by Vladimir Rozanskij

This year for Muscovite Catholics the Easter Way of the Cross without being able to leave the area around the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Mgr Paolo Pezzi: "Our path is embedded in communion with Christ". The 'foreign' roots of the capital's Catholic community. "Christ did not choose the cross, it was given to him".

Moscow (AsiaNews) - This year Catholics in the capital were able to gather for the Stations of the Cross in the open air on April 1st, but without obtaining permission to leave the area around the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The local Polish community built the Gothic church just before the revolution, only to have it immediately closed, then rebuilt and re-consecrated after the end of the communist regime in the 1990s.

The archbishop of the Mother of God in Moscow, Monsignor Paolo Pezzi, opened the procession by reminding us that 'our journey is embedded in communion with Christ, it is the entrance of Christ and His salvation into our lives, which is fulfilled on the cross'.

Never as much as this year, on the centenary of the Petrograd trial that condemned Russian Catholic martyrs to death, is the way of the cross truly an expression of shared sorrow, for the dramatic circumstance of the ongoing war against Ukraine, which leaves everyone with the desire for redemption and reconciliation.

Thus the archbishop recalls that 'the way of the cross is our way, to grow in friendship with Christ. He brings us even closer to Him in an even more intense way: if we have encountered Christ, if we live from the memory of Him, then in front of His bloody face there can be no other way of relating between men, other than that of friendship and fraternity'.

It is precisely the history of Catholicism in Russia that recalls the many tragedies of history in the confrontation between the Eastern Slavs on both sides of the rivers, and the need to rediscover the sense of coexistence and exchange of gifts between peoples and Churches.

The Catholic community in Moscow, and in the whole of Russia, constitutes a minority historically formed precisely by citizens with ancient Polish and Ukrainian roots, but also Lithuanian, German and from many 'friendly' countries from Soviet times: Africans and South Americans, but also Armenian Catholics who fled the civil wars in the Caucasus, and many Russians who have recognised in the traditions of Catholicism a part of the Russian tradition itself, which has always been open to the encounter between East and West.

The four dioceses of Moscow, Saratov on the Volga, Novosibirsk in the centre of Siberia and Irkutsk near Lake Bajkal bear witness to these stories, to the dispersion and deportations, but also to the rebirth of the faith in a country where it had long been persecuted.

On 19 March, in Murmansk, above the Arctic Circle, the ethnic Russian auxiliary bishop of St Petersburg, Mgr Nikolai Dubinin, had the joy of consecrating as deacon another Russian Catholic, Claret-born Denis Malov, who will become a priest to continue his congregation's great mission of evangelisation and charity in Russia.

Now Moscow's Catholics follow their pastor around the sides of the cathedral's large courtyard, which the Soviets had transformed into a four-storey building of workshops and offices, and under the vault was the auditorium for lectures on 'scientific atheism', which characterised all the institutions of the communist regime.

In the early nineties, the Polish community in Moscow celebrated Holy Mass with Salesian priests in front of the locked door, even in the winter cold that made even the consecrated wine in the chalice freeze, until the whole building, renovated thanks to the charity of confreres from all over the world, was returned.

Today, there are two official Catholic churches in the capital: the Immaculate Conception and the historic French church of St. Louis, the only one that remained open during the years of Communism, together with that of Our Lady of Lourdes in Leningrad, also historically linked to the presence of French diplomats.

However, there are other registered parishes, which meet in turn in the two churches or in private premises, and for the past two years have also been using the premises restored around the historical building of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, the church of Moscow Catholics since the 19th century.

After a long and troubled legal process, the Catholics have obtained at least part of the complex, where there were the educational and charitable institutions of the lively Moscow community, and await the final restitution of the entire 'Catholic quarter' in the centre of the city from the Supreme Court.

During the Stations of the Cross, meditations were read at the various stations by authors such as Charles Peguy, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and the saintly Pope John Paul II, who would have loved to consecrate the rebuilt cathedral in person, later sending his Secretary of State, Card. Angelo Sodano.

Arriving at the concluding altar of the service, Archbishop Pezzi recalled that 'the Church has spread throughout the world thanks to the preaching of the apostles and doctors, priests and lay people, and each of us, thanks to Baptism, has become a foundation stone of the spiritual edifice in which Christ the Lord unites us in the one Body'.

The archbishop emphasised that "Christ did not choose the cross, it was given to him, and it is not up to us to choose what our cross should be, we must carry it, even when it seems too heavy".

 

 

• russia
• moscow
• church
• catholic
• way of the cross
• easter
• monsignor paolo pezzi