01-05-2013 - Traces, n. 5

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MEETING 2013


A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
The countdown has begun: the 2013 Rimini Meeting will start on August 18th and addresses the theme, “The Human Person: A State of Emergency.” One of the exhibits is historical, presenting the life and works of Orthodox martyr saints–relating also the history of an unexpected friendship.

by Elena Mazzola

Fr. Georgij Orechanov, Pro-Rector for International Relations at the Orthodox University of Saint Tikhon in Moscow, has already been to the Rimini Meeting several times. When he starts talking about what he has seen there, the thousands of young people, the richness, he is irrepressible, recounting a series of episodes united by the common theme of wonder. “The first time I felt like I had been catapulted onto another planet. They told me that this year there will only be six exhibits–I always had the impression that there were hundreds!”

A sentence at dinner. One of his many encounters at the Meeting over the years was decisive for him. Fr. Stefano Alberto, Professor at the Catholic University of Milan and one of the responsibles for CL, said, almost in passing, at dinner, “I am convinced that if the Church in the West is still alive, it is because of the sacrifice of the martyrs of the Russian Church of the 20th century.” This judgment seared Orechanov’s heart because the martyrdom of the Russian people  is very recent history and the wounds are still open, too fresh to “pass into history,” but also so diabolically masked  that too often even many Christians in the East do not see them. Fr. Stefano’s words indicated a strangely explicit judgment that provoked a stream of questions: Does the Catholic Church truly look at us this way, and does she understand so deeply the history of our Church? How is it possible for a Catholic priest to say such a thing? Who is Fr. Giussani?
In trying to answer these questions, they deepened their relationship. The Italians spoke of Fr. Giussani’s love for the Orthodox Church, his educative method, and his friendship with Fr. Romano Scalfi, founder of the Russia Cristiana organization, which strove to help keep the faith alive behind the Iron Curtain. The Orthodox shared stories about themselves and a priest, Fr. Vsevolod Shpiller, who arrived in Moscow in the 1950s, and, from the pulpit of the Saint Nicholas in Kuznecy Church in which he was parish priest, started educating people anew to the faith. A fraternity of priests and laypeople formed around him, and gave life to the University of Saint Tikhon. Fr. Georgij observed, “You are children of the faith and witnesses of a priest, Fr. Giussani, who in Italy was able to help thousands of young people leave the shadows of the secularized West, bringing them back to the light of Christ. We were born of the testimony of faith of Fr. Shpiller, who illuminated the road for many of us in the midst of the darkness of Communism. We have much in common. We should get to know each other better and help each other.”
This was the birth of the idea for one of the main exhibits of the upcoming Meeting, which will open August 18th, with the title, “The Human Person: A State of Emergency.” This exhibit is a gift from the friends of Saint Tikhon University, who offer us this witness of their faith.
 Fr. Georgij comments, “This is the first time in the history of the Meeting that the Orthodox Church has come to speak about herself. The exhibit will be called ‘The Light Shines in the Darkness’ because the idea is that the task of the Church in whatever situation she finds herself is always to witness to Christ. In the 20th century in Russia, the Church was threatened with annihilation, and it is fundamental to show that her first concern was not ‘survival’ but being alive, that is, continuing to testify to Christ.”

Everyone to Moscow. In this way, the tragedy of an entire people, of women and men forced to live for 70 years in the deepest darkness of atheism, begins to be revealed before our eyes. The faces of the martyrs we encounter communicate to us unequivocally a living Church that continues to show the history of an unmistakable Face, which powerfully urges us to wake up from the torpor of our life turned somewhat bourgeois. The dimensions of the event are surreal–at least 27 million deaths–and in going through the facts, our reason tends to refuse to believe that it is all true. Aleksandr Filonenko, a Ukrainian Orthodox theologian, got involved from the beginning, and worked alongside the historians from Saint Tikhon. He says, “I am impressed by another fact as well, a purely mathematical one: in the period from the Baptism of Rus to the revolution, just over 300 saints were canonized, while in the year 2000 alone, there were 1,600 saints canonized. In the exhibit, we will recount the story and destiny of 13 of them, but we will also try to communicate the dimension of what happened, of the thousands of stories similar to theirs, and to show the faces of all those saints.” Among the historians working on the exhibit are Fr. Aleksandr Mazyrin, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century history of the Russian Church, and Lidija Golovkva. The exhibit is being prepared with step-by-step collaboration among Saint Tikhon University students and professors, Italian students guided by Fr. Francesco Braschi, and Ukrainians led by Filonenko.
Back in September, we decided to organize the work on three fronts. The students worked in groups in their respective countries, studying Russian history, exploring the meaning of martyrdom for Christians, and beginning to learn about the stories of the Russian martyrs. The adults worked on the itinerary of the exhibit and at the same time supervised the efforts of the students. We worked at a distance from each other, but we realized from the beginning that in order to walk this road together it was necessary to meet, to get to know each other, to compare ideas, and so in the beginning of March we all met at Saint Tikhon University in Moscow. There were about 70 Russian, Italian, and Ukrainian students, as well as professors, the graphic artist, the curators, and the panel of scholars. We had a busy schedule. There was a presentation on the itinerary of the exhibit, a talk about the Meeting–since many Russian students know nothing about the event–by Alessandra Vitez, who is responsible for the Rimini Meeting exhibits, and student presentations about what they have prepared on the martyrs. There were questions and discussions, all in a climate of great freedom. The level of the discussions clearly indicated that we were at the university, but the only topic was Christ! The second day we listened to a lesson by Fr. Mazyrin, comparing martyrdom in the 20th century with that in the first centuries. They were very different phenomena, but the cause, hatred of Christ, and the goal, annihilating His presence in the world, were identical. Fr. Mazyrin told us, for example, that the Russian Christians were not explicitly asked to renounce their faith, because they were all condemned for clearly political reasons, but they were forced through unimaginable tortures to betray their brethren. “The refusal to give names was considered a political gesture, and for this they could be condemned to death. In reality their silence was an act of profession of faith: betraying the other meant renouncing Christ.”

Slaughter. The last day of the seminar was dedicated to visiting the places of the mass executions. Lidija Golovkova spared us nothing. She spoke of the meaningless atrocity, a human bloodbath in which a State devoured millions of its children, using vehicles disguised as bread trucks to seize people at night and take them to unknown places, where they were gunned down and buried. Thousands of people disappeared into thin air. How was it possible? What is man? Does all this have something to do with us, too, with a “tragic possibility of the human soul,” that is also ours?
During the gathering, we were greeted by the Rector of the university, Fr. Vladimir Vorob’ev, the spiritual son of Fr. Shpiller and his successor in guiding Saint Nicholas parish. Speaking with him about many of the protagonists of the exhibit meant speaking with someone who knew and loved them. He told us, “If we are here working together, it is because we have been called together by the prayer of our martyrs. We are grateful to be able to share with you our love for these holy witnesses of the faith. We all know Tertullian’s saying, ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.’ We can be helped by the blood of our martyrs because their sacrifice teaches us faith and their martyrdom shines in the darkness in which we live, showing us a road for our daily life that is possible. My wish for us all is that our communion may grow.”
Back home, the greatest evidence was that “we didn’t expect it.” We could say how beautiful the work was, how interesting the topic, how hospitable the Orthodox were, but we could not explain how that “strange correspondence” happened. Who generated it? What happened to us?
Well, this is the question we will bring to the Meeting.