Commemorated on July 20
Elizaveta Pilenko, the future Mother Maria, was born in 1891 in Riga,
Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, and grew up in the south of
Russia on the shore of the Black Sea. Her father was mayor of the town
of Anapa, while on her mother's side, she was descended from the last
governor of the Bastille, the Parisian prison destroyed during the
French Revolution.
Her parents were devout Orthodox Christians
whose faith helped shape their daughter's values, sensitivities and
goals. As a child she once emptied her piggy bank in order to contribute
to the painting of an icon that would be part of a new church in Anapa.
At seven she asked her mother if she was old enough to become a nun,
while a year later she sought permission to become a pilgrim who spends
her life walking from shrine to shrine.
At the age of 14, her
father died, an event that seemed to her meaningless and unjust and led
her to embrace atheism. "If there is no justice," she said, "there is no
God." She decided God's nonexistence was well known to adults but kept
secret from children. For her, childhood was over. When her widowed
mother moved the family to St. Petersburg in 1906, she found herself in
the country's political and cultural center — also a hotbed of radical
ideas and groups — and became part of radical literary circles that
gathered around such symbolist poets as Alexander Blok, whom she first
met at age 15. Like many of her contemporaries, she was drawn to the
left, but was often disappointed at the radicals she encountered. Though
regarding themselves as revolutionaries, they seemed to do nothing but
talk. "My spirit longed to engage in heroic feats, even to perish, to
combat the injustice of the world," she recalled. Yet no one she knew
was actually laying down his or her life for others. Should her friends
hear of someone dying for the Revolution, she noted, "they will value
it, approve or not approve, show understanding on a very high level, and
discuss the night away till the sun rises and it's time for fried eggs.
But they will not understand at all that to die for the Revolution
means to feel a rope around one's neck."
In 1910, she married
Dimitri Kuzmin-Karaviev, a Bolshevik and part of a community of poets,
artists and writers, but she later commented that it was a marriage born
"more of pity than of love." In addition to politics and poetry, she
and her friends also talked theology, but just as their political ideas
had no connection at all to the lives of ordinary people, their theology
floated far above the actual Church. There was much they might have
learned, she reflected later in life, from "any old beggar woman hard at
her Sunday prostrations in church." For many intellectuals, the Church
was an idea or a set of abstract values, not a community in which one
actually lives.
Though still regarding herself an atheist, gradually her earlier
attraction to Christ revived and deepened, not yet Christ as God
incarnate but Christ as heroic man. In time, she found herself drawn
toward the religious faith she had abandoned after her father's death.
She prayed and read the Gospel and the lives of saints and concluded
that the real need of the people was not for revolutionary theories but
for Christ. She wanted "to proclaim the simple word of God," she told
Blok in a letter written in 1916. Desiring to study theology, she
applied for admission to St. Petersburg's Theological Academy of the
Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in those days an entirely male school whose
students were preparing for ordination. As surprising as her wanting to
study there was the rector's decision that she could be admitted.
By
1913, her marriage collapsed. Later that year, her first child, Gaiana,
was born. Just as World War I was beginning, she returned with her
daughter to southern Russia, where her religious life grew more intense.
For a time she secretly wore lead weights sewn into a hidden belt as a
way of reminding herself both "that Christ exists" and also to be more
aware that minute-by-minute many people were suffering and dying in the
war. She realized, however, that the primary Christian asceticism was
not self-mortification, but caring response to the needs of other
people.
In October 1917, she was present in St. Petersburg when
Russia's Provisional Government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. Taking
part in the All-Russian Soviet Congress, she heard Lenin's lieutenant,
Leon Trotsky, dismiss people from her party with the words, "Your role
is played out. Go where you belong, into history's garbage can!" She
grew to see how hideously different actual revolution was from the
dreams of revolution that had once filled the imagination of so many
Russians! In February 1918, she was elected deputy mayor of Anapa.
Eventually, she was arrested, jailed, and put on trial for collaboration
with the enemy. In court, she rose and spoke in her own defense: "My
loyalty was not to any imagined government as such, but to those whose
need of justice was greatest, the people. Red or White, my position is
the same — I will act for justice and for the relief of suffering. I
will try to love my neighbor." It was thanks to Daniel Skobtsov, a
former schoolmaster who was now her judge, that she avoided execution.
After the trial, she sought him out to thank him. Eventually they
married.
As the course of the civil war was turning in favor of
the Bolsheviks, the Skobtsovs fled to Georgia, where she gave birth to a
son, Yura, in 1920. A year later, having relocated to Yugoslavia, she
gave birth to Anastasia, Their long journey ended with their arrival in
Paris in 1923, where to supplement their income she made dolls and
painted silk scarves, often working ten or twelve hours a day.
A friend introduced her to the Russian Student Christian
Movement, an Orthodox association founded in 1923. She began attending
lectures and other activities and felt herself coming back to life
spiritually and intellectually. In 1926, she grieved the death of her
daughter Anastasia. She emerged from her mourning determined to seek a
"new road before me and a new meaning in life, to be a mother for all,
for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection." She devoted
herself to social work and theological writing. In 1927 two volumes,
Harvest of the Spirit, were published, in which she retold the lives of many saints.
In
1930, she was appointed traveling secretary of the Russian Student
Christian Movement, work which put her into daily contact with
impoverished Russian refugees throughout France and neighboring
countries. She often lectured, but she was quick to listen to others as
they related some terrible grief that had burdened them for years. She
took literally Christ's words, that He was always present in the least
person. "Man ought to treat the body of his fellow human being with more
care than he treats his own," she wrote. "Christian love teaches us to
give our fellows material as well as spiritual gifts. We should give
them our last shirt and our last piece of bread. Personal alms-giving
and the most wide-ranging social work are both equally justified and
needed."
In time, she began to envision a new type on community,
"half monastic and half fraternal," that would connect spiritual life
with service to those in need, in the process showing "that a free
Church can perform miracles." Father Sergei Bulgakov, her confessor, was
a source of support and encouragement, as was her bishop, Metropolitan
Evlogy [Georgievsky], who was responsible from 1921 to 1946 for the many
thousands of Russian expatriates scattered across Europe. Recognizing
her devotion to social work, and knowing of her waning marriage, he
suggested to her the possibility of becoming a nun. In time, Daniel came
to accept the idea after meeting with Metropolitan Evlogy. In the
spring of 1932, in the chapel at Paris' St. Sergius Theological
Institute, she was professed as a nun with the name Maria. She made her
monastic profession, Metropolitan Evlogy recognized, "in order to give
herself unreservedly to social service." Mother Maria called it simply
"monasticism in the world." Intent "to share the life of paupers and
tramps," she began to look for a house of hospitality and found it at 9
villa de Saxe in Paris, which she leased with financial assistance from
Metropolitan Evlogy. She began receiving guests, mainly young Russian
women without jobs, giving up her own room to house them while herself
sleeping on a narrow iron bedstead in the basement. A room upstairs
became a chapel — she painted the iconostasis icons — while the dining
room doubled as a hall for lectures and dialogues.
In need of
larger facilities, a new location was found two years later in an area
of Paris where many impoverished Russian refugees had settled. While at
the former address she could feed only 25, here she could feed a
hundred. Here her guests could regain their breath "until the time comes
to stand on their two feet again." Her credo was: "Each person is the
very icon of God incarnate in the world." With this recognition came the
need "to accept this awesome revelation of God unconditionally, to
venerate the image of God" in her brothers and sisters. As her ministry
evolved, she rented other buildings, one for families in need, and
another for single men. A rural property became a sanatorium. By 1937,
she housed several dozen women, serving up to 120 dinners every day.
Every morning, she would beg for food or buy cheaply whatever was not
donated.
Despite a seemingly endless array of challenges, Mother
Maria was sustained chiefly by those she served — themselves beaten
down, people in despair, cripples, alcoholics, the sick, survivors of
many tragedies. But not all responded to trust with trust. Theft was not
uncommon. On one occasion a guest stole 25 francs. Everyone guessed who
the culprit was, a drug addict, but Mother Maria refused to accuse her.
Instead she announced at the dinner table that the money had not been
stolen, only misplaced, and she had found it. "You see how dangerous it
is to make accusations," she commented. At once the girl who stole the
money burst into tears.
Mother Maria and her collaborators would
not simply open the door when those in need knocked, but would actively
seek out the homeless. One place to find them was an all-night café at
Les Halles where those with nowhere else to go could sit for the price
of a glass of wine. Children also were cared for, and a part-time school
was opened at several locations. Turning her attention toward Russian
refugees who had been classified insane, Mother Maria began a series of
visits to mental hospitals. In each hospital five to ten percent of the
Russian patients turned out to be sane and, thanks to her intervention,
were released. Language barriers and cultural misunderstandings had kept
them in the asylum. In time, she and her associates helped establish
clinics for TB sufferers and a variety of other ministries. Another
landmark was the foundation in September 1935 of a group named "Orthodox
Action" — a name proposed by her friend, philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev.
Cofounders included Father Sergei Bulgakov, historian George Fedotov,
the scholar Constantine Mochulsky, the publisher Ilya Fondaminsky, and
her long-time coworker Fedor Pianov, with Metropolitan Evgoly serving as
honorary president. With financial support from supporters across
Europe and the United States, a wider range of projects and centers were
made possible: hostels, rest homes, schools, camps, hospital work, help
to the unemployed, assistance to the elderly, publication of books and
pamphlets, etc. In all of these growing ministries, Mother Maria's
driving concern was that it should never lose its personal or communal
character.
In October 1939, Father Dimitri Klepinin, then 35 years
old, began to assist Mother Maria as she began the last phase of her
life — a series of responses to World War II and Germany's occupation of
France. While Mother Maria could have fled Paris when the Germans were
advancing, or even sought refuge in America, she would not budge. "If
the Germans take Paris, I shall stay here with my old women. Where else
could I send them?" She had no illusions about the Nazi threat, which to
her represented a "new paganism" bringing in its wake disasters,
upheavals, persecutions and wars. With defeat came greater poverty and
hunger, and the local authorities in Paris declared her house an
official food distribution point, where volunteers sold at cost price
whatever food Mother Maria had bought in that morning.
Russian
refugees were among the particular targets of the occupiers. In June
1941, a thousand were arrested, including several close friends and
collaborators of Mother Maria and Father Dimitri, who launched an aid
project for prisoners and their dependents. Early in 1942, their
registration now underway, Jews began to knock at Mother Maria's door,
asking Father Dimitri if he would issue baptismal certificates to them.
The answer was always yes. The names of those "baptized" were also duly
recorded in his parish register in case there was any cross-checking by
the police or Gestapo, as indeed did happen. Father Dimitri was
convinced that in such a situation Christ would do the same. When the
Nazis issued special identity cards for those of Russian origin living
in France, with Jews being specially identified, Mother Maria and Father
Dimitri refused to comply, though they were warned that those who
failed to register would be regarded as citizens of the USSR — enemy
aliens — and be punished accordingly.
With the subsequent mass
arrest of Jews — 12,884, of whom 6,900 (two-thirds of them children)
were brought to the Velodrome d'Hiver sports stadium and held for five
days before being sent to Auschwitz — Mother Maria entered the stadium
and for three days offered comfort to the children and their parents,
distributing what food she could bring in. She even managed to rescue a
number of children by enlisting the aid of garbage collectors and
smuggling them out in trash bins. Meanwhile, her house house was
bursting with people, many of them Jews. "It is amazing," Mother Maria
remarked, "that the Germans haven't pounced on us yet." Father Dimitri,
Mother Maria and their coworkers set up routes of escape to the
unoccupied south. It was complex and dangerous work. Forged documents
had to be obtained. A local resistance group helped secure provisions
for those Mother Maria's community was struggling to feed.
On
February 8, 1943, while Mother Maria was traveling, Nazi security police
entered the house and found a letter in her son Yura's pocket in which
Father Dimitri was asked to provide a Jew with a false baptismal
document. Yura, now actively a part of his mother's work, was taken to
the office of Orthodox Action, soon after followed by his distraught
grandmother, Sophia Pilenko. The interrogator ordered her to bring
Father Dimitri. Once the priest was there, said the interrogator, they
would let Yura go. His grandmother Sophia was allowed to embrace Yura
and give him a blessing. It was last time she saw him in this world.
The
following morning, after celebrating the Divine Liturgy, Father Dimitri
set off for the Gestapo office, where he was interrogated for four
hours, making no attempt to hide his beliefs. The next day, February 10,
Mother Maria was arrested and her quarters were searched. Several
others were called for questioning and then held by the Gestapo. She was
confined with 34 other woman at the Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Her
son Yura, Father Dimitri and their coworker of many years, Feodor
Pianov, were held in the same building. Pianov later recalled witnessing
Father Dimitri being prod and beaten by an SS officer while Yura stood
by, weeping. Father Dimitri "began to console him, saying the Christ
withstood greater mockery than this."
In April, the prisoners were
transferred to Compiegne, where Mother Maria was blessed with a final
meeting with Yura, who said his mother "was in a remarkable state of
mind and told me ... that I must trust in her ability to bear things and
in general not to worry about her. Every day [Father Dimitri and I]
remember her at the proskomidia ... We celebrate the Eucharist and
receive Communion each day." Hours after their meeting,Mother Maria was
transported to Germany.
On December 16, Yura and Father Dimitri
were deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, followed
several weeks later by Pianov. In January 1944, Father Dimitri and Yura
were sent to another camp, Dora. Within ten days of arrival, Yura
contracted furunculosis. On February 6, "dispatched for treatment" — a
euphemism for "sentenced to death." Four days later Father Dimitri,
lying on a dirt floor, died of pneumonia. His body was disposed of in
the Buchenwald crematorium.
Meanwhile, Mother Maria — now
"Prisoner 19,263" — was sent in a sealed cattle truck to the Ravensbruck
camp in Germany, where she endured for two years, an achievement in
part explained by her long experience of ascetic life. She was assigned
to Block 27 and befriended the many Russian prisoners who were with her.
Unable to correspond with friends, little testimony in her own words
has come down to us, but prisoners who survived the war remembered her.
One of them, Solange Perichon, recalls: "She was never downcast, never.
She never complained.... She was full of good cheer, really good cheer.
We had roll calls which lasted a great deal of time. We were woken at
three in the morning and we had to stand out in the open in the middle
of winter until the barracks [population] was counted. She took all this
calmly and she would say, 'Well that's that. Yet another day completed.
And tomorrow it will be the same all over again.' ... She allowed
nothing of secondary importance to impede her contact with people."
Anticipating
that her own exit point from the camp might be via the crematoria,
Mother Maria asked a fellow prisoner whom she hoped would survive to
memorize a message to be given at last to Father Sergei Bulgakov,
Metropolitan Evlogy and her mother: "My state at present is such that I
completely accept suffering in the knowledge that this is how things
ought to be for me, and if I am to die, I see this as a blessing from on
high." Her work in the camp varied. There was a period when she was
part of a team of women dragging a heavy iron roller about the camp's
pathways for 12 hours a day. In another period she worked in a knitwear
workshop. Her legs began to give way. As her health declined, friends no
longer allowed her to give away portions of her own food, as she had
done in the past to help keep others alive.
With the Red Army
approaching from the East, the concentration camp administrators further
reduced food rations while greatly increasing the population of each
block from 800 to 2,500. In serious decline, Mother Maria accepted a
pink card freely issued to any prisoner who wished to be excused from
labor because of age or ill health. In January 1945, those who had
received such cards were transferred to what was called the Jugendlager —
the "youth camp" — where the authorities said each person would have
her own bed and abundant food. Mother Maria's transfer was on January
31. Here the food ration was further reduced and the hours spent
standing for roll calls increased. Though it was mid-winter, blankets,
coats and jackets were confiscated, and then even shoes and stockings.
The death rate was at least fifty per day. Next all medical supplies
were withdrawn. Those who still persisted in surviving now faced death
by shootings and gas, the latter made possible by the construction of a
gas chamber in March 1945, in which 150 were executed every day.
Amazingly, Mother Maria survived five weeks in the "youth camp" before
she was returned to the main camp on March 3. Though emaciated and
infested with lice, with her eyes festering, she began to think she
might actually live to return to Paris, or even go back to Russia.
Such
was not to be the case. On March 30, 1945 — Great, Holy and Good Friday
that year — Mother Maria was selected for the gas chambers, in which
she perished the following day, on Great and Holy Saturday. Accounts are
at odds about what happened. According to one, she was one of the many
selected for death that day. According to another, she took the place of
another prisoner, a Jew, who had been chosen. Although perishing in the
gas chamber, she did not perish in the Church's memory. Survivors of
the war who had known her would again and again draw attention to the
ideas, insights and activities of the unusual nun who had spent so many
years coming to the aid of people in desperate straights. Soon after the
end of World War II, essays and books about her began to appear in
France and Russia. A Russian film, "Mother Maria," was made in 1982.
There have been two biographies in English and, little by little, the
translation and publication in English of her most notable essays.
On
January 18, 2004, the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of
Constantinople recognized Mother Maria Skobtsova as a saint, along with
her son Yuri; the priest who worked closely with her, Fr. Dimitri
Klépinin; and her close friend and collaborator Ilya Fondaminsky. Their
glorification took place in Paris' Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky.
SOURCE:
SAINT OR FEAST POSTED THIS DATE 2013(with 2012's link here also and further, 2011, 2010, 2009 and even 2008!)
Commemorated on July 31
