CL

The Great Mother Russia A Passion for Unity
Eighty years old on October 12th, he spent his life for Russia. In his encounter with Fr Giussani in the 1950s and his enthusiasm for the Orthodox tradition and the building of a bridge between Catholics and Orthodox, we see the fulfillment of a dream of youth for two priest friends

by Giovanna Parravicini

It all began in the 1940s in Trent, where some priests from the Collegium Russicum in Rome had come to the seminary to celebrate a liturgy in Byzantine-Slavic rite. Like Prince Vladimir of Kiev a thousand years earlier, the seminarian Romano Scalfi, too, was struck by the beauty of the Eastern liturgy that had made the Russian prince’s messengers say, “We no longer knew if we were in heaven or on earth. We can only say this, that there, God truly dwells with men.”
Thus began an adventure that has taken concrete form over the years in various instruments: from the publication of books and the magazine Russia Cristiana (Christian Russia, later transformed into La Nuova Europa [The New Europe]), to the celebration of the liturgy in the Byzantine-Slavic rite, to courses in icon painting, up to the most recent creation in Moscow of the Library of the Spirit Cultural Center. But these instruments do not tell the whole story. In fact, Fr Scalfi has always had complete freedom to change his path and recycle his activity, and yet the trajectory he chose in the long-ago 1940s has never deviated from a straight line toward the goal.

Full-time missionary
The young Fr Romano, ordained priest in Trent in June 1948, at that time had limited and rather confused ideas about Russia, but he had one well-rooted certainty: that he was called to a full-time mission, Iron Curtain or not, political junctures and high-level ecumenical relations or not. And a few months after settling in Milan, as he attempted a slow maneuver of approach to his purpose, a second certainty arose in addition to the first: in order to be a true missionary, it was not enough to be a specialist on Russia and the USSR (even if he had spent five years at the Russicum preparing to fight the enemy, and thus, besides studying the classical theological and liturgical subjects, had become an expert on Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist theories and had learned Russian perfectly).
In order really to know Russia and thus to be able to help it, he had first of all to want to know and love the origin of the beauty that had struck him years before, and this could come only from a lived experience of the Church, of communion. In the 1950s came the encounter with Fr Giussani. “I was going around, proposing to talk about Russia, and everybody laughed in my face, saying, ‘We already have enough of our own problems!’ Then I went to Via Statuto, and there Fr Giussani welcomed me with open arms. He was very interested, along with his students, in what I was saying.” This is Fr Scalfi’s earliest memory of a friendship that has lasted a lifetime. At this point it was clear: he could not conceive of mission as an intervention to be mapped out at a desk, but only as a bridge of exchange between living communities, between experiences tending toward the same beauty. And everything could be transformed into material for building this bridge: the songs of the Byzantine tradition, the thought of Russian religious philosophers, the letters from prisoners in the lagers, intertwined with the School of Community texts, Eliot’s poems, and Claudel’s The Announcement Made to Mary translated into Russian and launched to the other end of the European continent. It must not be forgotten that the contacts with Christian Russia–in which, at that time, no one believed except Fr Scalfi and Fr Giussani (everyone viewed the USSR as the country of achieved Socialism, the fatherland of the so-called homo sovieticus)–took place through the most unthinkable and risky channels, entrusted to the good will and brazenness of students, tourists, and diplomats.
In the early 1960s, in the meantime, something extraordinary happened in the USSR. The samizdat was born, which was a technique for transmitting texts, a kind of “grapevine” that paid no heed to State censorship and launched a password, “Living without lies,” reaffirming the centrality of the person and of his freedom and dignity rooted in the mystery of Being. It goes without saying that from then on, Fr Scalfi was one of the major points of reference and sounding boards for samizdats in the West, and he gave himself totally to making their voices heard as loudly as possible, to the point that the regime had the brilliant idea of declaring him persona non grata, forbidding him entrance to Russia for almost twenty years.

Finally he can work in his “fatherland”!
And then, at the end of the 1980s, came perestrojka. The paradox is that with Gorbachev’s “transparency” and Eltsin’s “democratization,” many Western centers operating for Russia were forced to close their doors, because they had exhausted their mission; protests and exposures were now superfluous. Fr Scalfi, on the other hand, did not hesitate an instant–the time had finally come to give concrete shape to a friendship lived for twenty years as a long-distance one! Even if this meant starting out again and in a different key, the important thing was to work to recompense the Russian friends for the gifts they had given us in so many years of courageous witness, by offering them our experience of the Church. “Your faith has moved mountains!” an Italian Bishop said to the newly named Russian Catholic Bishops in 1991, and one of them replied, “Yes, but now what is left there is a great desert!” And the desert was above all the humanity that was waiting for the encounter with a presence, because the regime had had the astuteness to allow a faith reduced to ritual, to a system of thought, while it did not tolerate experiences of lived life, of communion.
Fr Scalfi’s latest gift to the Russian church is the Library of the Spirit, founded in Moscow in 1993 together with Catholic and Orthodox friends: a cultural, publishing and book distribution center that reproposes today, a few steps from the Kremlin, the very bridge dreamed of, and then tenaciously built in Russia and in the whole world, by two young priest friends fifty years ago on the outskirts of Milan.