Starting from Scratch
An American missionary finds that after decades of Communist repression the Catholic presence has been thoroughly eliminated from Russia’s Far East, and the Church must begin anew.

When Father Daniel Maurer came to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East in 1992, he became the second Roman Catholic priest ordained in Russia since the repression of the faith that followed the Russian Revolution. He also became the first follower of the Canons Regular of Jesus the Lord, a new order founded by an Indiana native, Father Myron Effing. When the two American missionaries first came to the city of nearly 1 million, they were able to find only 6 elderly women who could still remember being members of their Catholic parish before it was closed in 1930. Not even all of these few women remembered how to pray, since they had been little girls when the Catholic parish was shut down, Father Maurer reflects.

The small number of the Catholic faithful was a bit shocking to the priests. But even more jolting was the realization that the Church in the Far East had been persecuted to the point of virtual extinction. The Communist persecution was very thorough.

“How naive we were to think that as soon as Communism goes away everything is going to be fine, that the people will come out of hiding and start going back to church and do business again,” says Father Maurer. “But everything has been destroyed—not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We have to sow the seeds completely from scratch.”

Despite the incredible challenges they face, Father Maurer (a Michigan native) and Father Effing are instituting new programs that that are slowly beginning to have an impact on the people. Before 1998, they were the only priests in a radius of 1,600 miles. In eight years, they have built a parish in Vladivostok, and founded eight other parishes in the Russian Far East. One parish in Khabarovsk, about 500 miles north, is now run by two Maryknoll missionaries; and two Polish Divine Word priests run another parish in Blagoveshensk. Father Effing’s new order has also just reaped its first Russian vocation: a novice who will make his first vows in December.

Father Maurer recently visited parishes around the United States to talk about the conditions in Russia. He spoke with CWR during his American trip.

Father Daniel Maurer: Yes. It’s the first example, and one of the only examples. What has happened to Russia, being a godless society? Maurer: What most people see when they come over is the killing of the spirit of the Russians. They see the absolute destruction of hope and inner serenity.

The Russians have exhausted their cultural capital. For years they have not allowed initiative; that was punishable by death. There was no incentive to work hard, no incentive to be honest. All of this has damaged their souls and you can’t teach it to them.

It’s not like Eastern Europe where they were Communist for a much shorter amount of time. In Russia, the people know that “Communism is us and this is what we have done to ourselves.” It’s a real death of the human spirit.

So the people don’t necessarily blame the Communist government?

Father Daniel Maurer: No, they don’t blame the government at all. If anything, they would like the government to come back.

Do the people, particularly the younger people, even understand their situation?

Father Daniel Maurer: The “middle young”—ages 28 to 35—some of them understand the situation. But no one can do anything about it. There’s nothing to be done because it’s on such a widespread level it has affected the being of the whole people. They even have a word for it: homo sovieticus. It’s a new species of human beings.

You are only 60 miles from China. Is there any influence on the Russian people from that nation?

Father Daniel Maurer: This is a huge overstatement, but I would almost say that all Russians hate all Chinese. They were trained to do so. One way to control your domestic people is to make a bogeyman, an enemy. Out our way, where there is a long border with China, in order for the Russians to control their people, they always taught them that the Chinese want to take them over—that they’re filthy, ugly, mean, stupid people. There were some border skirmishes in the 1960s where some people were killed, so they’ve used that as an example of the “Chinese problem.” So they’ve always had a hatred for the Chinese people.

What is happening with the Russian people? Is there a lot of despair and poverty?

Father Daniel Maurer: There’s a lot of despair and poverty. The situation has gotten considerably worse in the last two years. In August of 1998, there was the terrible Russian financial crisis. The bottom fell out from the ruble and people lost everything that they had—for probably the third time since perestroika in the late 1980s. So that made a real dent out our way.

There are no more foreign investments going on at all, there are no jobs. There is a lot of underemployment. The old Russian bureaucratic jobs are still there, but they don’t pay very well and people often don’t get their paychecks. Nothing is going on in the economy out our way. I hear that there are some foreign investments in the Moscow and St. Petersburg area, but that is a 9-1/2 hour flight away from us.

How are the people making do?

Father Daniel Maurer: The older ones who are on pensions are living hand to mouth. There are a number of food programs that keep them alive. We feed 50 people every day at a cafeteria downtown. We know that the Lutheran parish, which started up with a pastor from Hamburg, Germany, feeds a similar number of people three times a week. The Jews, who have just gotten a synagogue back, have a food program that feeds 30 or 40 people five days a week. There’s a lot of humanitarian aid going on just to keep people alive.

What is the state of religion? Is there still fear of practicing a faith, or is there just a general hopelessness?

Father Daniel Maurer: It’s not just hopelessness. The Communists controlled everything. It was as totalitarian as we ever thought it was—the educational system in particular. So everyone was taught that you had to be either weak or crazy to believe in God. Religion was the opium of the people, and they were very thorough in getting that across to people. Who wants to be known as a kook or someone who can’t solve his own problems and needs a crutch?

The older people, especially, were the ones who gave their lives to the ideology of Communism. There was a certain amount of hope and energy in that new ideology back in the 1920s and 1930s and they were marked by that. It would be very difficult for them now, when they are in their 70s, to be able to admit to themselves that everything they ever lived was a lie. So they are the hardest age group to bring back, unless someone in the family was a believer and taught the kids that God existed. Then sometimes you’ll find those people coming back when they get ready to die.

What is the age group that is coming back to religion? Is it the youth?

Father Daniel Maurer: No, not the youth. That’s a difficulty because they are apathetic and wondering about their future economically. It is the young adults: people who are in their late 20s and early 30s, those who have children. They didn’t give their lives to Communism and they’re looking for meaning. In terms of the growth of the faith, it’s hard to say. We think there is less than one-tenth of the population practicing any faith at all, in churches regularly. A small percentage of them are coming back to the (Catholic) Church.

What is the state of the Russian Orthodox Church?

Father Daniel Maurer: Statistics show now that about 54 percent of Russians are baptized Orthodox, but those practicing their faith are less than one-tenth of 1 percent. Nobody knows anything at all about the faith, and nobody practices. But in the last 8 years, the number of Orthodox parishes in the city has grown from one to five.

From a historic perspective, from 1922 when the Communists arrived in Vladivostok until 1937, they destroyed all 28 Orthodox parishes in the city in less than 20 years. Every one was taken down or blown up. So for many years there were no churches in the city at all. Then a group of old believers demanded that they be given a church because there was, supposedly, freedom of religion. And they got their government-inspected church where the priests were probably KGB agents, but the old ladies didn’t care because they got their sacraments and it was a place to pray.

There was a time just after Communism, back seven to 10 years ago, when there were many messages given to the people that now that Communism is ended, we can believe again and you have to get baptized. So the people marched themselves off to the Orthodox church and got baptized. But there was no preparation. They did it because they were told they should do it, and then they didn’t practice at all. So they’re nominally baptized but some of them don’t really believe. Some of them did it for all kinds of reasons. I’ve talked to people who did it because they didn’t study for their tests in college and they thought they would have a better chance of getting an ‘A’ if they were baptized. Other people were a little bit ill and they thought they would get better if they were baptized, or there were parents who had a cranky baby and some old lady told them he would settle down if he were baptized.

Because the Orthodox Church was so co-opted by the Communists, young people don’t want to join the Orthodox Church; they think of it as just a bunch of old grandmas who don’t know any better. The Orthodox Church ordained a lot of people that they shouldn’t have, back 10 or 12 years ago when they needed priests right away. They ordained people after a 6-month course of just teaching them old Slavonic, and a lot of them were problem people: alcoholics and those who were in it for themselves. Now they are trying to weed those people out. But it’s very difficult once they are ordained.

Do you have any thoughts on the recent canonization of Nicholas II by the Russian Orthodox Church?

Father Daniel Maurer: Well I have a couple of thoughts. The Russian Orthodox Church is not united, either. There are two or three splits there. When the Orthodox Patriarch in 1922 signed an official statement saying that Communism was the will of God for Russia at the time, a group of exiles broke away and declared themselves the Russian Orthodox Church in exile, and anathematized the Moscow patriarchate for capitulating to atheism. And the Orthodox Church in exile canonized the royal family decades ago, almost from the very beginning—not only as martyrs, but as the martyrs of martyrs, the biggest martyrs. So now that the Moscow patriarchate has canonized them, it could be looking toward reunion with that group.

There is a sense, at least, in which the Czar can be thought of as a martyr. At one point he was given the opportunity to leave Russia if he wanted. But he made the statement that it was God’s will that he, as monarch, stay with his people. Therefore, if that is what led to his death, it could be called martyrdom. He was a faithful man. He was a faithful Christian and took seriously his role as a Christian leader.

Is there a growing interest in the Catholic Church?

Father Daniel Maurer: Not on any percentage level. In the time we’ve been here, going from 6 to 450 Catholics in a city of a million people—well, you can do the math. I say we have 450 members; we’ve baptized 450 people, but not all of them are practicing. On any given Sunday, we have 160 people or more for Mass. A lot of people are coming just once or twice a month. In terms of Catholic converts, we’re finding young people who want something serious, who want to learn about the faith. We have a good RCIA program that we require. And those who don’t want to study, well they just wash out. But others who stick with it, they end up practicing. Sometimes after a year or two they will leave.

Are there other Christian denominations springing up?

Father Daniel Maurer: Yes. In Vladivostok and the Russian Far East, there are many, many denominations. There was a real rush to come into Russia in 1991 and 1992. We have Methodists from Korea. There are the Baptists, who have always been there. There are the Seventh Day Adventists, quite strong from the early years all throughout the persecutions. There are also Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. In our southeastern-most state of Russia, called Premorski, I heard there are 30 Evangelical ministers. They each have a little house or storefront church.

There are so few people that know anything at all about God that in terms of the other Christian groups, I say, “The more, the merrier.” For one thing they can teach about Christianity, and about the Bible, and about morality. On another level, the Russians are very liturgical, they have this wonderful mystic sense, and after a while Protestantism isn’t enough for them. So we have received many converts coming over from these little Protestant groups. We are almost as liturgical as the Russian Orthodox Church. Our Sunday Mass is an hour and a half, we use incense and we have a wonderful choir, so it’s a more solemn occasion than what the Evangelical groups offer.

Does Pope John Paul II have any influence on the people?

Father Daniel Maurer: My guess would be that he’s well respected because he is the symbol of Western Christianity. His messages for Christmas and Easter are always shown on Russian television.

How does Pope John Paul II view the events in Russia?

Father Daniel Maurer: He has told all missionaries going to Russia that we are forbidden to proselytize the Orthodox Christians. They are a true apostolic Church and, rather than catching them, we should be praying for communion between the two churches. He is very happy to have us there. When we first met the then-nuncio, Cardinal [Francesco] Colasuonno in 1994, he told us that the Holy Father asks about us every time he visits him. For us it was wonderful to know that he knew we were there.

Also, the regional director of our Caritas chapter went to a workshop in the Vatican. And when she told the Holy Father she was from Vladivostok, he said, “Aaahh, Vladivostok, the end of the earth.”

Do you ever think about the Fatima prophecy, in which the Blessed Mother said that Russia would be converted?

Father Daniel Maurer: Yes, but we don’t think it will be converted by becoming Roman Catholic. It never was a Roman Catholic country.

Well, Russia was Catholic when it was first converted. The Baptism of Russia is celebrated in 988, and that was before the great schism, which happened in 1054. So Russia was baptized Catholic, but Eastern Catholic: Byzantine, from Constantinople, and it has a beautiful and ancient Byzantine tradition.

The conversion of Russia will certainly be through the Orthodox Church. And then, we hope to have communion with the Orthodox Church. I don’t say union, but communion, because union in some people’s minds means that they are coming back. Communion: that the two patriarchs—the Patriarch of the East, the Bishop of Constantinople; and the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome —accept one another again as brothers; and therefore the Church will become one.

The Holy Father very much wants to visit Russia. It’s his fondest wish. They say that he has a Russian Bible at his bedside and he reads a chapter every night to prepare for the trip, but he doesn’t want to go without an invitation from the Patriarch of Moscow, Aleksei II, and Aleksei II has not yet extended him the invitation.

Do the people still have a sense of morality?

Father Daniel Maurer: There are morals because people have a human conscience, but it’s so damaged in many ways. Cultures emphasize different kinds of goods and virtues. The Russians, for example, are very hospitable and very emotional in their hospitality. But they steal. There are bars on every window and doors with five locks everywhere. So people who would kill you (in the good sense) with hospitality would also steal from you.

Can you talk about the alarming decrease in population in Russia?

Father Daniel Maurer: Abortion is the method, not the reason. The reason is that people are subconsciously uncertain about the future, they lack hope and trust in the future, and also that they are living in such poor conditions, they can’t imagine having another mouth to feed.

Thousands of people in Vladivostok are living in one little room for a whole family—that means grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, and children, in one tiny little room, and there’s no place else for them to go. So when kids get married, they can’t move out; they live with their in-laws in a room with others. So one child is all they can ever imagine having. Where are the jobs going to be? Are they going to be able to give them an education?

How about the medical conditions and general health of the people?

Father Daniel Maurer: There is an increase in suicide, and a great increase in sexually transmitted diseases. There’s a coming increase in AIDS, just beginning to be seen. They also have the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. On top of all this, the medical establishment is in shambles. It’s almost utterly destroyed. In Vladivostok, a city of a million people, there has not been one heart operation—ever! They did President Yeltsin’s in Moscow four years ago, but I think they had to import all of the doctors and equipment and they spent millions to do it, just because they were too proud to fly him out to another country.

The doctors don’t have the education, the facilities, or the equipment. The hospital system now in Vladivostok has declined further than it did in the Communist state because of the disorder of the situation. You have to bring your own sheets, you have to bring your own food, and you have to buy your own medicine. That’s like Africa. It never was like that before. Russia thinks of itself as a civilized country, and it had basic health for everybody. But it was socialized medicine, so you would wait a long time to get seen and it never was the quality that it should have been.

Can you expand on the problems with alcoholism?

Father Daniel Maurer: There are different figures. I’ve heard there is at least twice as much consumption of alcohol per capita as there is in the United States and perhaps as much as five times as much consumption of alcohol per capita. It’s a major endemic problem in Russia; everybody drinks. It’s socially unacceptable for people not to drink. The Russians do not know how to celebrate any event without alcohol, and they celebrate a lot.

I understand you and Father Effing are doing a lot with crisis pregnancy centers and may possibly start offering American couples the opportunity to adopt Russian babies.

Father Daniel Maurer: We hope to start adoptions. We were able to open the first crisis pregnancy center in the summer of 1998. That was because we had some friends and benefactors from Dayton, Ohio who trained our volunteers. A year later, we opened a second one. We have a proposal we hope to give to the Knights of Columbus, to start one in all of our parishes, which would be another six centers. We think it will cost about $10,000 to $15,000 to establish each center. We have to get a place, and get the team back to Russia to train, and we have to get all the equipment: the models of the fetuses, the pregnancy tests, and clothing that we give out to help them.

Is this in response to the large number of abortions?

Father Daniel Maurer: It is in response to abortions. Statistically, the average Russian woman will have eight abortions in her childbearing years. The people who have come over to help us with the crisis pregnancy centers have talked to nurses and doctors in the Russian field and they say that it’s underreported, so it could be more like 12 abortions per person. I’ve talked to women who have had as many as 25 abortions.

Why is abortion so prevalent and so widely accepted?

Father Daniel Maurer: It’s so prevalent because Russia was the first civilized country to legalize abortion. It happened very shortly after the revolution, in 1921. During the whole Communist period, there was no other way of limiting your family size. Russians live in tiny, tiny, little apartments or homes, and they think that more than one child is a terrible burden. So it is just ingrained in their culture.

I have talked to Catholic Russian girls, women who have converted because they wanted to believe in God and they liked the Church. But you can’t reach every new Catholic with every doctrine all at once. There’s no way that some can imagine having a baby and giving it up for adoption. That would be considered such a social stain; people would ostracize them because they would be seen as terrible mothers. So you just wipe it away and don’t tell anybody and just suffer by yourself quietly, with post-abortion syndrome. That’s much more socially acceptable than having the baby and allowing people to know that you’re pregnant, and then giving it away; that would be considered abandoning your child. It’s just how they have put together morality for themselves. It’s not logical.

Are the crisis pregnancy centers going to be accepted, then?

Father Daniel Maurer: If they’re not accepted on a moral level, at least they are accepted on a physical level. Again, we are starting from absolute ground zero. We’re talking about 12 abortions per woman for half a million people in Vladivostok and the number of people that our little crisis pregnancy centers see might be two or three a day. That’s a drop in the bucket. Some people will accept it. Catholics will accept it if we’re very clear on the Catholic teaching for our people.

We don’t just want to teach; we want to help them be able to implement the teaching. Even some non-religious young women will accept them, because they know that with each Russian saline solution abortion their chances of ever becoming pregnant again decreases by 10 percent.

If they come to the center, is it because they want to give the baby up for adoption, or is it because they want to keep the child and they need help?

Father Daniel Maurer: Or they’ve heard that there might be another possibility. They’re contemplating abortion, or maybe they want to have a test to see if they are pregnant; we advertise free testing. You have to get them in, any possible way, and then work with them as gently as you can.

Do they accept any other means for avoiding pregnancy, or is abortion the only option?

Father Daniel Maurer: Because of the poverty, there is no artificial means of birth control—or traditionally there has not been. Now you can find IUDs at any kiosk. But they are medically unsafe. They are being dumped on the Russian market because there are lawsuits against them in the United States. And the Russians don’t know any better. They just know that they don’t want to have any more children and they’ll try anything. The birth-control pill has not been introduced, or it’s too complicated, or they don’t trust the quality, or it’s too expensive.

Abortions are free and births are not. The average cost of a birth to get to the hospital and have a baby is about $20—about a monthly salary for the low-to-average earner—and abortions are free.

I understand you are also helping ex-prisoners by giving them work.

Father Daniel Maurer: Well, we hope to be. We recently received two containers of clothing and these ex-convict women will be repairing and selling the clothing. We have a building that we received in lieu of money that was frozen in our bank account during the crisis and they couldn’t give us back the money. That’s where we have the workshop.

We have been working for many years doing spiritual programs [with prisoners and ex-prisoners] and providing clothes to them. Catholic Charities in Khabaraovsk (a city 500 miles north of Vladivostok) has made a longstanding commitment to provide the women with clothing and a little bit of money when they are released. The government has no more money, so the women are released with nothing—not even a change from the prison clothes. They are released on the streets with their prison outfits, and the only thing they do is go back to crime and prostitution. We’re not rich and we can’t do everything, but at least we give them a little bit of money to begin with.

What specifically are the people of Russia longing for?

Father Daniel Maurer: I think the deepest longing of the Russian soul is security and stability. That’s why they were willing to follow a Stalin, because they thought that they would get that. They have a deep fear of chaos and civic disorder, so they are very complacent in a police state. The police can stop them anytime and ask for reams of paper, and ask them why are they here, where do they live, and who are they? And they can’t imagine that that’s wrong. We Americans bristle at this. They just look at us like we’re crazy.

What would you say to the Americans who are so antagonistic to the appearance of religion, particularly the Christian religion, in the public square?

Father Daniel Maurer: America has a long, long history of Christianity, going back to its origins. And it has not been exterminated. It’s very convenient for Americans to be atheist. You can throw out the rules and still have the benefits of 2,000 years of moral goodness and live in a society where 90 percent of the people every year in opinion polls say Jesus Christ is important in their lives. Whereas in Russian Communism, you see a society that has had the faith almost completely destroyed. So you see how morality has sunk to a new low in history and it’s very clear.

I would like to put all of the American atheists on a big jet and fly them over to Russia and let them see the end product of the “naked public square,” as they say: no religion in society. When you get the whole society un-Christian, you have a hell on earth.

In many parts of the world, and even here in the US, there are signs of a movement toward a totalitarian society, and Pope John Paul II has warned about that possibility. Are people so unaware of the situation in Russia, or are leaders of other countries so hungry for power that they would allow this to happen elsewhere?

Father Daniel Maurer: I think Americans are unaware of the situation in Russia. They are unaware of what totalitarianism has done—very much so. In America there are certainly different opinions on this. There are many socialists in America, people who want the government to solve every problem and are willing to be taxed for that to happen. But there are many people who aren’t so willing.

Russia is a very proud country and it doesn’t want to be told what to do. It says it wants investments, but if I were a member of the American government, I would not give Russia a penny of investment until they could prove to me that they were willing to do business.

How do you maintain your own spirituality?

Father Daniel Maurer: If you are where you know God wants you to be, your life becomes a great adventure of love, and I know that He wants me to be there. So you put up with all of the problems, and you see the good that you are doing.

And really, there are great rewards. I love liturgical music and when we arrived there, we didn’t know of one Russian song to sing because the liturgy before the Church was outlawed was all in Latin. I started an organization called the Russian Liturgical Music Society of St. Augustine. Our job is to translate, compose, and find Russian liturgical music. Where else in the world can you translate a song and make a major contribution to the body of liturgical music? Now after eight years we have a hymnal of over 130 hymns and service music.

Also we’re restoring a beautiful Gothic church, which was almost destroyed during the Communist repression, to its original grandeur. It’s all from donated funds, mostly—I would say 95 percent—from the United States.

So do you plan to be there for a while?

Father Daniel Maurer: I plan to be there forever.