Spreading culture

A Network of Books and an Ecumenical Center
Since 1993, The Library Of The Spirit carries on Fr Scalfi’s work of publishing texts that are indispensable for a Christian mentality and sending them even to the furthest parts of the country

by Jean-François Thiry

The Cultural Center, The Library of the Spirit, was born in 1993 in Moscow, in a cultural and religious context very different from that of today. Books of a religious nature were still rare, much sought after, in an atmosphere that would later be known as “the religious boom.” The few thousand Bibles printed in 1988 to commemorate the millennium of the Baptism of the ’Rus were certainly not enough to satisfy the thirst of the generations emerging from the spiritual vacuum imposed by state dictatorship. In this context, the newly appointed Catholic bishops asked Fr Scalfi’s Russia Cristiana to found a center for the printing and distribution of religious texts, so as to help these new generations, to direct them in their research, and to support the reconstruction of Catholic parish structures in the new dioceses. “Found” is not the right word. It was rather a matter of carrying on in Moscow the work that Fr Scalfi had been doing for thirty years in Italy, at Russia Cristiana, printing and sending to Russia texts indispensable for sustaining a Christian mentality under the Soviet regime.
The new prospects that were opening involved a whole range of challenges: setting up a stable structure in the “Wild West” situation of the Yeltsin government; choosing collaborators who shared the same ideal and methods. In these ten years, more than eighty titles have been published, including In Search of the Human Face, The Religious Sense, The Announcement to Mary, Miguel Manara, The Choruses from ‘The Rock,’ Lortz’s History of the Church, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the series on Catholic Theology Amateca.

It’s a real pleasure
to distribute some books
The choice of the books to distribute was a crucial step in our cultural proposal. For as the social, cultural and economic situation in Russia began to stabilize, the Center found it had to look for editions by other publishers to include in the catalogue of the books to distribute. It was marvelous to find that authors like Péguy, Dobraczinski, Moulin, Eliade and Dawson were being published, and it was a real pleasure to distribute them. To this end, we have organized a mail-order service that presents the best of Catholic and Orthodox publications, aimed most of all at reaching outlying regions of Russia, totally neglected by normal systems of distribution.
At first, an important sector of our service was charitable. We would make free donations of books to State and parish libraries, so as to support the pastoral work of the priests working in prisons and in orphanages. Then we realized the importance of entering the book market and circulating books through diocesan and parochial channels. The sale of books had a missionary value, not just because we needed the money to go ahead, but it was also a way of reaching a much larger public, and of operating in a more professional and systematic way in the civil society.
So a new adventure began, decentralizing our office in Moscow and finding partners in other cities of Russia and the ex-Soviet Union. New centers linked with us opened at Novosibirsk, St Petersburg and Minsk. We gave them a starting capital of books to set off, and offered them a stable collaboration to help them begin their small enterprise: creating jobs and forming a Christian mentality in society.

Interest in Catholic Tradition
Russia is a land of Orthodox tradition where the Catholic Church, though present for many centuries, has never been relevant numerically, but has always been made up of foreigners present for various motives in its territories (Poles and Lithuanians subjected with their countries in the Russian Empire, Germans invited by Catherine the Great to exploit the fertile lands of the Volga region, French, English and Italians as architects and men of culture, and so on), and a small minority of Russian intellectuals and nobility. Yet Russia has always manifested a strong interest in the wealth of Catholic tradition, and more and more amongst the Orthodox the awareness that we have ourselves is growing, that is to say, the need to acknowledge an already existing unity to which we need to be converted together, each one deepening his own tradition through the companionship of the other. So we felt from the start that our task was to make known the Catholic tradition and to learn sympathetically from the Orthodox tradition.
In its ten years of activity, the Center has realized so many initiatives, on its own or in collaboration with other groups. We could quote the photographic exhibition, “From the Land to the Peoples,” which the Library of the Spirit brought from the Rimini Meeting and organized in more than thirty cities of Russia and Belarus; the now-traditional Book Bazaar, organized every year in one of Moscow’s two Catholic churches (just to give an idea, we sell around three thousand books in one day), in which we have involved various Christian publishing houses, who present their books and sell at bargain prices; an ambitious theological project in collaboration with official organs like the Russian Orthodox Encyclopedia and the Theological Commission of the Moscow Patriarchate for the publication of a series of works of 20th-century Christian theology.

A new space
in the Moscow Center
The most demanding project we have in hand, and certainly the prime challenge for our enterprise, is the forthcoming opening of a new cultural space composed of a bookstore and a room for meetings, exhibitions, cine-forum and the like, in central Moscow, along with a bar/cafe where people can meet informally. We are forced to measure up, without a safety net, with the rules of the market, with the flood of more or less cultural proposals already offered in Moscow. Our bet is that it is possible to make it if we are true and sincere in our missionary desire, which is identical to the adventure of our company. Ten years of experience bear us witness of this.