MARY, OUR MOTHER

Kazan and Fatima

 

A wise Orthodox bishop, miraculous icon, a night train ride into the snow.....

By Robert Moynihan, reporting from Moscow

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The Icon of Our Lady of Kazan

(Note: I left off my last report, Letter #50, from Moscow and Kazan,  just before entering the sanctuary in Kazan, Russia, to view the icon of Our Lady of Kazan on Sunday afternoon, November 15. Here is the continuation of that report...)

"Let's go to see the icon," says Father Diogenes. "Dmitri and Maxim are waiting for us there..."

 

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From Kazan to Portugal to Rome and Back 

 

 The icon we are going to see is the icon of Our Lady of Kazan. (photo of icon, left)

 

It is the icon which was kept by Pope John Paul II in his own apartment for 11 years, from 1993 to 2004. I personally saw it there, when don Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Pope's personal secretary, now Cardinal Dziwisz of Cracow, invited me once up to the papal apartment to see it.

 

This revered Russian icon, which depicts Mary holding the child Jesus, was first discovered under mysterious circumstances by a young Russian girl named Matronain 1579.

 

Very early on, miraculous healings were attributed to it, and this prompted the Czar to call for it to be brought to Moscow. Over the following centuries, whenever Russia was in grave military danger, including against Napoleon, the Russian Czar and people would pray before the icon, and on each occasion, the nation was preserved from defeat. And for this reason, the icon came to be popularly known as "the Protection of Russia."

 

In 1918, during the Bolshevik revolution, when religious objects were being destroyed and churches turned into latrines, the icon was also in danger, but it escaped. It was spirited out of the country and into the hands of an art dealer in Warsaw. Through many twists and turns, the icon found its way, it is believed (the story still needs to be thoroughly reconstructed) from Warsaw to London, from London to New York, and from New York to... Fatima, Portugal.

 

Yes, for many years, this most famous Marian icon of Russia was in Portugal, in a special chapel builtespecially for it next to the site of the apparitions of the Madonna to the three children of Fatima in 1917.

 

During the 1970s and 1980s, many Russians began to hear that it was kept there, and journeyed to Fatima to venerate it.

 

Then, in 1991, on Christmas Day, Mikhail Gorbachev signed the document dissolving the Soviet Union. Open religious persecution in Russia was over. The icon could return to Russia without danger of being destroyed.

 

Immediately, Pope John Paul II went into action. He wrote to Fatima, asking that the icon of Our Lady of Kazan be brought to him in Rome. (I have seen copies of the letter.)

 

The icon left Fatima and came to Rome in 1993. It was placed on the wall of the Pope's own private study, and I have been told that the Pope prayed before it almost every day, sometimes for half an hour.

For the next 11 years, John Paul sought a way to carry the icon himself back to Russia -- to return Mary, "the Protection of Russia," back to Russia.

 

But there was resitance in Russia to inviting the Pope to visit the country. And the invitation never came.

 

Finally, in 2004, knowing that he would die soon, and would never be able to bring the icon back to Russia himself, Pope John Paul decided simply to send the icon back. "Mary wants to return to Russia," dan Stanislaw once said to me.

 

And so, in August 2004, John Paul sent a special delegation to Moscow, and the icon was handed over to Patriarch Alexi II, and returned to Russia on August 28 of that year.

 

(Photos, left, John Paul in the Vatican delivering the icon to Cardinal Walter Kasper, and, right, Cardinal Kasper delivering the icon to Patriarch Alexi II in Moscow. Alexi is on the right, Kasper in the background in red.).

 

The question then arose of what would be the fate of the icon, now that it was back in Russia.

 

The decision was made to return it to Kazan, and to build a pilgrimage center there. In this way, the "protection of Russia" could be venerated by the Russian Orthodox, but also by Kazan's Muslims, who have a great veneration for the icon and for Mary, and also by Catholics and others, making Kazan into a type of symbolic "city of peace" in a world where religious warfare, despite centuries of secularization, seems to loom darkly over our future.

 

And the planning for this pilgrimage center was entrusted to my two friends, Maxim Gritschkin and Dmitri Khafizov. (Khafizov in 2001 wrote articles for Inside the Vatican about how much the people of Kazan longed for the return of "their" icon, articles I was told were read by the Pope and moved him deeply, perhaps influencing his decision to return the icon to Kazan.)

 

It would be good to see them again...

 

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Visiting the Icon

 

"Robert!" Dmitri shouted, when we drove up to the sanctuary gate with Father Diogenes. "Welcome!" And he enfolded me in a Russian-style bear-hug.

 

(Photo left, Dan Schmidt, Father Diogenes, Maxim and Dmitri in front of the gate of the sanctuary, with the Kremlin of Kazan in the background at the end of the street.)

We entered through the sanctuary gates, and made our way toward the wide stairway which leads up to the second floor where the icon is kept.

 

I remembered coming here in the summer of 2000 and climbing these same steps, and on the second floor a choir of Russian children had been gathered to sing for us. Their voices had seemed to bring human song to the portals of heaven, and that song had moved me deeply, and was a factor in my decision to try to work for a brighter future for such children, and now I was back again in this same place, experiencing what Walker Percy calls "repetition" -- the memory of "then" and the experience of "now" in one place, mirroring and so intensifying one's experience of reality.

The icon is in the far corner of the upper room, behind

protective glass. There are two steps in front of it, and a stand of candles.

 

Next the icon is another case which contains the tiny piece of the robe of the Virgin Mary, and other relics, brought last year from Rome by Immacolata. Click for article on Immacolata's gift

 

(Photo right: the present location of the Icon of Kazan. The window looks out over the courtyard and the main gate of the sanctuary. Father Diogenes is standing in front of the icon.)

 

The moment comes to venerate the icon.

 

What does veneration mean? Why venerate a painting? Is it something superstitious, or silly?

 

The iconoclasts of all ages have thought so, and they have destroyed the images and icons which they feel distract men and women from the awesome transcendence of God. This has always been a tendency within Christianity (remember not only the Iconoclasts, but also those Protestant groups which have shattered stained glass windows and religious statues in their righteous zeal for the greatness of God), within Judaism, and especially within Islam, where it reaches its most radical form -- no images whatsoever, only geometric patterns.

 

But an icon is not a painting. No painter paints an icon. The painter disappears, and the Holy Spirit does the painting, and what is painted is not an image, but a window, from this time into that one, from time, into eternity. It is something other than what the iconoclasts imagine, and that is why they can be forgiven, for they know not what they do.

 

As one draws closer to the icon, one feels a certain warmth, as if from a holy fire.

 

It isn't just the candles, although the candles, too, are warm, and bright. How many prayers are contained in the wax of those candles, which are being oxidized by the flame from the wick, which flickers upward toward heaven?

 

We are never worthy to pray, to ask for the deep things we long for. We long for them, and wish for them, and hope for them. And these are the gifts that prayer brings, even before it rises to God. For it elicits from our own heart the clarity of what our deepest longings are: good things for our families, peace for our friends, prosperity for all, patience for ourselves in the face of many difficulties, joy even in sorrow.

 

It would be a poor world in which prayers no longer were prayed.

 

And now I am directly in front of "the Protection of Russia," the icon of Our Lady of Kazan.

 

Silence.

 

 

 

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Leaving Kazan

 

We go out into the back, to the spot where the icon was found by Matrona. The place is in the middle of a barren field, now covered with snow.

"Last week, 250 children from all over Tartarstan were here, praying the rosary," Father Diogenes tells me.

 

"We had planned to build a pilgrimage center here, but all the work is stopped for the moment," Maxim tells me.

 

"It's time to be going," I say. "We have to see Bishop Anastasi."

 

As we leave the sanctuary, I have a strange sense of disappointment, a certain sadness.

 

The site seems almost forlorn to me. In my mind's eye, I had imagined something like St. Peter's Square, a spreading piazza with fountains and a colonnade, and the icon of Our Lady at the center. This was different than what I had imagined.

 

 

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A wise Orthodox bishop

 

We drove to Bishop Anastasi's seminary. He has 65 Orthodox seminarians studying for the priesthood, and his relations with Father Diogenes are very good. We sit for a cup of tea and talk for an hour. Anastasi tells us that Patriarch Kirill is asking all the Orthodox bishops and rectors of all the Orthodox seminaries to strengthen their curriculum.

"It is hard for some of us to keep pace with the changes of the modern world," he said. "But we are doing our best. The question we asked Patriarch Kirill is, 'How far, how fast, how long?' And he told us that, as long as the world keeps changing, we must do our best to make it possible for the Church to speak to the people of this changing world. And we are trying."

After we talk, Asastasi leads a vespers prayer service in his little chapel. We attend for a few minutes (photo left), and then we must leave for the train station.

 

During the night, it snows, and when we arrive back in Moscow, the city is shrouded in white. (photo below, from my room)

  

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“He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright.”—Blaise Pascal (French mathematician, philosopher, physicist and writer, 1623-1662)

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