Three rectors of the Russicum stand out with special significance in the mission for unity: Vendelin Javorka, Philippe de Règis and Paul Mailleux.
Vendelin Javorka,530 became the Russicum’s first rector in 1929. He transferred from the Latin to the Byzantine-Slavonic rite in 1925, a year after Charles Bourgeois SJ,531 who worked with Eastern Slavs in Poland and helped to found the parish at Albertyn in Eastern Poland, where he was arrested by the Gestapo
528
Russicum graduate, Fr Andrew Rogosh, assisted Russian Catholics in New York where he established St Michael’s Chapel in 1936, still operating today.
529 See Simon, ‘How Russians See Us’, p. 349.
530 C Simm, ‘The Life and Times of Vendelin Javorka: A Russian Odyssey, Diakonia, 35 (2002),
5-22.
531 Simon, Pro Russia, pp. 274-275. Charles Bourgeois, 1887-1963, French Jesuit born in Paris,
studied Russian while caring pastorally for Russian émigrés in Paris. He was called to Rome in 1924 and transferred to the Byzantine-Slavonic rite. Repatriated to France in 1946 he left for Brazil where he cared for Russians in San Paola for twelve years before his accidental death. See Charles Bourgeois, A Priest in Russia and the Baltic (Dublin: Cahill & Co, 1955).
and interned for two years before arriving in Moscow. In 1934 Javorka left Rome for Manchuria and China where groups of Russian émigrés had settled, returning to the Russicum again in 1939 as vice-rector. In 1941 he returned to his native Slovakia, aged sixty, but was imprisoned by Soviet authorities as a foreign agent in 1944 and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in concentration camps in the coldest region of Russia. On a starvation diet, he nevertheless survived and was released in 1954. He rejoined his brother’s family in Slovakia and regaining his health, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his priesthood in 1965. He died the following year.
The Catholic understanding of Christian unity as unionism during the pontificates of Pius X, Benedict XV and Pius XI was beginning to emerge from unionism to ecumenism. Whereas Javorka never quite lost his Latin uniate way of thinking, Philippe de Régis, although neither Russian nor Slav, promoted a more Russian atmosphere in the college. As second rector of the College, in 1934, he at first saw the goal of the Russicum was to train Catholic priests of the Byzantine-Slavonic Rite532 for apostolic work concerning Church unity and confession of Petrine primacy in Russia, if circumstances permitted, or at least with Russians in Diaspora.533 The rite was implemented in Russian Catholic parishes at that time being formed around the world.
The work of Philippe de Régis SJ with and for Russians started in the Jesuit novitiate near Lyons where he organised holidays for children of Russian émigrés; later as a priest he helped Jesuits of the Byzantine rite establish the Missio
Orientalis, at Albertyn in 1924. He was called to the Russicum (1934) and remained as rector until the Second World War when he returned to France (1940). In Paris he founded a school for Russian boys, and with the help of
532 For Uniate Churches in Poland see Konrad Sadkowski, ‘The Roman Catholic Clergy, the
Byzantine Slavonic Rite and Polish National Identity: The Case of Grabowiec, 1931-34’, Religion, State and Society, 28 (2000), 175-184. The term Byzantine-Slavonic was contemporary to that era. At the formation of the Russian Catholic exarchate in 1917 by Szeptycki, it had been determined that ‘in accord with the decisions of the Apostolic Roman See, we shall use that rite which exists at the present time in Russia, not allowing any departure from it’, the introduction of any additions from the Latin rite liturgy without the express wish of Rome was forbidden, even if other communities had introduced some Latin forms. This referred to the Ruthenian rite of Greek Catholics which the Russicum was not to follow.
533 Simon, Pro Russia, p. 295: Philippe de Regis letter to Pontificia Commissione, 20 February
teaching sisters, another for Russian girls; he visited Russian prisoners of war to offer spiritual assistance. Russians and Slavs streamed into France, and were placed in camps; the threat of repatriation meant the Gulag or death. After the liberation of Paris he became a commander in the Corps de Repatriement caring for displaced people; he excelled at this and was asked to co-ordinate the camps of the entire Clermont-Ferrand region in central France. He found these detainees had little understanding of religion, but openness and a complete lack of prejudice towards Catholicism.
De Régis was recalled in 1945 to be rector at the Russicum. Many Russians fleeing the Red Army were arriving in Rome, and de Régis was again caught up with refugee work. He assisted Russian émigrés arriving from Europe and China to find a new life in the Americas, and in 1947 de Régis himself set sail for Argentina, taking five Russian Catholic priests in the mistaken belief there would be a large Russian émigré population. On arrival he founded a small parish in Buenos Aires with a boarding school for Russian boys; in 1954 he established another at Sao Paulo in Brazil. He visited a Russian community in Santiago, Chile, and sent them a priest, before travelling on to Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru, where he found a significant number of Russian immigrants from Shanghai. Exhausted, sleeping in a poustinia, de Régis became ill with leukaemia and died suddenly in 1955, aged 58; at his funeral, Orthodox and Catholic priests of the Byzantine rite carried his coffin.
The ecumenical predictions in De Régis’ Le travail futur,534
written in the last year of his life form a prophetic testimony to his intrinsically ecumenical perspective towards Russia. Over time he moved from the concept of being a missionary consecrated by the pope for a special mission, which for Pius XI was the conversion of Russia, to seeing the tiny presence of the Russian Catholic Church, not as a rival but an important, supportive collaborator of Russian Orthodoxy. De Régis’ predictions were realised at the Second Vatican Council and become part of the Church’s official teaching on ecumenism: the Orthodox were seen as ‘sister’ Churches, proselytism was abandoned, grace and salvation
534 See Vincenzo Poggi SJ, Le travail future: d’après Philippe de Regis SJ (1897-1955), OCP 58
(1992), 5-21. English translation: Philippe de Régis, ‘The Future Work’, Diakonia, 2-25 (1992), pp. 199-208.
outside the Roman Catholic Church recognised. In Le travail futur, he foresees a time when Russia is finally ‘thrown open’ and while he passionately believes priests must embrace evangelisation, writes, ‘I deplore or would judge fatal the idea of proselytism in the new Russia – a proselytism which strives only to extend the boundaries of Catholicism or recruit new members for the Catholic Church [...] Only one method can be employed: fraternal and disinterested collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church in the task of education and religious training.’ Concerning dogma, he writes, ‘it is difficult to concede any ground [...] but [...] faced with a different mentality our perspectives change.’535
Paul Mailleux SJ536 became the sixth rector of the Russicum, 1966-77, transforming it into a College openly welcome to Russia and the Orthodox Church, and an Orthodox-Catholic centre of ecumenical dialogue. He established friendly relations with Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Novgorad, who was responsible for the external relations of the patriarchate of Moscow. Nikodim became devoted to Ignatian spirituality and was responsible for sending the first students from the Soviet Union to the Russicum, and for creating a more positive image of the Russicum among the Russian Orthodox.
Nikodim, born in 1929, became a youthful member of the Communist pioneer movement, yet somehow found a Christian vocation; this alienated him from his family when he chose to become a monk at the age of eighteen. He rose to high office in the Orthodox Church remaining a loyal Soviet citizen. His earlier critical attitude toward Roman Catholicism, however, became conciliatory as changes occurred under Pope John XXIII, he even contributed to the translation of the Latin Mass into modern Russian, which he undertook in a spirit of prayer. It was thanks to Nikodim that the Orthodox patriarchate developed a more friendly and open stance towards the Holy See during the 1960s and 70s. Nikodim’s
commitment to Orthodox-Roman Catholic relations drew criticism from some conservative Russian Orthodox, but it also initiated cordial relations and fruitful
535 Cited from de Régis manuscript, in Simon, Pro Russia, pp. 453-454, Simon judged Le travail
future to be prophetic; unfortunately he witnessed aggressive proselytism in the first years after peristoika; see also Poggi, Le travail future; S. Tyszkjewicz, ‘Father Philip de Régis’, Eastern Churches Quarterly, 6 (1955-1956), 47-48.
ecumenical dialogue between the Vatican and the Moscow patriarchate, with the result Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism was born.
Nikodim led the first Russian pilgrimage to Rome in 1969 and returned to the Russicum on several occasions before his death in 1978, when he died in the arms of John Paul I during a private audience in the Vatican. It is interesting to note that Nikodim visited the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Josef Cardinal Slipyj who had endured eighteen years in Siberian Gulags since 1945, and the annihilation of his Church, before his release in 1961 following Pope John XXIII conciliatory actions during the Cuban missile crisis.537
Since Vatican II (1962-1965) the Russicum has become a European ecumenical college, welcoming Greek Catholic students of the Latin rite or Orthodox Christians. However, when the Soviet Union fell and Russia opened to the West there appeared almost no-one who had trained at the Russicum who wished to be involved in the apostolate in Russia.538 Mailleux was one of the first Jesuits to be invited by the Russian Patriarchate to visit Moscow. Jesuit pioneers in ecumenism followed: Spanish Jesuit Miguel Arranz was invited by the patriarchate to lecture at Leningrad Theological Academy, later the Superior General Pedro Arrupe twice visited the Soviet union at the invitation of the Moscow patriarchate, and American Jesuit John Long, Rector at the Russicum till 1995 and a leading ecumenist and expert on Russian Orthodoxy enabled Orthodox students to study at the Russicum.