SIEMPRE LISTA

It is remarkable that the genesis of the Eastern Catholic Church in Russia during the nineteenth century developed at a time when Russian imperial and national self-identity, and therefore politics, was deeply influenced by the prevailing anti- Catholic stance of the Russian Orthodox Church. The dominant Russian ideology of Slavophilism,387 active in Russia from 1830, stated that all Slavs must profess

384 _{Pospielovsky, p. 33.}

385 _{Pospielovsky, p. 36.}

386_{Michael Plekon, ‘Relativism and Fundamentalism: An Eastern Church Perspective from the}

‘Paris School and Living Tradiion’, Between Relativism and Fundamentalism: Religious

Resources for a Middle Position, ed Peter L Berger (Grand Rapids MI: W B Eerdmans, 2009), pp 180-209.

387 _{Slavophilism: movement in Russia from 1830s idealising the supremacy of Slavic culture,}

especially over western European influences. The role of the Orthodox Church judged more important than the state and that all Slavs must profess Orthodoxy. Alexander III (1881-1894), a committed Slavophile, disliked democratic freedom and freedom of speech, wanted to close Russia against Western Europe.

Orthodoxy. This shaped all foreign and domestic policy and legislation, and remained at the heart of Russian identity388 during the nineteenth century and beyond. A small minority of Russians converted to Latin-rite Catholicism during the nineteenth century, although this meant exile, loss of all Russian inheritance and life in Diaspora in the West. The discovery of Roman Catholicism was usually only possible for wealthy and aristocratic Russians travelling in Western Europe.389 Constantin Simon in his great work, Pro Russia,390 records the history and personalities of many Russians who were drawn to the Russian Catholic movement.

Prince Ivan Gagarin, became a Catholic in 1842; he entered the Society of Jesus and formed a team of Russian Jesuits living in Paris.391 Feodor Dostoevsky, a fervent nationalist, regarded Prince Ivan’s conversion to Catholicism and entry into the Society of Jesus as treachery! In Dostoevsky’s view Catholicism was linked with ‘socialism, atheism and world revolution’.392

In 1887 Princess Elizaveta Volkonskaya (1838-1897) converted to Catholicism in Rome; like others of her generation she chose to become a Catholic of the Latin rite; but later four of her children became Russian Catholics of the Byzantine-Slavonic rite. Her son Sergej, who was closely connected to Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archbishop Andrej Szeptycki, was ordained a Russian Catholic priest in Rome in 1930, served at the Russicum and taught in the Pontifical Oriental Institute. His life provides a link that connects Russians who became Catholics of the Latin tradition and those of the Eastern Catholic tradition, and with the Russicum College in Rome itself.393

388 _{Constantin Simon, Pro Russia, p. 147.}

389 _{Simon, Pro Russia, p. 115. Cyrille Korolevskij, Kniga Bytija Moego (Le Livre de ma Vie),}

Chapitre XVIII ‘La Première Église Russe Catholique à Rome, 1909-1911, II (1908-1919), ed. by Giuseppe M Croce, Collectanea Archivi Vaticani 45 (Rome, Vatican City, 2007), p. 446, recalls the presence of about 10 Russian Catholics in Rome when he and another Russian Catholic priest, Serge Verighin, renovated a derelict chapel for use as a Russian rite Catholic Chapel in 1910. Simon, Pro Russia, p. 111: Ivan Gagarin compiled a list (incomplete) of 29 converts from Russian aristocracy to Catholicism during the first half of the nineteenth century. Paris was a central point of Catholic life for these émigrés. Gagarin became the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica.

390 _{Simon, Pro Russia, Chapters II, ‘The Russian Catholic Movement’, and III, ‘Russian Catholics}

in the West’, pp. 60-294.

391 _{Simon, Pro Russia, p. 112. For an Orthodox view concerning positive outcomes for relations}

between Byzantine rite Eastern Catholics and the Orthodox see Nicolas Lossky, ‘Diaspora Orthodoxe et Églises Orientales Catholique’, Irènikon, LXV (1992), pp. 352-362.

392 _{Constantin Simon, ‘How Russians See Us: Jesuit-Russian Relations Then and Now’, Religion,}

State & Society, 23 (1995), p. 345.

393 _{For history of Princess Elizaveta and family, see Simon, Pro Russia, pp. 121-126; Aleksandr,}

These Russians were encouraged by the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, who was judged by the Jesuit scholar Michel d’Herbigny to be a

‘Russian Newman’. Soloviev influenced a small minority of Russians towards the end of the nineteenth century to be optimistic that the Catholic West and Orthodox Russia would be united. The presence in Rome and Paris of a small number of Russians converted to Latin Catholicism during the nineteenth century, and the subsequent change of legislation in Russia in 1905,394 that guaranteed every citizen freedom of conscience and religion, opened a space for a Russian Eastern Catholic movement to emerge within Russia. 1905 is therefore a turning point in which the possibility arose for a Russian to become a Catholic and remain

culturally united with Russia. A minority of Russians, who desired unity between Catholicism and Orthodoxy chose to express loyalty to Rome while celebrating the liturgy in the tradition of the Orthodox Church, by using a Byzantine liturgical rite,395 sometimes referred to as the synodal rite, which was thought by the Holy See at that time to create a non-nationalistic liturgy.396 Robert F Taft SJ defines ‘Rite’ as Catholicism as it developed according to the culture and spirit of a particular community.397 The Eastern Catholic movement is one aspect of the ferment that arose among Russian thinkers concerning Christian thought and ecclesiology and is therefore an indigenous part of that ferment to which many dedicated Jesuits responded and committed their lives. A Russian lay Dominican foundation was established in Moscow in 1911, and the formation of an Eastern Catholic exarchate398 in Russia in 1917, when Archbishop Szeptycki399 named Fr Leonid Federov as ‘Exarch by the Greek Catholic Church in Russia’. The

Oriental Institute, published a volume used in Catholic apologetics, Katolicestvo i Svjascennoe Predanie Vostoka (Catholicism and the Sacred Tradition of the East), ed. Église Catholique Russe (Paris, 1933).

394 _{Nicholas II, following the 1905 Russian Revolution, issued the October manifesto which}

promised civil liberties.

395 _{Robert Taft, Eastern-Rite Catholicism: Its Heritage and Vocation (Mahwah NJ, Paulist Press,}

1963).

396_{Konrad Sadkowski, ‘The Roman Catholic Clergy, The Byzantine Slavonic Rite and Polish}

National identity: The Case of Grabowiec 1931-34’, Religion, State & Society, 28 (2000), 175- 184; the Byzantine-Slavonic Rite ‘represented an ambitious attempt by the Church to overcome modern national conflict based on East-West religious divide’, p. 180.

397_{Taft, Eastern Rite Catholicism.}

398 _{Exarch: normally Head of an autocephalus Orthodox Church, a bishop ranking between}

patriarch and metropolitan, see Simon, Pro Russia: a ‘nominal head of the small group with jurisdictional powers of a bishop’, p. 175.

399 _{Andrej Szeptycki became Metropolitan of the Greek-Catholic Church in Ukraine from 1901-}

1944, the year of his death. He was descended from an aristocratic Ruthenian family which became Roman Catholic in the nineteenth century.

exarchate however was only destined to survive five years; what had seemed a promising beginning was destroyed.400

The pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939) coincided with the early years of Communism, the rise of Stalin and terrible religious persecution in the Soviet Union. Pius XI’s deeply felt concern for the Christian East, especially Russia, was rooted in his experiences as apostolic visitor and nuncio for Poland, the Baltic States and Russia. The failure of collective farms and other ideological economic measures in Russia led to widespread famine. Pius responded by providing food for 160,000 people daily by 1924. Nevertheless the Soviet press and the Russian Orthodox Church reacted strongly when Pius condemned religious persecution in 1923. The acting patriarch, under pressure from Soviet authorities, denied

religious persecution in Russia at a press conference of foreign journalists.

Documents recently released from the Vatican archives in 2011 confirm continued persecution; they reveal that Stalin himself orchestrated the Holodomor which brought death by starvation to nearly seven million people in the great famine of 1932-33.401

Lenin died in 1924 leaving political chaos. In 1925 Pius XI founded Pro-Russia, the Apostolic Commission responsible for affairs inside and outside Russia for Latin and Byzantine-Slavonic rites.402 The French Jesuit Michel d’Herbigny, chosen by the pope to be president of the commission, was optimistic about Catholic and Jesuit work inside Russia. However, he underestimated the rejection felt by the Russian Church and state against Catholicism, ‘uniatism’403 and any Catholic presence within Russian territories.

400 _{On Blessed Leonid Federov, see Constantin Simon, Pro Russia, pp. 166-174. Cyril Vasil,}

‘Chiese orientali in diaspora nell’Europa orientale. Cattolici russi di rito bizantino’ Nuove terre e nuove chiese. Le communità di fedeli orientali in diaspora (Venice: 2008), pp. 147-160.

401 _{See North Dakota State University Libraries at <library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history> [Accessed}

26.7.12] and Tony Branaghan CSsR, Mission in Siberia, CORI May 2014.

402_{Simon, Pro Russia, p. 289.}

403 _{Uniatism: a consequence of the Roman Catholic Church’s ecclesial self-understanding at that}

time, believing catholic unity was achievable, it encouraged, in the spirit of the times, the return of ‘dissidents to the See of Peter’, Simon, Pro Russia, p. 55. See Etienne Fouilloux, ‘Eastern Catholic Churches and Uniatism’, Concilium, 268 (1996), 110-117 and Aidan Nichols, ‘Ekaterina

Sienskaya Abrikosova (1892-1936); A Dominican Uniate Foundress in the Old Russia’, New Blackfriars, 848 (1991), 164-172.

In 1925 d’Herbigny drew up an ambitious plan for the Society of Jesus in which he suggested there should be Jesuit action within Russia and around the Soviet borders, as well as action in the Russian apostolate in the West and outside Europe in the Americas and China.404 He reasoned that work in the borderland areas of the Soviet Union with Slav peoples would prepare Jesuits for future missionary work inside Russia, and chose Albertyn (Poland) and Vyburg in Finland near St Petersburg, Estonia, Latvia and Bulgaria. Rome would remain the centre of the Jesuit Russian apostolate as well as the centre of the Jesuit Order.405

In 1926 two young Jesuits aged 28 and 32, Austrian Joseph Schweigl and Frenchman Joseph Ledit, were sent to Odessa and into the Soviet milieu of Communism and atheism. Their mission was to found a Catholic seminary in Odessa, Moscow or Leningrad, as all Catholic seminaries had been closed by the state in 1918. They discovered an underground Roman Catholic Seminary operating in Leningrad, where five students lived while working in a Soviet art school. The two Jesuit pioneers requested the authorities for permission to set up a seminary in Leningrad. Within days they were given 24 hours to leave. The Soviet Union was not going to tolerate any Catholic intrusion.

A new urgency was felt in Rome and two pontifical institutes for the training of men for the Russian apostolate were devised: The Russicum in Rome and the Catholic Seminary at Dubno, a town soon to become part of Soviet Ukraine, to train missionaries in the Eastern rite. The Dubno seminary was entrusted to Jesuit management in 1931 and seen as a sister institute to the Russicum. Eleven Jesuits worked at Dubno as professors and two as rectors, most of whom were frequent visitors to the Russicum giving lectures and retreats. Subsequently Dubno was closed during the Second World War and Soviet occupation of the area.406