The ukaz had no bearing on Russians. Just as before, if a Russian crossed the threshold of a Catholic church, it was seen as a betrayal of the State, punishable by exile to Siberia.

Pre-revolutionary Russia’s Criminal Code even had a specific article for those who dared to give their children an un-Orthodox upbringing. Thus, the first Catholics in Petersburg were exclusively visitors: Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Armenians and large number of Poles.

For them, the capital of the empire had more than 20 churches, seminaries, several schools, shelters for the poor and even special Catholic cemeteries. The little Church of St. Catherine Aleksandrinsky, on Nevsky prospekt, gradually became the main Catholic church in the country.

Its parishioners rose in number to several tens of thousands. Among them was Dantes, the murderer of the greatest Russian poet, Pushkin. He had been married there in a Catholic ceremony to the poet’s sister-in-law.

By the middle of the 20^th century, there remained but one acting church, which the communists did not close because French President Charles De Gaulle spoke in defense of it. The rest of Catholic property was nationalized. Priests were exiled from the country as agents of the Vatican.

The Catholics returned only at the very end of the 20th
century.

To this day, Russians’ conception of the Catholic Church is formed by films about the crusades and music videos by the group “Enigma.” Russians are not hostile to Catholics. They simply do not know anything about them.

Personally, I was baptized in the Catholic Church ten years ago. And only one time in this entire ten years did I stumble across negative feelings toward Catholics.

I was traveling through a small Russian town and decided to attend a service. My travel guide assured me that a church was located very nearby, but I wandered around for half-an-hour and could not find it. I asked a woman passerby whether she might help me.

The woman looked me over from head to toe and replied:

“You are looking for the Catholic church? E-ekh! But you seem like such a Russian guy! Why would you want to go there?”

There are very few 100% Russians among the parishioners of Catholic churches in Petersburg. And if you dig into their family tree, you inevitably uncover a German or a Pole.

Nonetheless, I succeeded in finding a fully Russian girl. Her name was Lena.

“I understood that God was calling me to the church during my last year of school. And I was baptized, of course, in the Orthodox Church. It was such a… you know … I wore a shawl over my head, I did not use cosmetics, I observed all the fasts. As a result, I had many conflicts with my parents.”

“So how did it come to be that you moved from the Orthodox Church to the Catholic?”

“You know, a major influence was what the Orthodox brothers told me about Catholics. They told me lots of negative things and I simply had to take a look and see: what kind of people are they? I stopped in and looked around. And, after a year, I moved to the Catholic Church.”

“Was it a difficult choice?”

“Very! All the more so that people from my previous parish considered it a betrayal. I was already studying in the institute by that time. Young guys would come to the university and yell at me: ‘Judas!’”

Transfer of Russians from the Orthodox Church to the Catholic is a very rare thing. Yet such things happen. And it is namely because of such things that the life of Russian Catholics today cannot be called easy.

An acquaintance told me this story:

“Ten years ago, when they found out that the communists no longer forbade religion, the leadership of one Siberian region decided to begin teaching the Laws of God in their schools. They sent a letter to the Moscow Patriarchate and asked them to send a priest. Just one. But they could not find anyone interested in venturing to their backwoods region. The Siberians were insulted and wrote to the Vatican. Just like that. Without any hope whatsoever for a result. But within two weeks Salesian monks [from the order of St. Francis de Sales] began to arrive in the Arctic Circle by helicopter, accompanied by containers of literature, ready-to-build chapels, miniature printing plants and everything they needed for their work. As a result, the majority of residents in this region are now Catholics.”

I cannot vouch for the veracity of this story. But the enthusiastic era of religious freedom and lack of governmental control ended swiftly. From the beginning of the current decade, the Powers That Be began to simply expel Catholic priests from the country.

According to various estimates, there are between 30 and 200 thousand Catholics in Russia. The number of priests to this day is not more than 150. Moreover, the majority of them are foreigners.

On September 10, 2002, Edward Matskevich, prior of a parish in Rostov-on-Don, had his visa revoked when he tried to return to Russia after a vacation. A major in the border guards told the priest that “his parish had been liquidated and the church closed, therefore the parish no longer had need for a priest.”

Just a few hours later, Father Yaroslav Vishnevsky, practically the sole support for Catholics in Sakhalin oblast, was detained at Khabarovsk airport. Border officials annulled his visa and informed him that he would be expelled from the country the following day, for some reason to Japan.

A few weeks prior, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo-2 airport, Archbishop Yezhi Mazur was detained. Border officials took his passport and did not return his documents for several hours. And then the head of the border guard declared that Mazur, a citizen of Poland, was on a list of persons forbidden from entering the Russian Federation.

The East Siberian diocese which the archbishop headed is the largest Catholic diocese in the world. To this day, it remains without a leader.

The archbishop himself has recounted how he tried many times to apply for residency status in Russia. Immigration service workers refused to accept his documents, advising this celibate, high-ranking priest to take a Russian bride.

I asked the deacon of a Petersburg church whether it was not difficult for him to work in such conditions.

“Of course it is difficult. Priests who do not have residency status in Russia call each other up and wonder: ‘Who should we send next?’ Parishioners tell me that sometimes they have to hide the fact that they are Catholic.”

“Do you think it is the beginning of a mass religious persecution?”

“Of course not. It is the consequence of the eternal Russian muddle. On the one hand, the Powers That Be are expelling priests. On the other hand, recently we were transferred a huge church confiscated during the communist era. In our country, nothing ever goes right, but we are used to that. We simply keep on working.”

Before entering a Catholic church anywhere in the world, one should place one’s hand in the cistern with holy water and cross oneself.

Parishioners, gathering for evening mass at St. Catherine’s Church on Nevsky prospekt do everything the way they are supposed to. After they have made the sign of the cross on themselves, droplets of water remain on their foreheads. Very small droplets.

The huge and extremely beautiful St. Catherine’s almost burned to the ground in both 1948 and 1984. Restoration continues to this day, so the huge ceremonial entrance to the church is closed. In order to attend a service, parishioners have to enter through an unlit, trash-soaked courtyard. Services are held in a small side chapel.

There are very few people attending the evening mass. I counted 23 persons. The majority are women. There are just a few young people. One sports a stylish beard and expensive English boots. There are also nuns: some Polish sisters in grey, Franciscan dresses, and some Dominican nuns from Latin America…

The service ended. Exiting the courtyard, I come out on Nevsky prospekt. It has a very strange feel.

Rich tourists from the Grand Hotel Europe shuffle by the church. Bearded artists, crazed from poverty, try to pawn off on them their grim canvases. The tourists wince and walk on. The artists return to their half-empty vodka bottles and their unfinished games of chess.

I crane my head skyward. Above the church entrance there is a several-meter tall crucifix, but it is hardly visible from below. The crucifix is supported by a marble angel. On the crossbeam is perched a pigeon.

I lower my head and trudge to the metro. More than anything, the crucifix seems like a sure nail. It tightly fastens our bustling world to the heavens, suspended so low … so near to us.   RL