Russicum: Pioneers and Witnesses of the Struggle for Christian Unity in Eastern Europe (review)

The Catholic Church's relationship with Russia and its Orthodox Church has long been difficult. To be sure, the Russian Empire included a significant number of Catholics, but almost all of them were ethnic Poles, Germans, or Lithuanians. During the reign of the autocratic Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855), Orthodoxy was defined as the privileged religion of the country, and efforts to convert Orthodox to other faiths became punishable by imprisonment or Siberian exile. It was only in 1905, with Nicholas II's Decree of Toleration, that most of these restrictions were lifted and Orthodox could once again legally become Catholic. Catholics were now free to carry out mission activity in the country during a brief period that would end with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Officials in the Vatican were watching developments in Russia carefully. As an enormous country with strong Christian roots and a rich theological and spiritual heritage, there was a strong desire to find ways to reconcile the huge Russian church with the even larger Catholic one. Many came to believe that missionaries working among the Russian Orthodox could be successful only if they fully adapted themselves to Russian ways of thinking and became experts not only in Russian history and culture, but also in the Russian liturgical tradition, celebrating the liturgy in a way identical to the complex Orthodox prototype.

During the brief years of religious tolerance in Russia, these efforts led to the creation of a very small community of Russian Catholics of the Byzantine rite centered in St. Petersburg. It was composed mostly of a small band of westernizing intellectuals, and completely vanished with the onset of communist persecutions. But in the early years after the revolution, many Vatican officials were convinced that communism would be a horrific but short interlude in Russian history. Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) in particular wanted to prepare a well-trained group of priests who would be ready to enter the country as soon as the borders re-opened. Central to this project was the creation of a college in Rome where their training would take place. The Pope's desires were fulfilled in 1929 when the Russian Pontifical College of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus—known as the "Russicum"—was opened.

Constantin Simon, a Jesuit professor of church history at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, has provided a very useful two-volume history of these events. In the first tome, he furnishes historical sketches of three major personalities in the movement. The first, Leonid Feodorov (1879-1935), was an Orthodox convert who served as head of the small Byzantine-rite Catholic community in Russia, later condemned to a prison camp and death in internal exile. The second is Vendelín Javorka, S.J. (1882-1966), who, after guiding the Russicum for five years as its first rector, went in 1934 to work among Russians in Manchuria, and then in 1941 to the frontier province of Bukovina where he was arrested by the invading Soviet forces in 1944. A few months later he was sentenced to ten dreadful years in Soviet prisons (one of the four charges against him was "trying to reunite the Russian Orthodox Church to the Roman Catholic Church"), after which he was released to spend his remaining years in obscurity in his native Slovakia. And finally, there is the Russicum graduate Theodore Romzˇa (1911-1947), the Greek Catholic bishop of Mukacˇevo, who was poisoned by the communists. Both Romzˇa and Feodorov were beatified by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Ukraine in 2001.

In the second volume, Simon traces the history of the foundation of the Russicum and the first ten years of its existence. The fascinating story is told...