Russian Greek Catholic Church
In 1928, Pope Pius XI founded the Collegium Russicum, whose graduates have included Walter Ciszek, Pietro Leoni, and Theodore Romzha, as a major seminary to train their clergy.
It was only over the centuries following the Great Schism in 1054 that anti-Papal and anti-Catholic beliefs grew as a result of the Church in Rus strengthening its alliance with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
In response, the Tsar convened a Church Council, whose bishops obediently declared Metropolitan Philip deposed on false charges of moral offenses and imprisoned him in a monastery.
"[9] Within the Russian Greek Catholic Church, Blessed Leonid Feodorov, the 20th century Exarch of Russia, is known to have had a very deep devotion to Metropolitan St. Philip of Moscow.
[10] Over the centuries that followed, as growing numbers of members of the Eastern Catholic Churches fell under the rule of the House of Romanov as a result of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the Great Northern War, and the Partitions of Poland, they similarly experienced escalating and brutal religious persecution.
For example, Tsar Peter the Great, whose anti-Catholicism and control over the Russian Church had already caused the martyrdom of Greek Catholic Deacon Peter Artemiev at Solovetsky Monastery on March 30, 1700,[11] was so enraged on 11 July 1705 to see icons of Eastern Catholic Starets, bishop, and martyr St. Josaphat Kuntsevych inside the Basilian monastery church in Polotsk, that the Tsar immediately desecrated the Eucharist and then personally murdered several priests who attempted to retrieve it.
[13] Meanwhile, with the grudging exception of the Armenian Catholic Church, the Eastern Catholic Churches were increasingly treated as illegal in the Russian Empire beginning with the forced conversion of the Archeparchy of Polotsk-Vitebsk by Bishop Joseph Semashko between 1837 and 1839 and continuing with the 1874–1875 Conversion of Chelm Eparchy and the martyrdom of 13 unarmed men and boys by the Imperial Russian Army in the village of Pratulin, near Biała Podlaska on January 24, 1874.
Nicholas Tolstoy, entered into full communion with the Holy See by making profession of faith before Bishop Félix Julien Xavier Jourdain de la Passardière at the Church of St. Louis des Français in Moscow.
[18] Tsarist policy of persecuting Eastern Catholics continued unchecked until the Russian Revolution of 1905, when Tsar Nicholas II grudgingly granted religious tolerance.
After being asked, the Pope confirmed Metropolitan Andrey's belief that he, instead of the local Roman Rite Bishops, already held jurisdiction over all Byzantine Catholics living under Tsarism.
In addition to the extremely rare privilege of Communicatio in sacris as a tool of Greek Catholic evangelisation, Sheptytsky was told that he was free to ordain priests and even to consecrate Bishops while reporting only to the Pope himself.
Pope Pius advised Sheptytsky, however, to delay using his powers openly until a more opportune time, as otherwise the infamously anti-Catholic Imperial Russian Government would cause an enormous amount of trouble for him.
[21][22][23] After the outbreak of World War I, the heavily Eastern Catholic Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was occupied by the Imperial Russian Army.
Count Georgiy Bobrinsky, an infamously anti-Catholic member of the Tsarist civil service, was appointed as Governor General of a Province which had long been claimed as Russian territory by both extreme and moderate Slavophiles.
Despite his efforts to maintain a purely apolitical stance, Metropolitan Andrey almost immediately became one of the many Habsburg loyalists, Ukrainophile intellectuals, and clergy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who were arrested by the Tsarist secret police and deported to Siberia.
Despite angry questions being raised about his incarceration by members of the Opposition in the Duma, Sheptytsky spent a total of three years as a prisoner of conscience held by the Russian Orthodox monks at the Monastery of Saint Euthymius in Suzdal.
[26] On 19 May 1917, Vladimir Abrikosov, who along with his wife Anna Abrikosova, had long been the driving force behind the formerly underground Russian Catholic parish in Moscow, was ordained to the priesthood by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church.
Potapy Emelianov, a former Priestless Old Believer and priest of the Old Ritualist tradition within the Russian Orthodox Church, entered into communion with the Holy See along with his entire parish, which was located at Nizhnaya Bogdanovka, near Kadiivka, in the Luhansk Oblast of modern Ukraine.
[32][33][34] Meanwhile, Exarch Leonid Feodorov made presentations, participated in discussions with Orthodox clergy,[35] including Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow and Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd.
For this reason,[38] in the spring of 1923, along with multiple codefendants including Archbishop Jan Cieplak and Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz, Exarch Leonid Feodorov was prosecuted for counterrevolution and anti-Soviet agitation by Nikolai Krylenko.
Feodorov was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in the Soviet concentration camps at Solovki,[39][40] located above the Arctic Circle in the former Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea.
During a conversation inside the anti-religious museum at Solovki with fellow Russian Greek Catholic political prisoner Julia Danzas, the Exarch revealed that felt profoundly moved to be incarcerated in the former monastery complex once led by St. Philip of Moscow.
The money for the college building and its reconstruction was taken from an aggregate of charity donations from faithful all over the world on the occasion of the canonization of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and the Pope chose to place the Russicum under her patronage.
After Remov's conversion became known to Joseph Stalin's NKVD, the Archbishop was arrested on 21 February 1935 and was accused of being, "a member of the Catholic group of a counterrevolutionary organization attached to the illegal Petrovsky Monastery" and of anti-Soviet agitation.
Walter Ciszek, Pietro Leoni, Ján Kellner, Viktor Novikov, and Jerzy Moskwa, used the ensuing chaos as a means of entering the U.S.S.R. incognito with the intention of running clandestine apostolates there.
All were captured almost immediately,[49] having been betrayed by Alexander Kurtna, a convert from Estonian Orthodoxy, former Russicum seminarian, and NKVD mole, who worked between 1940 and 1944 as a lay translator for the Vatican's Congregation for the Eastern Churches.
This continued until 1979, when the surviving Sisters arranged for Soviet Jewish convert and former Jazz saxophonist Georgii Davidovich Friedmann to be secretly and illegally ordained by a Bishop of the underground Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Such a move would have been strongly objected to by the Russian Orthodox Church, which caused Cardinal Walter Kasper to repeatedly persuade Pope John Paul II to refuse out of concern for damaging ecumenism.
In 2004, however, the Vatican's hand was forced when a convocation of Russian Greek Catholic priests met in Sargatskoye, Omsk Oblast and used their rights under canon law to elect Father Sergey Golovanov as temporary Exarch.
The Pope then moved quickly to replace Father Sergey with Bishop Joseph Werth, the Latin Church Apostolic Administrator of Siberia, based in Novosibirsk.
