Rome – Ninety-seven pilgrims from the four Catholic dioceses of the Russian Federation had the joy, on the morning of Friday, October 17, of meeting Pope Leo XIV, during their Jubilee pilgrimage “ad limina Petri.” “We so need reasons to hope, and today’s meeting with Pope Leo was a strong sign of hope and help from the Lord,” Stephan Lipke, Auxiliary Bishop of Novosibirsk, told Fides.
The meeting took place in an atmosphere of fraternal joy: “The Pope wanted us to sing the Lord’s Prayer in Russian, and then he shook hands with each of us: these gestures filled us with joy,” reports Bishop Lipke.
“The Pope,” he added, “has asked us to be precious stones in the edifice of the Catholic Church in Russia. Our local Church is a small edifice, we are not many, but we too can be the precious stones that build the universal Church.”
Among the gifts presented to the Pope that morning was also a monstrance made in the USSR in the 1980s, when persecutions were still ongoing.
For three of the pilgrims from Siberia, this occasion represented their first trip abroad: “Being here in Rome during the Jubilee Year is such a grace for my heart, such a joy that it is difficult for me to express it,” says Galina, originally from Kemerovo, who, for the first time in her life, has applied for a passport to travel abroad in order to be able to travel to Rome these days. Marinel, a woman of Armenian origin living in Irkutsk, is surprised to see so many places of worship and, above all, so many priests around her: a fact that is not easy, considering the difficulty Catholic priests have in regularly visiting all the communities scattered across the vast federal territory.
The long journey, made more complex by the restrictions in force, did not discourage even those in the group who made and continue to make more of an effort than the others: “We have among us people with physical disabilities and a young mother with her newborn, but we manage to experience these days together: it is something very beautiful and something that is not to be taken for granted,” comments Bishop Lipke.
After attending the canonizations on Sunday, October 19, the group will return to Russia.
The ecclesiastical province of the Catholic Church in Russia is made up of the Archdiocese of the Mother of God in Moscow and its three suffragan dioceses: the Diocese of St. Clement in Saratov, that of St. Joseph in Irkutsk, and that of the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk. Catholics in the Russian Federation represent less than 1% of the population and are mostly grouped into small or very small communities, which sometimes see the presence of a priest only very rarely during the year.
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