Msgr. Jerzy Steckiewicz, protagonist of the Catholic revival, has died

The priest died from the coronavirus. Born in Grodno, between Belarus and Poland, he arrived in Russia in 1991, rebuilding the fabric of Catholic communities, after decades of atheism.

Rome (AsiaNews) - The Catholic Church in Russia has lost one of its most important representatives, crushed by Covid: The Belarusian Msgr. Jerzy Steckiewicz, who died in the night between December 12 and 13.

He was dean of the pastoral territory and parish priest of St. Adalbert in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave of East Prussia. Kaliningrad is the ex-Könisberg, city of Immanuel Kant, annexed to the Soviet Union since 1945, at the end of World War II.

The area, inhabited by many citizens of Polish and Lithuanian origin, has a dense network of Catholic communities, in cities and small towns overlooking the Baltic Sea, reopened thanks to Father Jerzy. The Kaliningrad deanery is part of the Archdiocese of the Mother of God in Moscow, whose archbishop, the Italian Msgr. Paolo Pezzi (recently recovered from the coronavirus), first broke the news of the priest's death.

On the official diocesan website cathmos.ru, Msgr. Pezzi recalls that “Father Jerzy initiated the rebirth of the Catholic Church in the Kaliningrad region, where he served for many years, it can be said that he was the ‘Catholic apostle’ of this region. There is not a city, a town or a village that Father Jerzy had not visited. I met him immediately after my episcopal consecration, and in each of my visits to the Kaliningrad area I was always amazed that wherever I went, among the believers there was someone who personally knew Father Jerzy and remembered or talked to me about him".

Monsignor Steckiewicz was 66 years old, he was born in Grodno on the border between Belarus and Poland, the same city of Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the first Catholic bishop in Moscow after communism, of which he was one of the first collaborators together with his brother Father Andrzy. Growing up in Poland, he became a priest in Szczecin in 1981 and moved to Russia 10 years later, taking care of the Kaliningrad region in particular from the very beginning.

The same diocesan site repeats an old interview with Monsignor Steckiewicz, in which he recalls the early days of the religious revival in the former Soviet Union: "Since the perestroika of the Eighties, the Orthodox faithful have been able to receive the assistance of their priests here, while the Catholics looked at them with envy, but they felt the beginning of a new time for everyone. Gorbachev himself had declared that he was baptized, and he saw nothing wrong in this… and so we Catholic missionaries also arrived”.

Monsignor Steckiewicz also led the local Caritas for a long time, and contributed a great deal to the reconstruction of ecclesiastical buildings and diocesan structures on the Baltic and throughout Russia. It was Kondrusiewicz himself who sent him to Russia, and he was part of the first group of Catholic priests, from Poland and from various countries of the world, who – once in Russia -  had to learn how to navigate respecting the traditions and history of a historically Orthodox country after decades of imposed state atheism.

As he himself once said in an interview, "they called us from various countries, sometimes they were just two or three people who thought they were the only Catholics in the city ... then that parish became one of the most beautiful, and it developed in a wonderful way".

Father Jerzy would recall: "the only father of our religious rebirth was the Lord God, we were only small instruments, trying to carry out their service ... not always suitable instruments, but the Lord always managed to use us in the right way ". The Catholic Church in Russia is a minority community, often linked to ethnic origins, but of great ecumenical and cultural significance not only for Russia, but for the whole Catholic world, thanks to humble and holy ministers such as Monsignor Steckiewicz.