Published December 20, 2002
Celebration of Mass in Magadan is fulfillment of a long-ago dream
On Dec. 25, 1990, I offered the first public Mass ever celebrated in the City of Magadan, the Soviet Far East. Concelebrating with me was Father Michael Shields, at that time pastor of St. Michael’s Parish in Palmer, Alaska.
On Dec. 25, 2002, I will offer the first Mass in the Church of the Nativity of Jesus in the City of Magadan, Russia Far East. Concelebrating with me will be Father Michael Shields, now pastor of the parish of the Nativity of Jesus, and Father David Means, formerly pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Seward, Alaska, and now associate to Father Shields and administrator of a mission in Ola, 35 miles from Magadan.
This might be called the fulfillment of a dream; but, it was not my dream. Rather it was the dream, maybe prophecy, of Archbishop Joseph McGucken, my archbishop, who preached at the Mass in Holy Name Church in San Francisco when I was ordained bishop of Juneau by my brother, Bishop Mark Hurley, in 1970.
Archbishop McGucken noted that Alaska and Russia were only a finger-tip apart geographically, and perhaps through the grace of God they might someday through this bishop touch one another.
"What a dreamer," was my immediate thought — what about the cold war with atheistic communistic Russia?
As I celebrate this Christmas in the new, almost completed first Catholic church in Magadan, his prophetic dream will be hovering over me.
Yet, as I look back, the grim reality of the horrible gulag that the Magadan area was during the Stalin years was brought immediately to my attention.
"That was not the first Mass," I was told by one man attending that first Christmas celebration in 1990 — "but the first public Mass in Magadan," with the emphasis on "public."
"My father," he continued, "a prisoner in a slave-labor gold mining camp and a Catholic priest (Eastern rite), said Mass many times."
As that story unfolded I asked where he got the wine for Mass. "He used water."
When I mix the water and wine at this Christmas Mass, that priest will be in my prayers.
Over the years I have heard many stories of faith defying enemies. At this coming Mass one amazing woman will be present. The guards took her rosary from her when she was imprisoned. So, she made rosaries out of breadcrumbs. I treasure the one she made for me.
Three weeks after that first public Mass, in January 1991, through the good offices of Igor Pavlov, the governor’s assistant for Religious Affairs, (yes, there was one even then) 12 citizens of Magadan registered the Catholic parish under the civil law.
"Church of Birth of Jesus" was the name selected. Notice was sent to Pope John Paul II and through the office of Cardinal Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of State, the Holy Father’s blessing was sent to the people of Magadan.
I would venture to say that perhaps the Parish of the Birth of Jesus was the last Catholic parish of the Soviet Union to receive a papal blessing and the first of the new Russia.
But, I must not get mired down in anecdotes of the past, as fascinating and important as they are for history.
The coming Christmas Mass in a new church heralds the coming of Jesus Christ. It is He who inspired the small group of lay people who founded the parish and sustained it until the first pastor arrived six months later, Father Austin Mohrbacher, a Russian-speaking American priest of the Byzantine Rite who served as first pastor for four years.
It was the Messiah who invited Father Shields and Father Means to follow him to Russia.
It was the Master who attracted Catholic people in Magadan who hardly knew the church to come to him for their spiritual food and drink.
It was the resurrected Jesus who planted the seed for two American priests, Father Myron Effing and Father Daniel Maurer, to migrate to Vladivostok.
It was the ascending Christ who redirected several Maryknoll Fathers to travel from one end of the earth, which can now care for itself, to another end of the earth that hungers for the word of God and the sacraments of the church.
I was ordained a bishop in Holy Name Church in San Francisco, my very first assignment as a newly ordained priest in 1951. I had learned that the motto for Alaska was "North to the Future." Little did I know what that might mean.
But apparently Archbishop McGucken envisioned something I didn’t.