Published April 12, 2002
Religious turmoil fails to halt Magadan church project
Recent friction between Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholics in Russia has made life interesting for the Catholic community in Magadan, but Nativity of Jesus Parish there is pushing forward with its church building project.
Father Michael Shields, the priest from Alaska who has led the Magadan parish since 1994, told the Anchor last week that the strained relations make it all the more important to get the new church built now. He is visiting Southcentral Alaska parishes this month to raise funds.
The Orthodox-Catholic problem is rooted in Pope John Paul’s decision two months ago to upgrade Russia’s four Catholic jurisdictions from apostolic administrations into full-fledged dioceses.
The Vatican said the change simply normalized the jurisdictions that had been set up as temporary administrative structures when the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991. But Orthodox officials around the country reacted angrily, accusing the Catholic church of wanting to "expand its influence" in traditionally Orthodox territory.
The Russian parliament even passed a resolution asking the Russian Foreign Ministry to "stop giving visas to representatives of the Vatican."
It remains unclear how the resolution will affect foreign priests like Father Shields and his associate pastor, Father David Means, who is also an American. They currently are required to renew their visas on an annual basis.
The situation had begun to cool since those heated days after the Feb. 11 announcement, but just before the Anchor went to press April 9, Russian news agencies reported that government officials had halted construction of a nearly completed Catholic church in the city of Pskov in the northwest of Russia.
According to a report by the Russian news agency Novye izvetiia, the April 3 stop order is related to a March request that the local Orthodox prelate, Archbishop Evsevy, and several of his clergy made directly to Russian president Vladimir Putin and other officials.
"People whom our ancestors opposed are operating freely … in the Russian land," the report quotes from the letter to Putin. "Catholics are not benefactors. … They have not brought anything that is good and beneficial to a single nation."
"I was saddened to read that," said Brian Kuzel, director of the Anchorage Archdiocese’s Russian Desk.
He said April 8 that it was too early to tell how the situation in Pskov might finally be resolved, or how it might affect the Magadan church.
Workers have been laboring since the summer of 2001 to build the first Catholic church in Magadan, the city Stalin created in the 1930s as a hub of east coast slave labor camps.
Nativity of Jesus Parish, established in 1991 by Retired Archbishop Francis Hurley, is the first Catholic parish in the region. It has been located since its inception in a converted apartment in downtown Magadan.
Pastor Father Shields said the parish and he himself have had good relations with the Orthodox in the past.
But since the Vatican’s creation of dioceses in Russia, the local Orthodox leader, Bishop Feofan, has been circulating a letter opposing expansion of the Catholic church in Russia and asking Orthodox parishioners to sign it.
"These are hard times for Orthodox-Catholic relations," Father Shields told the Anchor last week. He said the souring of the relationship was especially troubling because he and Father Means have always been careful to direct inquisitive people to the Orthodox church if they have Orthodoxy in their family backgrounds.
Sometimes people in this situation can’t afford the cost the Orthodox church charges for baptism.
"I’ve paid for people to be baptized in the Orthodox church!" Father Shields said.
Troubles with the Orthodox as well as a new set of tax laws that in 2003 could limit what services churches can provide make the need for the new church even more urgent, Father Shields said.
Workers are at the stage of erecting walls and framing windows and doors. Father Shields said he hopes to be celebrating Mass in the church by the end of November.
"We will meet the deadline if we get the funding," he said. "Another $150,000 and we’ll have it made."
The total budget for the project is around $950,000. Fathers Shields and Means have been fundraising in several U.S. and European dioceses.
The church will have a worship space with seating for 200 in the upper level and headquarters for an outreach ministry below.
The design reflects respect for the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Stalin’s gulags, many of whom were Catholics sent there because of their religious beliefs, Father Shields said.
"It’s a triumph I think to build a church in the place of the former prison camps," he said. "The building is literally the concrete symbol that the church has been rebuilt in Russia and in Magadan."
Anchor writer Kelly DuFort contributed to this report.