About 450 people from all over the country came together at Holy Apostles Church in Colorado Springs Colorado June 8 - 10 to hear how U.S. Catholics can assist the resurrecting church in the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.) - the bulk of the former Soviet Union.
Principle speakers were Cardinal Kasimierz Swiatek from Pinsk, Belarus; Bishop Jan Pavel Lenga, M.I.C., of Karaganda, Kazakhstan; and both Catholic bishops of Russia: Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Moscow and Bishop Joseph Werth, S.J., of Novosibirsk - as well as two American archbishops: Francis Hurley of Anchorage and Theodore McCarrick of Newark, chairman of the U.S. bishops' committee to aid the Church in eastern and central Europe.
Besides giving much factual information on the challenged state of the Church in the C.I.S., these bishops stressed over and over the utter urgency of taking advantage of extraordinary opportunities the Lord has opened up. "We must put into the hands of the Church in every one of these countries," said Archbishop McCarrick, "the prayerful support and the material support that the Church needs to take advantage of this extraordinary moment of grace, a moment...watered by the blood of the martyrs, made fertile by the tears of many survivors, and made precious by the Blood of Christ."
Professor Joanne Karpinski of Regis University, former professor at Moscow University, opened the conference with an historical overview of the presence of the Catholic Church in Russia.
Fr. Alex Kahn, S.J., Bishop Werth's vicar general was there too, and Msgr. George Sarauskas of the U.S. bishops' office to assist the church in central and eastern Europe; Msgr. Timothy Moran, associate executive director of the U.S. Catholic Conference; Msgr. Zdzislaw Peszkowski, a former Polish military officer, who had barely missed being executed in the Katyn Forest Massacre in 1940; and José Correa, managing director of the Catholic Radio and TV Network in Brusells, Belgium.
Numerous readers of this letter were there also, as well as several American missionaries active in the C.I.S.: Father Austin Mohrbacher of Magadan, Sister Lucy Ann Wasinger, C.S.A., of Chelyabinsk, Father Ivan Rohloff, O.F.M.Conv., of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Father Blase Karas, O.F.M., of Chicago, who returned to Novosibirsk shortly after the conference, after a year's absence. Five of Father Mohrbacher's parishoners, studying various aspects of church ministry in this country, attended too and some provided music interludes in Russian.
Among immediate results of the conference, several crates of medicines, religious goods, etc., have already been shipped to various parts of the C.I.S. and a wide variety of other initiatives are being planned including on-site missionary work, twinning of parishes, etc. This newsletter plans to return to some of them, once the plans and resolutions becomes reality.
An icon of the Pieta, written (i.e. painted) by Father William
McNichols, S.J., of Albuquerque, and entitled Mother of God of
Magadan was blessed at the conference, and prints were sold for
the benefit of the Church in Russia. These and videos and audio
casettes of the conference are available from Queen of Apostles
Mission Association at Denver's St. Thomas More Church
(8035 So. Quebec Street, Englewood Colorado 80112- Telephone (303) 770-3240 -
fax: 303-770-0415 - e-mail: 102522.3040@compuserve.com)
which sponsored the conference in association with Holy Apostles
Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
[Photo unavailable]
Colorado Springs Conferees personally connected with the Apostolic
Administration of Novosibirsk (l.-r.):
Sr. Donna Innes, C.S.A., general councilor and Siberian
mission liaison; Sr. Lucy Ann Wasinger, C.S.A., U.S.
missionary in Chelyabinsk; Maria Grizun, Magadan
parishioner studying in Denver; Bishop Joseph Werth, S.J.,
apostolic administrator of Novosibirsk; Father Al Bitz, Bishop
Werth's North Dakota contact; Larisa Ksaeva and
Tatiana Kononova, Magadan parishioners,
Father Blase Karas, O.F.M., U.S. missionary in Novosibirsk;
Father Austin Mohrbacher, U.S. missionary in Magadan; and
Father Blaine Burkey, O.F.M.Cap., the Bishop's Kansas contact.
Not pictured: Archbishop Francis Hurley of Anchorage, who
personally began and continues to support the parish in Magadan;
Father Alex Kahn, S.J., vicar general in Novosibirsk;
Peter Savchenko and Olga Medvedeva,
Magadan parishioners. (Photos courtesy of J.W. Richards, Colorado Springs.)
(Part one of the address given at Colorado Springs CO on June 10, 1995, at the First International Conference to Aid the Church in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The remainder of the talk, which describes the current condition of the Church in Siberia, will appear in the next issue).
Praised be Jesus Christ! Dear brothers and sisters!
I am most grateful for the opportunity to speak about the Church in Siberia. Hearty thanks to those who conceived and made this conference a reality.
About four or five years ago, I received a letter from American Catholics saying they had seen in a Catholic newsletter a report of our Catholic parish along the Volga and that this was the first news they had received of us. Ever since the Communist revolution in 1917, they had not heard from us and didn't know that anyone had survived the persecutions.
This letter was the small beginning of our contact with the Church in America, which has progressed so well that it is now possible to have an international conference.
During these days we want to thank God and praise Him and pray for the wonderful works He has accomplished in recent years in the former Soviet Union.
It is known from history that the first Catholics came to Siberia in the 16th century during the time of Czar Ivan the Terrible. They were knights of the Teutonic order taken captive during the Teutonic War.
Catholics did not settle in Siberia in large numbers until much later. At the end of the 18th century, after the division of Poland, thousands of Poles and Lithuanians were banished to Siberia every time a rebellion against the Russian occupation was put down. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, many people voluntarily immigrated to the Asiatic part of Russia. These were again from Poland and Lithuania, but also Letts from the Balkans. There were also Russian Germans from the Ukraine and Volga areas. They were peasant families who moved in search of free land.
Near Irkutsk, the village of Vershina still exists, which was founded by Poles in the year 1910. Residents of the village, almost all of whom are Polish and Roman Catholic Christians, rebuilt and rededicated in 1992 the small church that had been built in 1912 and destroyed during the Soviet era.
Parishes had been formed and churches erected in every large city in Siberia and in many country places by the time of the Communist revolution in 1917. Polish churches called Houses of God have survived in many cities, for example in Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Tobol'sk, and others. In the city of Vengerovo near Novosibirsk stands a building which was once the Catholic Church of the Lithuanian parish there. In the rural Altai region there are a number of churches that belonged to the Russian German Catholics.
This quite well built infrastructure of the Catholic Church was struck and destroyed within a short time after 1917. Within 30 years, none of the Catholic priests were free and none of the churches open.
However the living church, which consists of living stones, remained standing despite the storms of those times. Actually the church in Siberia grew numerically during those years. Millions of deported people came to Siberia, and the larger part of them were Catholic. They were especially Russian Germans, but also Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Letts, Belarussians, etc.
One ought to recall also the history of the diocese of Tyraspol, too, whose bishop was located in Saratov. However I leave that to the Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, who is located in Moscow. Geographically this diocese lay in the European part of Russia, not in Siberia. However, almost all of the Catholics of this diocese were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan and thus have become faithful in the Apostolic Administration of Novosibirsk [and that of Karanganda].
In all of Siberia there was not a single Catholic priest of the Latin rite till 1982; and only at Prokop'yevsk in the Kusbass region had a Greek-Catholic priest, Fr. Vasily Rudka, been working in the deep underground since 1960.
When on April 13, 1991, the Holy Father reestablished ecclesiastical jurisdictions in the former Soviet Union, I found three priests and 13 religious sisters in all of Siberia.
(To be continued in Issue 16.)
Bishop Werth's helpers in Novosibirsk issued in January the first issues of a new 12-page monthly diocesan news magazine caled Sibirskaya Katolischeskaya Gazeta, the Siberian Catholic Gazette. It is entirely in Russian and carries, besides an editorial and a letter from the bishop, an article on one of the saints, a talk by the Pope from the Osservatore Romano, Catholic news from various parts of Russia, and personal recollections of the Church in days of long ago. The January issue carried the recollections of Stanislaus Korotkovsky of the work of Fr. Hrabya Rostvorovsky, S.J., from Warsaw, in pre-revolutionary Tobol'sk and Krysnetsk.
Jesuit Fathers Alexander Kahn and Joseph Messmer, Bishop Werth's vicar general and secretary respectively, took part in a seminar for church workers in Eastern Europe at the Catholic University of Eichstadt, Germany, Feb. 3 - 20. In April Father Messmer was stricken by some as-yet-unidentified ailment.
The Mar. 22 Osservatore Romano announced that the Pope appointed Father Kahn Mar. 14 to the Pontifical Council "CorUnum," Rome's office coordinating its worldwide efforts at caring for the poor and promoting the progress of peoples.
The very same day that the Sisters of St. Agnes arrived back in Chelyabinsk (Mar. 24), the newcomer among them, Sister Deborah Golias, was asked to teach a class the next day at Ariadna College. This in turn led to an invitation to teach a course at the college in the fall term as well as to opportunities for educational work with the public schools. Sister Lucy Ann Wasinger, who remained in the States for eye surgery left June 20 to return to Chelyabinsk.
Bishop Werth laid the cornerstone for the new church being built in Chelyabinsk on May 9. He also visited the parish's outlying missions at Shikhminka, Barshuche and Korkino.
The HTML version of this issue is posted at
http://feefhs.org/lfs/lfs-15.html
| [ a letter from SIBERIA Home Page ] | [ Index ] | [ Previous Issue ] | [ Next Issue ] |