The Catholic Magnet



Reflecting the privileged place of baseball in our culture, the newspaper clipping was entitled “Council Box Score” and gave a brief account of the accomplishments of the ongoing Second Vatican Council through the council’s first three sessions. Since the third session of the council ended on November 21, 1964, my guess is that the newspaper article is from November or December 1964. The care with which the person clipped the “Council Box Score” leads me to conclude that the person was avidly following the proceedings of the council. Yet, I found something even more interesting — in my view far more interesting — on the reverse side of the “Council Box Score” story.

On the back, there was a short article headlined “Students Join Church” with a byline out of Munich, Germany. But the article was not about Germans or Germany. The article was about two students in Moscow’s Lenin Teachers Institute in the heart of the Soviet Union. Remember that 1964 was still the height of the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a little more than two years old by the end of 1964. The American involvement in the Vietnam War was still in its infancy. The article recounts a highly dramatic series of events in matter-of-fact newspaper prose:

Two young students at Moscow’s Lenin Teachers Institute caused a furor last month when they were baptized as Catholics at St. Louis’ Catholic Church in Moscow. . . . [T]he action was particularly galling to the Soviets because one of the youths . . . had just been appointed a political instructor for Komsomol, the Communist youth organization.

[The students] . . . were received into the Church after first declaring in a letter that “we cannot endure it any longer. The Church and religion are our last refuge.”

The students were expelled from school. . . . [A] Communist youth publication . . . blamed the defection on foreign radio broadcasts which “caressed their ears and, like rust, corroded their souls.”

Two young students bred completely in the Soviet educational system, rewarded for their work by receiving specialized training to become teachers and on the brink of sealing their future careers, threw it all away. They threw it all away at the height of Soviet power. It would be at least two decades before the Soviet unraveling would become apparent. They became Catholics in one of the most hostile environments for Christianity ever devised by man. What happened to them? Did they persist in their faith even through persecution and loss of status? Did they emigrate? Are they still alive?

They wrote words that still reverberate today. “We cannot endure it any longer. The Church and religion are our last refuge.” Many others in far different circumstances have felt the same, even if they did not express it so eloquently. Even in the grip of a totalitarian, militantly atheist society, even before the reforms of Vatican II were completed, these students felt the magnetism of Catholicism. What attracted them? Surely, some priest or other Catholic had made some contact with them. But those of us who have been there know Who was the definitive contact who called them by name.

The call today is the same whether through a faithful priest or Catholic friend or even through The Passion of the Christ. In the very personal crisis of meaning that most of us experience at one point or another, we recognize that we must come home to our last refuge. You want proof for the truth of Christianity and the magnetism of Catholicism: browse through old books.

© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange

Oswald Sobrino’s daily columns can be found at the Catholic Analysis website. He is a graduate lay student at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He recently published Unpopular Catholic Truths, a collection of apologetic essays, available on the internet at Virtualbookworm.com, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

By

Oswald Sobrino’s daily columns can be found at the Catholic Analysis website. He is a graduate lay student at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He recently published Unpopular Catholic Truths, a collection of apologetic essays, available on the Internet here.

Subscribe to CE
(It's free)

Go to Catholic Exchange homepage

MENU