Last modified on Tuesday August 03, 2004 at 8:40 PM EDT
"…Mother Ekaterina herself was an imposing figure with whom other strong personalities found co-operation less than easy. In relations with others she avoided sentiment and familiarity. She expressed herself briefly and always to the point. For the sake of recollection and study she insisted on the meticulous observance of silence. In a word she was glacial. This, however, was not entirely a matter of personal temperament. Her two main concerns in governing her community were: first, a striving through ascesis and prayer for perfect discipleship, and secondly, a concentration on the community's goal so thorough that it would shut out everything irrelevant to that purpose. With Mother Ekaterina the decks were always stripped.
An impression of a certain puritan authoritarianism might account for the adverse criticism she and her sisters endured. The neighbouring Polish clergy referred to her as 'the Russian pope-ess'; to a number of the Moscow Orthodox her community was known as the 'Abrikosovian sectarianettes.' The reservations of the Polish clergy require further comment. With the creation of the Exarchate, Mother Ekaterina had committed herself wholeheartedly to the restoration of communion between the Orthodox church of Russia and the see of Rome. In this new context she turned abruptly against the Latin rite which she had once petitioned a pope to let her enter. Her opposition to the Polish clergy was intensified by the outbreak of war between Russia and Poland in 1920. Where Polish churchmen in Russia were concerned, she did not mince her words:
Hostility, narrow provincialism, together with an inborn hatred of the Eastern rite and an absurd desire to maintain a leading role in the Catholic Church of Russia, as well as the alien fantasy of latinising the Russian people.
Mother Ekaterina would tolerate in Russia no Latin missionaries or Orders, unless they went over to the Eastern rite. She would accept no Latin bishops, but only the Exarch. She would let no Latin churchman administer the funds of the Pontifical Aid programme launched by Pius XI in the wake of the Civil War.(8) The Polish presence in Russia she stigmatised as a 'colonial Church.' And as to the idea of a Russian-speaking Latin rite she wrote it off in a single English word: 'nonsense.' A painful contrast is presented by her rather productive early relations with the Communists. 'What an interesting and enchanting personality your little mother is,' exclaimed an ideological re-education officer to one of the sisters. 'It is just a shame that she isn't a Communist!' (9)
She also enjoyed excellent relations with many of the Orthodox clergy, as indeed did the Exarch himself. (10) In 1919, the Orthodox metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd, together with the Exarch, made a joint protest against Bolshevik attacks on the Church, and they further projected a common course of apologetics to counter atheistic propaganda. When in June 1922, after the house-arrest of the patriarch Tikhon, a presentation was arranged for him on his name-day as a demonstration of solidarity, Father Vladimir was also invited to take part, not least to compensate for the absence of the many Orthodox clergy who had gone over to the collaborationist body known as the 'living Church'. In her correspondence, which mentions scores of Orthodox ecclesiastics, never once does she speak of any of them with acerbity…" (pp. 168–169)
"…In November of the same year, Mother Ekaterina was arrested with eight other sisters, and placed in the dreaded Lubjanka prison, deprived of all human contact, in a windowless cell, with a permanently burning electric light. After four months the sisters were transferred to the Butyrskii prison, where they could enjoy a degree of mutual contact. There they partially re-created their religious life, singing the Offices from memory, in low voices. On 30 April, St Catherine's day, three sisters made profession into her hands. In May they heard of their trial, conducted in absentia, and also of their sentencing under Articles 61 and 62 of the Soviet penal code.
These articles covered any relations of advantage with the international bourgeoisie, together with the Organisation of sedition, armed uprising and espionage. Mother Ekaterina was convicted on four heads:
The sentence was deportation to Siberia.
The prison regime was harsh enough to take its toll on her physical health, and her activities were hampered by months of illness at a time. Despite her difficulties, she managed to gather information about the whereabouts of the other sisters, and resumed her spiritual motherhood by correspondence. She taught reading and writing to those of her fellow prisoners who were illiterate, taking them through Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy. They repaid her by sending in fruit to improve her diet and flowers for her cell from their work in the fields. The prison authorities commented on the dignity of her bearing and the condition of her cell: more like a court lady than a prisoner.
In this prison life, her spiritual personality seems to have attained its full flowering. At the end of 1929 she was transferred to Yaroslavl, where she would remain until shortly before her death. Her correspondence ceased, probably from fear of drawing down suspicion on the addressees. Ironically, she was thrown together with a Polish prelate, Teofil Skalski, apostolic administrator of the Latin diocese of Zhitomir, but all anti-Polonism had drained out of her. He wrote later of her 'neat, aesthetic and even festal appearance', and her 'complete simplicity and dignity'. She taught the other inmates the Psalms, and the use of the English language, and copied out newspaper articles she thought important.
Late in 1931 she developed cancer of the breast. She was operated on in the prison hospital of the Butyrskii, but without much hope of success. On account of her serious condition she was now released, though under a prohibition order on residence in the six largest Russian cities, together with the seaports. She was, however, permitted visits of ten days' length to Moscow, and the final testimonies to her come from these excursions. She remained under surveillance, and, at a meeting with women students in a friend's house, was once again arrested in August 1932. Charged with the dissemination of religious propaganda, she was sent back to Yaroslavl, but to an isolation cell. Her health deteriorated. In the course of 1935 the cancer reached her face. In the spring of 1936 she was brought back to the Butyrskii hospital, where she died on 23 July. Four days later her body was cremated and her ashes interred at a place unknown. No priest prayed; no friend was present…
…Although Anna Ivanovna's career was marked by human frailty, it is not entirely unworthy of a mention in the Church's history. Though she was in high degree a self-willed, headstrong and even impulsive woman, she was also deeply religious. Her courage, which existed finally in the mode of sacrifice, her love for the Church, and her concern for her fellow human beings, were palpable. Her boundless energy and somewhat domineering temperament were pitfalls ― yet they were also presuppositions for the success of the enterprise she undertook.
Whereas there were many sisterhoods devoted to social and charitable works in the Russian Orthodoxy of the nineteenth century, it would appear there was none consecrated to the intellectual apostolate which she made her own. At the same time, she was attempting an experiment in ecumenism, the living out of the way of life of an Order of the Latin middle ages within the context of an Eastern church, preserving that Order's own ethos and elements of its devotional life, while transplanting these to the setting of the Byzantine-Slav Liturgy and its spiritual world. That, as the child of a liberal and even secularised milieu who had found her way to Christianity through Western Catholicism, this required of her a further education in Eastern Orthodoxy itself only added to the magnitude of her self-set task.
We know that many Orthodox view with profound suspicion all attempts at Uniatism no matter the circumstances. Yet not all of Mother Ekaterina's Orthodox contemporaries saw matters in this light. Indeed, the Patriarch of Moscow saw fit to bless her work. No doubt the menace of the Bolshevik persecution of the churches drew them together. It is a Christian truth of wide application that out of suffering, borne in an evangelical spirit, does the desert bloom. The suffering which both purified and warmed Mother Ekaterina's heart may also provide a valuable education of feeling for those involved in the ecumenical task today." (pp 170-171)