Learning to ‘love your enemy’ in a Soviet labor camp

July 29, 2018 CNA Daily News News Briefs 1 Print

Lviv, Ukraine, Jul 29, 2018 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- “I can honestly say that the labor camp was the best place to understand what ‘love your enemy’ really means,” said Myroslav Marynovych, a Ukrainian Catholic who spent seven years in a Soviet gulag in the Perm region of Russia.

After receiving the 2018 Charles J. Chaput Award at the Napa Institute conference this month, Marynoych explained to CNA how the gospel came to life for him in the gulag, and how a stint in solitary confinement led him to write a letter to St. John Paul II.

Marynovych is currently vice-rector for university mission at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.

Marynovych was sent to the labor camp in 1977, one year before Karol Wojtyła was elected Bishop of Rome. He was arrested for leading the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, the first non-underground group in Ukraine tasked with documenting human rights abuses and monitoring the implementation of the Helsinki Accords.

He spent 1977-1984 in forced labor camps in Perm, and then three years of exile in Kazakhstan.

Marynovych learned early on in his gulag experience that he needed to guard against an unchristian contempt for the KGB officers and guards.

After an outburst while interacting with a guard when he was in solitary confinement, Marynovych reflected on his actions in his cell.

“This incarnation of anger – is it me? What about my Christianity? I didn’t want to transform myself into a ‘man of hatred.’”

“I started to pray. I started to walk in the cell back and forth, and…I decided, ‘No, I don’t want hatred to overcome my heart.’”

After that realization, “I behaved in a way that is acceptable as a Christian. I don’t need to hate people to say something that they have to hear,” said Marynovych.

The Catholics in his labor camp celebrated Easter twice in a sign of solidarity with their Orthodox brethren, who follow a different liturgical calendar. “That was a sort of prison ecumenism,” Marynovych explained. It also made it more difficult for the KGB officers to pit the two groups against each other.

Any sort of religious practice was strictly forbidden in the Soviet camps. In 1982, the camp administration issued a warning on Holy Saturday that anyone gathering to celebrate Easter would be punished.

“And, for us Christians, to be punished for celebrating the Easter is okay. So of course we ignored these warnings,” said Marynovych.

“We gathered and we prayed. There were people of different confessions. We started to eat some simple food that we had at that moment, and the guards arrived and took all of us to the penal isolation cell for 15 days,” he continued.

“That was the time when in Europe Christian peace marches were very popular, and the Soviet Union supported these Christian peace marches because they stood for disarmament etc. It was useful for the Soviet propaganda.”

“The Soviet Union supported Christian movements in Europe, on one hand, and punished Christians for just celebrating Easter on the other hand. We had to inform the world about that.”

The prisoners decided to write a letter to the pope.

When the news that Wojtyła had been elected reached the gulag, there was “total enthusiasm in the labor camp,” explained Marynovych.

“We all understood that as a Polish citizen, he knew the nature of communism from within, not as some Italian bishops-cardinal from outside. They knew communism as a grassroots activity of Italian communists, but he knew communist crimes from within.”

Marynovych was the man selected by the prisoners to pen the letter.

“We described the situation and asked John Paul II to make this moment known for Christians in the world – that we were punished simply for celebrating the Easter. We shared the text of this letter later when we were released from this punishment cell, and the text was agreed upon by the other prisoners.”

“We smuggled this letter secretly to Moscow, and then from Moscow to Rome.”

“After several months, we received a secret information from our relatives that John Paul II had received this letter and prayed a Mass for the signatories of this letter, including me.”

“There was a storm of positive emotion, and gratitude to John Paul II for that because this support was very important for us.”

“It was suggested that the election of the John Paul II as pope was the end of communism. And actually it happened during his papacy. The Soviet Union fell down.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marynovych had a chance to meet the pope and thank him personally, more than ten years later after he had written the letter.

“Of course, I was deprived of many joys of life – just imagine, I was arrested when I was 28 and released at 38. And yet, I am an illustration of the very important truth: God never takes anything away from a human being without compensating him or her even more abundantly. That’s why I have never considered my imprisonment as a curse,” Marynovych said in this remarks that the Napa Institute conference July 14.

“Yes, the Soviet regime did want to make my life hell. However, it was God who transformed the camp experience into a blessing.”

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Legion of Christ responds to ‘Paradise Papers’ claims of offshore accounts

November 18, 2017 CNA Daily News 3

Rome, Italy, Nov 18, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Reports about the Legion of Christ’s offshore accounts date to the time of its disgraced founder and do not apply to the religious institute today, a spokesman has said.

“Today the Legion of Christ does not own offshore companies nor does it own resources in offshore companies,” Legionaries of Christ spokesman Father Aaron Smith told Vatican Insider.

“The companies, in Bermuda, Panama, Jersey and Virgin Islands, to which the articles refer, were created at the time when Father Marcial Maciel was general manager and then were closed,” he said.

According to Smith, the offshore companies were managed “in compliance with the law and were not shell companies used for illegal activities.”

Vatican analyst Andrea Tornielli, writing at Vatican Insider, summarized several reports on the topic

These reports drew on the Paradise Papers, a collection of 13.4 million documents on various entities’ offshore finances that were reputedly obtained in a computer hack of the offshore law firm Appleby. The collection covers six decades, through the year 2014.

The documents were leaked to a German newspaper and shared with a network of journalists, including the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents began to be released Nov. 5.

Based on these documents, the Italian television program Report and the weekly magazine L’Espresso had reported that the International Volunteer Services company had been set up in Bermuda to protect the millions in revenues from the Legion’s education institutes. The alleged $300 million in revenues were said to come from the fees of more than 160,000 students around the world.

The first offshore company created, The Society for Better Education, was reportedly founded in July 1992. L’Espresso claimed the money was “secretly moved abroad and managed by Father Maciel personally, who rigidly controlled his collaborators.” The offshore network’s Rome address was the headquarters of the Legion in Italy.

L’Espresso had said that the Caserta Children’s Village would have suffered a $33 million loss through money going abroad.

Smith, however, said it was false to claim that over $300 million had been channeled annually through the International Volunteer Services company.

His comments contradicted L’Espresso’s claim that the Legion’s offshore network had not been fully closed. It had claimed that some companies that opened in the 1980s in Panama are still registered, as are some in the British crown dependency of Jersey off the coast of France.

Smith cited a 2014 statement from the Commission for the Study and Review of the Economic Situation of the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ which said there was “no misappropriation of money or other irregularities in the annual audit.”

Legionaries-backed activities today “have societies that allow them to operate in compliance with the laws in force in those countries where they carry out their pastoral mission,” Smith said.

The educational institutions “have no relations” with offshore companies and work “transparently,” are audited, and “comply with the legal and tax provisions of the respective countries,” Smith said.

He denied any links between the Caserta Children’s Village and offshore companies.

The Legion of Christ was long the subject of critical reports and rumors before it was rocked by Vatican acknowledgment that its charismatic founder, Fr. Maciel, lived a double life, sexually abused seminarians, and fathered children.

In 2006 the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, with the approval of Benedict XVI, removed Maciel from public ministry and ordered him to spend the rest of his life in prayer and penance. The Vatican congregation decided not to subject him to a canonical process because of his advanced age.
 
From that point, Pope Benedict carried on a process of reform for the Legion of Christ, a process continued under Pope Francis.

As of 2016, the institute had 963 priests, 1,650 male religious, and 121 parishes. Its associated lay movement is Regnum Christi.

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