Episode 153: Mary Kloska Speaks on the Russian Mission at SOLT Conference 2002 (April 6, 2025)

This week's episode of The Heart of Fiat Crucified Love comes from the archives of Dr. Mary Kloska's mission work in Russia. In 2002, after spending a year helping to found the SOLT mission in Krasnoyarsk, Mary was asked by the SOLT community to give a presentation about the work they were doing. This podcast is copied from a tape cassette recording of the talk. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So listening to w c AT radio your home for
authentic Catholic programming.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
M h.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Say black geeve sash casbel same agos, tibi.

Speaker 4 (00:28):
Flu basnas.

Speaker 5 (00:35):
Balay quite gasp name pass click name hoosigat et potion

(00:59):
saspe bad love prato, sas sail heat, spy, slut, chish
hedsoriaish feu me yepily cheese fire.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Corner portion saspiostyania.

Speaker 6 (01:42):
Con sasstru heap clue aneytag clue chisting cheeste epi cross.

Speaker 7 (02:00):
Me str.

Speaker 8 (02:03):
Ma she.

Speaker 7 (02:06):
She yes.

Speaker 9 (02:11):
Fibu potion sapn umbrato, sipat so blocktion trial sat by

(02:35):
libious pridas.

Speaker 7 (02:38):
Sania type you to.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Vntian foer potion siperduce sistru sign acky mach he morior

(03:09):
geeste he's smelly any dragon sny no.

Speaker 4 (03:19):
She's named to chera carna the potion steve.

Speaker 7 (03:35):
Name garden.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
Huge cherver brodo ko stood sagri start me as your
shantnu s tomb ConA n potion stych u sinistrant maas

(04:27):
love flashan mast man she st b barga coayposal, satiato,

(04:53):
persia corbach to be loop.

Speaker 4 (05:01):
Feed spillst.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Spirit contradani spy each year flat potion su smith, Sir Sistruna, Shti, cornet,

(05:38):
snow sheet, crac not yet man dorty east cool planga.

Speaker 8 (05:53):
Dot Toshel for.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Triap she Din gave Safish gospel, Say my goo shoes
Torblish my fastmas shoes.

Speaker 5 (06:22):
Caj quarter Gospel, n e.

Speaker 8 (06:32):
Basque cans not t s M M.

Speaker 10 (06:57):
M M.

Speaker 8 (07:13):
In the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit, Mary, Oh, Mary Tender, Mother
of all people, refuge of sinners, beloved daughter of the Father,
Virgin mother of the Incarnate Word, mystical spouse of the

(07:34):
Holy Spirit. You were chosen from all eternity to be
the Theotokis, the Good Risa, the God Bear. We your
little society, had received the gift of missioning in the
land of your promise. Keep us, o Mother in Nadyezhda

(07:57):
the hope of the triumphs of your immaculate heart. We
thank you for the privilege of being chosen to serve
our brothers and sisters through you and the most holy
Trinity obtained for us a virgin ever faithful, the grace
to walk in your fiat. For by your yes the

(08:21):
world was redeemed. Amen. Come, Holy Spirit, Come by the
means of a powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of
Mary thy Well beloved spouse. The Mission of Salt officially
states members of Salt are committed to live the Marian

(08:45):
Trinitarian spirituality in discipleship of Jesus and Mary on ecclesial teens,
living the evangelical councils according to their state of life,
united in the Eucharist, prayer, Apostolic teaching, and in solidarity

(09:08):
of Apostolic spirit, serving in areas of deepest Apostolic needs
for the full development of people, leading all to discipleship
of marrying Jesus. If you live the mission, the vision,
and the charism of our Lady's Society, you will have fruit.

(09:33):
I'm going to tell you a story about Father Peter
Fremont Smith and Father Tom Showalter. And in nineteen ninety four,
I was seventeen years old and I found myself in
a mission in Russia. I had gone with a community
from Europe, a family of Mary co Redemtrics, and I

(09:54):
was really happy to be assigned to the mission that
had the American leadership because I knew that they could
speak English and I didn't speak any Russian. The head
of our mission in this little village called gagarding Cuff
was Father Peter Fremont Smith and Seminarian Tom Showalter. And

(10:14):
the way they lived salt spirituality gave me my vocation
not only to Salt, or it showed me my vocation
not only to Salt, but to the Russia. And if
they wouldn't have lived the spirituality of our lady society
the mission that I just read then, I don't know

(10:35):
if I would be here today. The center of our
mission was the Eucharist. When I think about the Russian
mission back in nineteen ninety four, I was seventeen years old,
and I loved God, and I went to daily math sometimes,
but I was a high school student and I had
never prayed twenty four hours a day and all the

(10:58):
sorts of things that we ended up doing and the mission,
but the way that they loved God and the way
that they showed me a missionary needed to be taught
me the importance of prayer as being the center of
every mission. Every night we had Eucharistic adoration, whether there
were twenty of us in this little village or if

(11:20):
there were five. You know, some nights we'd sign up
for three or four hours at a time and have
to go wake each other up because we'd sleep through
because we were working all day. But it was the
eu Christ as the Center that gave us the source,
the energy, the strength to do what we did during

(11:40):
the day. And I believe those hours spent before Our
Lord at night were more powerful and more profound than
anything that we did during the day. When I think
of that mission in nineteen ninety four, the first thought
that comes to my mind is the monstrance right in
front of my head on the fourth floor of this
bill building. We were building a house and we were

(12:03):
living in the construction site. In the house, it was
for drug addicts to come from Moscow, and on the
fourth floor we had this little make view chapel, and
that picture of the Eucharist in the monstrance is the
picture I have when I think of Russia. Father Peter

(12:23):
gave me two jobs that summer. I was one of
the only two women or girls at that time in
the mission. The rest were seminarians or brothers or priests,
and they were doing construction, so there wasn't much that
I or this other young girl could have done, so
I'd come to him in the morning. I'd say, Father,

(12:44):
what can I do for you today? And he'd say,
go to the chapel and pray all day.

Speaker 11 (12:48):
And I would say what he go sit before the
blessed sacrament and.

Speaker 8 (12:52):
Pray for me, and I would be okay, father, And
I always thought I wasn't doing anything, But you know,
day after day I'd go, damn, father, what can I
do for you today?

Speaker 7 (13:01):
Go sit before?

Speaker 8 (13:02):
It wasn't a curent So little by little I learned
how that has to be the center of every mission.
The other job that I was given sometimes was in
the afternoon to go down to what was called the hospital.
You have to know in Russia, anybody rejected from society,

(13:24):
handicapped people or the elderly, or I've even heard that
children of divorced it's not that they fight because.

Speaker 11 (13:31):
You the child. They want to get rid of the children,
and so.

Speaker 8 (13:34):
They're all sent to these they're called like hospitals, is
the way you would translate it. But they're not off
in the country. And there was one for men that
we helped out with, and it was sickening. They locked
them in in cages. There were these little you can see.
There's pictures I have from the ninety four mission sitting

(13:55):
out by my board in the hallway if you want
to look, and you'll see these little wooden shacks that
the men are locked in. And right before we came
they took the barbed wire down, and right after we
left they put it back up. The men were just
locked in these cages all day long. They would beat them,

(14:15):
they'd go to the bathroom on themselves. Nobody cared for them,
and so Father Pete would send me down to love them.
He'd say, go love these men, and I would say, how, Father,
I had no idea. I'd never done anything like this
in my life. I was still very very young. And
he'd say, well, you know, take a ball down there
and unlock them from the cages and love them. And

(14:39):
the caretakers would come after me, screaming and yelling because
I'm letting these men out, and I just act I
didn't understand. I acted like I didn't understand, and after
a while they didn't bother me anymore. But we were
sent down day after day, and Father Pete taught me
a very important lesson that summer. At one point they

(15:01):
decided that we were going to go down and bathe
all the men. We had gotten donated clothes, and you
never donate clothes to a place like that because the
caretakers come right in and take them right off the
men and take them home and sell them or something.
They don't let people receive the donations. So the father

(15:22):
Pete and the seminary and Tom had decided we would
go down and we would bathe them in and we
would dress them, and then we'd take their clothes and
burn them so that they couldn't put them back on. Well,
that was too much for me. I had been so
overwhelmed with all this, the sadness, the poverty, the suffering.
And I was seventeen and I said that morning Father

(15:45):
Pete said, okay, Mary, you know ten o'clock we're going.
And I said, Father, I'm not going. And he said,
what are you talking about. Of course you're going. I said, Father,
I can't.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
I just can't.

Speaker 8 (15:56):
There's no way that I can go down there for
the day and do this. I I have nothing left.
And he took me in the chapel and he sat
me down and he said, Mary, we've all been watching you,
and God gave you the gift to love. None of
us can love those men like you love those men.

(16:17):
And that's not a gift that God gave you for you.
It is your responsibility to go use it. He said,
It's not an option. He told you to do it.
He gave you that gift. I'll see you down at
the hospital. And he left. So I'm sitting in the
chapel with Jesus and my conscience bothers me and I'm like, oh, okay,

(16:39):
I'll go. And I walked down to the hospital and
they tell me to My job was to keep the
men in line, and it was one of the hardest
jobs I've ever done in my life. They've not been
bathed for a month, and they wouldn't stay dressed. And
at this point anybody who went there that was mentally
sound wasn't anymore. They were eaten so bad and treated

(17:01):
so poorly. They were all very mentally unstable and handicapped.
And I couldn't keep them in line, and I couldn't
keep them dressed. And Father just laughed and laughed and laughed.
But in the end we got everything done and taken
care of and they were clean and they were happy.
The last day I was in the mission, was August fifteenth,

(17:24):
and Father and Father Tom also they decided together that
we wanted to honor our lady. This village hadn't had
the Eucharists present in it except for our masses for
many years. There was an Orthodox church in the center
of it that they'd come in, and there's also pictures
of that, I believe out on the board you could

(17:45):
look at. And they'd come in and just ransacked it.
They turned it into a sawmill, they turned it into
a movie theater. They had gypsies had been living in it,
and the only thing left were some faint frescoes on
the walls, and up on the dome on the very
very top was the Holy Spirit and it was too

(18:06):
high up for them to get. So we always decided,
you know, the Holy Spirit stayed with this village, and
he was the one that had continued to work even
though the Communists had destroyed the church. So Father decided,
we want the Euchrest in that church again, and it
was still completely torn up, but we didn't care. We
decided we would have a mass there on August fifteenth,

(18:29):
and that he would take the Euchrist and possess all
the way around the village, blessing every house, and the
job he gave me was to somehow get all of
the hospitalmen there.

Speaker 11 (18:42):
And it was me and this one other girl.

Speaker 8 (18:45):
So we go down and we unlock the cages, you know,
and start sneaking the men down to the church. And
the head lady comes and she's yelling and screaming, and
basically what she said was anybody that you have, you
can keep, but anybody else you're not allowed to take.
So I remember kicking these men up and I just
said to they'll run, and we just grabbed them and

(19:08):
we just started running so that they could be with Jesus.
And we did. We had Mass, and we had adoration,
and we brought them back and they ate with us
and it was a beautiful, beautiful honoring of the Blessed Mother.
That's one thing that I've learned in Russia is that

(19:28):
in order to you can't do anything. I shouldn't even say.
In order to do anything, you need to honor the
Blessed Mother. That's her land. Russia is her territory. Her
son has kind of given it over, and that is
the land of her heart. She promised and Fatima that

(19:48):
her heart would triumph from Russia and that that would
spread throughout the world and convert the whole world. So
the key to Russia is the mac at heart of
our lady, and father Pete and father Tom taught me that.
That summer, many many, many years kind of went by,

(20:10):
and then I found myself once again last year coming
back to the Russian mission, and this time was in Siberia.
I'll give you a little picture of what's going on there.
A sister and I are right now living in Krasnayarsk.
It was a closed communist city up until ten years ago,

(20:31):
where they keep a gate around the city. There's lots
of government buildings there and nobody could enter or exit
without governmental permission. So foreigners are very foreign to them.
They notice everyone, and they opened up the city ten
years ago to let the first foreigners enter. Right now,

(20:53):
we spent the year primarily praying, studying Russian, helping out
with mission, but also really praying out what salt could
look like in Russia, how we could live the vision
and the mission and the charism in Russia. What is

(21:15):
the greatest need And whenever we go to a mission,
we're supposed to look for the deepest apostolic need. So
we've been praying and praying what is the deepest of
all apostolic needs there, but it's hard to find. You
have crisis after crisis. The whole society is dysfunctional. Alcoholism

(21:39):
is just rampant. Everybody has alcoholics in their family parents.
I've met so many children who don't have anybody to
care for them because they live at home, but both
parents are always drunk. The whole society is pretty much
like what an alcoholic family be, that dysfunctional. Nothing really works.

(22:06):
The different abuse that goes on, the sexual abuse that
goes on in family, there's not in all of Krasnaiarisk,
we do not know one family where you have a
father and a mother that lives faithfully together and have
children and don't have major problems with alcoholism or abuse.

(22:28):
The kids come to me, especially the ones that have
been catechized. Now for a couple of years, we've had
missionaries in krassnaarist and they're ready for marriage, and they say,
we've never seen a family in our whole life. We
don't know what's a family supposed to look like. It's
problem after problems. The average woman, we've been told, has

(22:52):
ten to twenty abortions, and I have a very good friend.
She was actually she's a sister, and she was pretty
high up in the Communist Party for a long time.
She ran what would be like the Communist boy Scouts,
and she organized the youth and she took them around
and kind of formed them according to the Communists thought.

(23:16):
And it was interesting how the Holy Spirit worked with her.
She said that her conscience started to bother her before
she knew there was a God. She said, something inside
of her just told her that what she was doing
was evil and she couldn't handle it anymore, and she left.
And it caused a great scandal in this area of

(23:36):
Siberia where I was, because she was so high up. Well,
eventually she found the church and she's become a sister
and she is on the second year of her vows.
And I went to her and I said, sister, you know,
you know Russia, you know the Communist Party, you know
the real situation here, and you have the light of
God to see the truth. Is all this stuff we

(24:00):
hear true? And she said, Mary, don't be naive. Of course,
it's way worse than what you hear. And I looked
at her and I said, I mean, Sis, I've heard
that the average woman is ten to twenty abortions. And
she said, Mary, this week a woman came to me
who had twenty five and lost count. She said, the

(24:24):
Russian people don't understand. Their hearts have just been mutilated
by seventy years of communism, of the devil running this country.
It states in the communist documents in Russia that belief
in God can be cannot be existent with communist thought.

(24:50):
To be a communist, you may not believe in God.
And you take God from a people and you lose
their heart. It's interesting. The Catechism says that the human
heart is it's beautiful. It's the place where man meets God,
the place of deepest decision. It's their sanctuary. It's the
holiest center of a person, the deepest place of their body,

(25:16):
their motion, their thoughts, their soul. They all come to
me in the human heart. Well, Russia has had God
taken from them, and in a way it seems as
if they've lost their heart. Sister and I have prayed
and prayed and prayed. What is the deepest apostolic need
in Russia? And what keeps coming back to us? And

(25:40):
what Father Tom said to me when I came back
this time as well, was the Russian heart needs to
be healed. You can't go and put band aids on
all these problems. Well, you can help them, but it's
not going to heal the whole people. Their heart needs
to be healed. And I believe that is why our

(26:01):
Lady has chosen them so that she can come and
offer them the healing of her immaculate heart. Something the
union with God within the Immaculate Heart of Mary is
the only thing that's gonna heal the Russian people. The
Eucharist is the only thing, the heart of Jesus that

(26:24):
can help to heal and teach the Russians what a
heart is. And it all makes sense in hindsight why
the Eucharist was the center of our mission in nineteen
ninety four, and why it must be the center of
our mission now. It's funny. If you come, I welcome
all of you to Siberia, if you'd like to visit me,

(26:48):
And when you come, you will hear people know the
Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity as
a Eucharistic community. This is how I'm introduced. They're Eucharistic.
They're very spiritual. These other communities they work a lot,
but Society of Our Lady, they pray and people flock.

(27:12):
Because of that, the Eucharist has to be the center,
because if you don't have the heart, then you don't
have anything else. And we have to go and receive everything,
everything that we are, from the heart of Jesus through
the heart of our Lady. It's key. And so although

(27:37):
the situation in Russia seems very bleak, and it is,
in some ways, there's great, great, great hope because our
Lady loves to choose the weakest, the littlest, the lowest,
and nothing, which is exactly what Father flanning and called
me before I left. He said, always remember you're nothing.

(28:03):
You're the least, the littlest, the lowest, and nothing. And
as soon as I got there, I realized that. I said,
you know, Mother, I can't do a thing. I can't
be a drop in this ocean. What am I supposed
to do here? And it just kept coming back. You're
supposed to be faithful. You're supposed to, as Sister Mary

(28:23):
Catherine says, provide a resting place for the Holy Spirit.
You're supposed to just receive His love through her. You're
supposed to love Jesus in the midst of these people.
You're supposed to just suffer with them. I'm not gonna
glorify the Russian mission. If anybody is a vocation, you're

(28:46):
vocated to really suffer. It's calvary. It's interesting the Communist
people really crucified in a way, the Russian people. There's
the stories and the torture and what they did to
even the culture of the people, the mind, the emotions.

(29:12):
They kind of feminize the men and masculinize the women.
Everything is just yeah, I can only think in Russian
like upside down.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
And.

Speaker 8 (29:22):
It just seems as if there's no there's no hope.
But what we're called to do is to go to
these crucified people who had Jesus himself taken from their cross. See,
that's the problem, is that they did this to them,
and then they stole God from them, or they wanted to.
I'll tell you they didn't do it, but they wanted

(29:44):
to steal God from them. So you know, the job
of any missionary to Russia is to climb on the
cross and to help them find God in their suffering.
You're not going to be able to take it all away,
but you're able to live salt spirituality, live, try to

(30:06):
live that union with each person of the Most Holy Trinity,
with Our Lady in the midst of them, and show
them how to suffer, how to find their strength in
the crucified Christ. And then after you're with them in
the suffering and they're looking to you, then you can
give them the resurrection. Then you can show them the

(30:27):
joy that can come in such suffering. It's amazing the
Communist people, they ruined all sorts of relationships. People in
Russia don't have relationships. And that's how I know that
Our Lady's charism is needed in Russia because people are
afraid of each other, of everything. The few times I've

(30:51):
come in and out of Russia, every time it's like
if you were to walk from an air conditioned room
outside into heavy humidity. You feel this presence of fear,
of something of spiritual warfare all around you. You feel it,
and Sister said the same thing. It's not it's odd,

(31:13):
and you just you have to decide to not be afraid.
You have to decide and understand that God is bigger
than all of this. He's bigger than the fear, he's
bigger than the mafia, he's bigger than the communists, He's
bigger than all these people. And you have to teach
these people not to be afraid of relationships. If something

(31:37):
happens in Russia, there's a shooting, somebody's you know, murdered,
or something happens on the street, you don't look, you
don't help, you don't report. Nobody looks to the left
or the right, or you'd be turned in, is what
the idea is.

Speaker 6 (31:52):
Now.

Speaker 8 (31:52):
It's been ten years where communism hasn't ruled Russia, but
the mindset is still there. There have been times when
I might self has been in dire need of a
Russian to come to my aid, and nobody. Nobody comes.
And you know, the Russian missionaries there have said to me, well,
et Russia. That's Russia. That's their answer to everything. That's Russia.

(32:15):
You just don't help anybody, You don't have relationships, You
don't trust anybody. And you know, even mothers with their children,
if they do have them, they feed them and they
clothe them, but they don't even have relationships with their children.

(32:36):
I don't think I've ever seen a mother love their
child the way they should, like hold them on their
lap and you know, rock them or something. Once when
I climbed in a bus, I saw it and I
was so excited. And then the lady started speaking some
foreign language and I realized she wasn't Russian, and I thought, oh, man,
my one hope. The one lady I saw that actually

(32:58):
held her baby. But we need to go and to
teach them relationships, teach them relationships with each other, teach
them relationships with God. You know, it's interesting. God gave
us the fatherhood to teach us about the fatherhood of God.
But in Russia there is no fatherhood in a human way.

(33:22):
Fathers don't stay around, and fathers often abuse their children.
So children there and people there are learning about what
it means to be a human father from what they're
learning eventually about God the father. It's everything's kind of
opposite in the way you work there. The same thing
is with motherhood. You know, they don't understand what it

(33:45):
means to be a mother. They don't understand what it
means to love their children. And you give them our lady,
and the Orthodox love our lady too, so they kind
of know our lady, because all Russians have some sort
of contact with the Orthodox, even if they don't believe
in God, they know about our Lady from the Orthodox faith,

(34:07):
which is very prevalent, and they learn from our Lady
how to be a mother. They learned from watching just
I've had people come up to Sister and I young
teenagers and say, wow, you guys really love each other,
don't you, And they just can't believe that we would
live together and work together. And it's interesting. There's a

(34:29):
priest there that says, the siss and I all the time,
you've got to be united. I don't care what struggles
you can have, because all teams have struggles. I don't
care how you're feeling about things. You have to be
one and you have to love. And if you're one
and you love, then just that witness in the midst
of the mission will be able to start changing hearts.

(34:55):
Our lady is the key. Is the key to the
Russian mission. I leave the key to every mission, you know.
Father Crappy was saying how it's so important to pray
the Rosary, and it's true. Jesus has really given his
mom a lot of power, and there's not a situation

(35:16):
I can think of where I didn't turn it over
to our lady and she didn't come through for me.
She didn't help me, if not save me from it.
See the grace of God in it. See Jesus there
with me in that struggle. There's one amazing story. When
I went back the second time here this year, I
hadn't been to Russia in seven years, and when i'd

(35:39):
gotten on the plane when I was seventeen at the
end of that summer, there was a priest and a
sister from I believe Slovakia that it brought me and
put me on that plane, Father Ralph and Sister Rita,
and I had been working that summer with a bishop
to Bishop Nielita, So those three names are important. I

(36:00):
had no contact with them for seven years, and I'm
flying into Russia from Rome and sister had asked them
sisters to meet me because the way the airports are
set up in Russia is you fly into one and
your next flight flies out of another one an hour away,
and there's no shuttle. The taxicab drivers charged like two

(36:20):
hundred dollars to take you that because you you know,
if it's needed then they'll charge anything because they know
you have to pay it. So I was stuck, and
I was praying on that plane to the Blessed Mother.
I just felt like something wasn't right. At that point.
I didn't know that the sisters weren't gonna be there,
but I just started to feel this panic, and I said, Mary,

(36:43):
you know dog gone it. You wanted me to come here.
You gotta get me through this, keep me at peace,
make sure everything goes okay. And I look up as
I'm getting off the plane, and on my airplane from
Rome to Moscow was Bishop neelitza who I had worked
with seven years ago and I had had no contact,

(37:03):
and I couldn't believe it. So I get off and
I keep looking at him, and I'm thinking, that's Bishop Meelza.
It's got to be Bishop Meeliza. But he didn't have
any clerics on because it's not as safe to go
through Moscow with cleric or it wasn't at that time,
I guess. So afterwards, I get off, I go through customs,
I don't see any sisters. I'm really scared because I

(37:25):
can't figure out how to do. You know, they're throwing
me through all these lines and asking these questions and
I didn't know Russian, and I look up and there's
Father Ralph and he also I had had no contact
with for seven years. And I go up and I said,
Father Ralph, he spoke English. You know, do you remember me?
And uh, he said, yes, I remember you that it's

(37:46):
been so long since I've seen you, and you know,
we talked for a while and he kind of walked
me through everything, and he gave me his blessing, and
Bishop gave me his blessing in the airport there and
he said, if you go through that line right there
on the other side, you'll find Sister Rita. She'll get
you to the next airport. So I go through, and
the sister couldn't believe that we had been hooked up again,

(38:08):
and she gave me your card. And it was providential
because in January, as I was going through Moscow, we
got stuck again and the only person in our group
that knew anybody in Moscow was me, and it was
Sister Rida's card, and it all came through again. She
came and picked us up and got us where we
needed to go. It's amazing when you do. Our Lady's work,

(38:30):
and you do it the way she's asked you to
do it, you do it. You know, if she's entrusted
this mission to us, she's entrusted a vision to us.
She's entrusted a terroism to us. If you live her
work the way she's asked you to do it, she's
going to give you the grace to live it, and
she's going to do miracles to open doors so that

(38:51):
you can do it. She's not going to give you
an impossible job, and the fruit that will come from
it will be amazing. You won't necess fairly see it.
You know, when I left the Gardenka that first time
in nineteen ninety four, after we left the house we
had built burnt down, the barbed wire went back up
on the men's cages, and eventually the mission was closed,

(39:14):
and it would seem that there was absolutely no fruit.
But years later my vocation came, and years later showed
up at my house in northern Indiana was one of
the girls we had served in this village who had
been in America and had found me and needed a
place to live for a couple months years later, as

(39:35):
I go through Moscow, I meet some of the you
know drug addicts that we had worked with that have
gotten better or found better lives. And it's interesting. When
I was little, my dad always said to us, he'd
sit us all thirteen. We'd have a family of thirteen kids,
and he'd sit us all down and have these talks.
And he would always say, you never know what you do.

(39:58):
He would say, ev everybody is watching you, especially since
there's so many children in this family. And I want
you guys to know that you don't understand the impact
you will make on many lives. Now. You can make
a good impact or you can make a bad impact,
but you have to know someday it'll all come back

(40:22):
to you. And it's so true. I see it from
that mission in nineteen ninety four. The faithfulness of Father
Pete and Father Tom to this mission brought forth lots
and lots of fruit. And they kept saying to me,
this is so salt. And I didn't get what salt.
I had no clue what they're talking about. You know,

(40:44):
we had brothers and priests and laity and this mission
and the sisters would come and visit from Moscow every
once in a while. But it was hard because there's
no water and no little electricity, and everything was hard,
and they kept saying, no, but this is salt, this
is salt. And it was and years later you see

(41:04):
the fruit in little ways. Our lady always works in
really little ways. Her fiat was hidden. It wasn't there
weren't tons of people there. It was she and the angel.
She lived mostly a hidden life. And so when you
work with our Lady, you remain hidden lots of times.

(41:28):
And that's beautiful because then you don't lose your you
gain humility. There's no room for pride. When you work
with our Lady, you must be willing to be little
like her. And we're supposed to live discipleship of Jesus
and Mary. When you are disciple, you imitate and you

(41:53):
become the person that's your teacher. We learn how to
be a disciple of Jesus by being a disciple of Mary.
And the more that we go and we learn from her,
we can become like her, and then she teaches us
how to become like Jesus. The one thing that Mary

(42:14):
has taught me most this year about how to become
like her in order to serve Jesus is the importance
of listening, always listening to the Holy Spirit. Father Flanagan
last year would always tell us when we would have
teachings at the Ecclesial Teine Formation Center that you must

(42:34):
listen to the Holy Spirit and listen to where he's
working before you even go to a mission, because he's
always working, and listen continually listen. What does he want?

Speaker 11 (42:48):
What does he want?

Speaker 8 (42:49):
It's our temptation. It's been my temptation to take something
I know and to run with it or to try to,
you know, think out the most practical way to do
this plan. But that's not the way that a listening
heart works all the time. You need to plan sometimes
and you need to uh, you know, organize things, but

(43:13):
you always have to be listening with your heart and
willing to surrender your plan for God's plan, because God's
plan in a mission or just in life is, at
least in my experience, is always very different than what
my plan was. And our lady always let the Holy
Spirit guide her because she was his spouse. It's amazing

(43:38):
how the Holy Spirit does plant seeds and prepare the
way before you ever end up in a place. I'll
tell you a story about Father Max. Father Max, we
work with very closely. He is a clarician priest and
in Krasnaires since we have not had assault priest, we've
been working closely with the claricians from Pole and Father

(44:02):
Max was born in Russia. He's Russian and he was
ordained last spring and he was the second priest from
Russia in Siberia to be ordained after Communism. Father Max
came from a KGB a family. His dad is very
high up, well, he retired now, so he was very

(44:22):
high up in the KGB. His mother was a movie star, director,
actress or something like that. But they didn't believe in God.
There was no speak words spoken about God. As he
was growing up, his parents were sent at this point
they were still married and they were sent to East
Germany when he was seven years old. And in East

(44:46):
Germany father would wander the streets and he wandered one
day into a Catholic church seven years old, and he
said he was looking around and he saw a statue
of our lady, and he he didn't really know who
she was, but he walked over there and he was
looking up at her, and he heard a bell ring

(45:07):
and he looks over and a priest comes out to
say Mass and he said that he heard at that
moment in communist East Germany, the words you must be
a priest from our lady. He didn't really know exactly
what that all entailed or what it meant, but he
knew that God wanted something from him, and he remembered
those words. He went home and told his mom, he said,

(45:31):
and his mom made fun of him, and you know,
his dad didn't even listen. And years years later, in
the early nineties, when Communism fell, he met the Protestant
some Protestant faith, I don't remember which one, and he
converted to Christianity. And then when the priest came in

(45:51):
it was I think nineteen ninety two. He met them
and presented himself and said, well, when I was seven
years old, our lady told me to be a priest.
How do I be a priest? You know, how do
I sign up? So they at that point had to
get permission from the Vatican because they didn't even have
official diocese set up. They didn't have a bishop's permission

(46:13):
to let him go into seminary, and we caused a
little problem there, but they did it, and they sent
him to Poland, and he's a wonderful priest. He suffers,
he's got MS, but he's a wonderful, wonderful priest, and
it shows how the Holy Spirit had been working years earlier,

(46:34):
giving him this vocation so that when the priests came
in they could just cultivate it. It's amazing the little
kids that I meet in the same kinds of situations
that come up and say, you know, I know I'm
supposed to pray for people, how do I do it?
Or you know, I know, you know our Lady wants

(46:54):
me to do this, how do I do it? And
these are children from you know, alcoholic families that parents
don't believe, and they walk twenty minutes to Mass on
their own. I mean, there's no doubt that the Holy
Spirit's working in the midst of the darkness, but he's
working hiddenly with our Lady in the way that she

(47:16):
always works. It's really all that I can think of
to share with you the most important things about our
Lady's mission. But I can't stress to you enough how
important it is for you to uh for you to
live everything that our Lady gave us in vision, mission

(47:41):
and charism, because once you lose that, you'll lose your identity.
And you don't have a gift to give. You know,
our lady is prepared away I see in Russia for
these gifts, the specific gifts of salt. And if we
try to go and give another gift that we think
is great, you know, they're not cultivated, they're not ready

(48:02):
for it, they can't receive it. She's got a plan,
and so each of us has to live our role
and our vocation and our part of salt in the
way that she's asked us to. And then in the end,
her immaculate heart will triumph that I'm not I don't doubt,
and then the whole world will be converted. So that's beautiful.

(48:24):
I was asked to ask if there were any questions
that somebody might have.

Speaker 7 (48:28):
Yeah, how as.

Speaker 12 (48:49):
You're there as a Catholic and representing the society and
the ladies members, how how do you respond to the
Orthodox questions and criticisms that the Catholic Church is proselytizing,

(49:10):
Which could you just give us a little insighted for that.

Speaker 8 (49:24):
The Holy Father has been really careful about the way
he's worked in Russia, and we're trying to take a
lead from him. When he set up the diocese. He
knew that the Russian Orthodox Church would not be happy
because the Orthodox have a belief that only one bishop

(49:45):
can be present in every diocese. For them, it's just
wrong to have more than one, and so for us
to set up we had dioceses, that's true. We had
dioceses before communism set up for I believe, throughout Russia.
But when we reinstated them as active dioceses, the Orthodox
were very angry. But the Holy Father was very wise.

(50:09):
He did not name them after the cities. He named
them after saints or feastings, so that it didn't seem
like we were setting up diocese in the same geographical region.
It seemed as if we were setting up dioceses under
a spiritual patronage, like we're in the Diocese of Saint

(50:30):
Joseph in Irkutsk.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
It's not the.

Speaker 8 (50:33):
Diocese of Irkutsk. But the Orthodox are very angry at us,
and I think you can see it anywhere in the news.
We see it on TV in Russia all the time.
We've been encouraged to imitate the Holy Father in his
humility and his love. The priests beg their people to

(50:54):
be very merciful, to be very loving and prayerful. When
you know people come and pick at the church, the
Orthodox will come and pick it sometimes, and he asks
us to forgive and to forgive and to forgive. The
bishop himself is some of most of you probably know,

(51:15):
has been removed from Russia. The government has forbidden for
him to come back. When he was coming returning to
Russia in April, they stopped him in Moscow and took
all of his papers and sent him back to Poland.
They said that he was an unwanted person in the country.
And he himself has gotten on loud speakers at the

(51:35):
cathedral and Irkutzk over the telephone and told his people
that obviously this is the will of God that he
not be there, because God is bigger than all of
the problems, and if God wanted him there, he would
let him be there, and that we need to trust,
and we need to pray, and we need to love.

(51:57):
It is hard, it's hard to answer questions you are.
It's interesting how the situation there is because the Orthodox
Church is one with the government in a lot of ways.
When communism fell, the communists killed many many Orthodox In
addition to the Catholics, but then they took the other

(52:18):
half and they decided to work with them. So they're
very united and the church or the government is very
united with the mafia. So they're all kind of inner wound.
So you have to be careful. And I've been stopped
on the street and asked questions by government people, or

(52:40):
by Orthodox priests or by it just you know, they're
all kind of together drilling me about the diocese and
all of that. And I went to the vicar general
of the bishop and I asked him, how do you
want me to respond to these questions or these accusations
on the street. And he said, to me, Mary, tell
them every thing you know, because they know it anyway,

(53:04):
he said. You know, they listen to every phone conversation,
they read my email. They you know, he said, they
know it, he said, And we're not hiding anything. You know,
when you're with God, you don't have to, you know,
hide the truth and sneak around. He said, tell them,
tell him I went to Rome, or tell him that
you know this is our plan, or tell them everything

(53:24):
you know, because if you do, then they'll look at
your response and they will see if you it looks
like you're hiding something or you're nervous, then you'll get
in more trouble than if you just tell them all
the truth. But he said, you know, work with them,
Try to work with them on the simple level. I'll

(53:44):
tell you, the Russian people are very faithful, and the
Orthodox that you meet on the simple level are very beautiful,
faithful people who don't understand why we don't have the
same Christmas and don't understand why we don't have the
same Easter. And I'll tell you in church, I have
my little Orthodox Babushka grandmother who decided to adopt Sister

(54:08):
and I, and she came to the Catholic Church because
she was having some spiritual problems when somebody told her
the only people to help you are the Catholics. And
so she can't hear and she can't see, and she
comes into church and she knows nothing of what's going on,
and she sits down by Sis and I, and she,
you know, starts fumbling through things. She's talking really loud

(54:30):
in the middle of mass, asking what's going on, and
Sis and I kind of, you know, took her under
our wing and tried to explain things to her and
guide her sister would have to write. She can see
a very little. She would take this piece of paper
and write in huge Russian notes to her, you know,
like now we have to be quiet or you know, well,
it was time for Communion and she wanted to go

(54:52):
up to Communion, but she technically not supposed to, so,
you know, we tried to tell her she had to
sit there, and she kept saying, what I did, did
my fast? I did my fast. So afterwards we talked
to the priests of the parish and she was too
deaf to go to confession in the normal way they
have it in the little confessionals before Mass, because nobody

(55:14):
could hear. And he said, you know what, this is
a pastoral call. I'll make an exception. I'll take her,
I'll confess her, she can.

Speaker 11 (55:24):
Go to communion.

Speaker 8 (55:25):
He's like, she will never understand the difference between the
Orthodox ray than the Catholics. You know, there are situations
where you can try, and you can try, but she
just didn't understand. If she had fasted, why she couldn't
you know, receive And she kept saying, but they told
me that if I went to Mass at the Catholics
and I received communion, that I'd be healed and everything

(55:46):
would be better. So you know, you have to work
with the split like that, and I truly believe Our
Lady will unite the two. The Orthodox have a church

(56:09):
is because it was too embedded in the people and
the people would have all revolted, and so what they
decided to do was some of it and then the
rest was destroyed. So Our Lady is still you know,
you go into when I go into the villages, and
you go into the houses and the villages, they still
have the tradition in the corner that corner of this

(56:31):
one room. It's very traditional.

Speaker 11 (56:33):
The way their houses are.

Speaker 8 (56:34):
Set up is the icon to our Lady with the candle,
and you first go there and you make the sign
of the cross and you bow, and I mean even
if they haven't gone to church in years, you know,
they still have that devotion. And lots of people who
come to the Catholic Church may have had Catholic roots,

(56:57):
but we're baptized in the Orthodox faith because it was
easier during that time of communism. The two are kind
of wound up as one. So we just try to
kind of spread unity and love them and pray for unity.
Every mass we pray for unity, and we tell the
people that they have to, you know, be patient. They're

(57:20):
really scared. The Russians are very scared. They you know,
these Babushtras, they come to church and they're crying and
they say, you know, we only had ten years of
freedom and now they're going to take our bishop and
take our faith.

Speaker 11 (57:35):
And they're just God bless them. They're right.

Speaker 8 (57:37):
I mean, it's it's scary for them to see. But
you know, we tell them just they need to forgive
and they need to love, and we need to work
with them. And we know the truth that we're not proselytizing.
We know the truth that most of the people we
serve actually in our area we're Polish or German Catholic

(57:59):
exiles years ago and they've just been passing the faith
down from grandmother to grandmother, generation to generation. You do have,
you know, atheists that come to the church, but it's
it's mostly the work that we do are with the
already existing Catholic populations that have just lost their faith,

(58:22):
and you find them everywhere. Somewhat. I think that Satan
has really struck there because if you divide, you conquer,

(58:44):
and so it could be. It could be for power,
since you know, the Orthodox Church and the government are
very united, and because the Orthodox have such a grip
on the people, because you know, they've always kind of
been around there too, and uh so, yeah, that's true.

(59:09):
We just gotta love them. I even feel bad talking
about the division because that doesn't help anything. And so
I always try to just avoid the Orthodox Catholic questions
because I really believe we're gonna be one. I mean,
someday we really are, whether they want it or not,
or you know, we're gonna have both, and they're good.

(59:33):
They just they don't know better. Sometimes. Yes, I know
about it a little. I don't know a tent father, Tom,
do you know anything about our lady? Because I just
know about it.

Speaker 11 (59:50):
I don't know a story, right, right, you re right.

Speaker 8 (01:00:12):
I don't know the history of.

Speaker 7 (01:00:30):
The UH as you're told. Tuck out of uh Russia UH.

Speaker 13 (01:00:51):
Either in the twenties or thirty and uh someone in
the United States raised about five million dollars to pay
for it. Uh and the Russians wanted the money bad
enough they allowed it to come through. So for many
years it was in the Domus Paschish where the.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Blue army had their home and that's where I saw saw.

Speaker 13 (01:01:13):
It for the first time, upstairs in a chapel, and
they all told all the pilgrims that it was their
desire that someday our Lady at Kazan would be returned
to Russia. So all the pilgrims whoever went to Satima
were exposed to.

Speaker 10 (01:01:30):
That that icon. Any other questions, Oh sure, mm hmm, okay.

Speaker 8 (01:02:24):
We also have in Krasnayersk the sisters of Charles Borromeo.
They're also in Irkutz and they they came in ten
years ago with father Anthony Badoura, who's the Vicar general.
He's a clarician, and he came in ten years ago
with sister Samuela who is a sister of Charles Borromeo,

(01:02:47):
and sister Maria, who I don't know what in English,
the Adorers of the Precious Blood of Jesus, maybe from Poland,
and they came in and kind of started the mission
up in krasnas So they're still prevalent. And the sisters
of Charles Borromeo we work very closely with in krasnask

(01:03:10):
and in Atchinsk, which is about two hours from us,
are the sisters of are the doors of the precious
Blood of Jesus. Father Tom knows probably a little bit
more about the other you were in your cup. It's
a good hand up.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Yeah, well the hours up. But I just it kind
of sounds like, you know, Mary gave the background of
her first involvement in our first time in Russia in
the summer of ninety four, and I don't know how
many of you know the story of us going back,
Father Jim Keller, her and sister Mary Katherine went and

(01:03:57):
met the bishop, and the bishop invited us to come
back back back into your kutzk Bishop Masua, And so
Father Jim came and at the priest's retreat in the
year two thousand, asked all the priests that were gathered
in the chapel for the retreat, and he said, Bishop

(01:04:17):
Maser has asked for two priests to come. Father Tom
over there he was with Pete and Russia in ninety four.
He's going, so we just need one more priest. We
just need one more priest and one more prieston. I
was like, MOI, okay, so not really an unwilling but
an unwitting first missionary. But believe me, once you get

(01:04:41):
there and Tommya's and I went, it's something that just
grabs your heart to see the people in the situation
that they're in. We have to say a few words
about Bishop Masuar and we were there. In ninety four,
Father Peter went to Archbishop Kandra Sievitch, who was the
Metropoli's the head of all the bishops in Russia. And

(01:05:02):
he's an extremely gifted He's a beli Urusian, wonderful man,
gifted as languages, but he's not what you would call
a missionary bishop in the way that we think of missionary.
I'll give you an example. When Father Peter went to
meet him, Barti official congressaved, it's just a person. He
said to him, how much Russian do you know? Father

(01:05:23):
Peter said, well, I don't. He says, well, come back
and see me when you learn Russian. That's all he
wanted to say to him. You know, in other words,
I need priests here now who can serve, who can
speak Russian. Contrast that with Bishop Masur in Erkutsk, who's
a society of the Divine word, missionary priest who is
eight years twelve years in Africa and speak one of

(01:05:43):
those weird African dialects where they go like that in
their language. He can speak that language, you know, knows
eight different languages and has a missionary's heart. He gets
to r Kutzk in nineteen ninety seven, nineteen ninety six
with his suitcase, and within three years he has built
a huge, one of the most beautiful cathedrals you'll ever see,

(01:06:05):
right across the street from the largest atheistic university in
all of Siberia. All right, there's a guy making a statement. Yes,
all right, two huge buildings on this complex. One there's
the cathedral and the other is a huge curia building
where he invites missionaries, not just Poles, okay, brothers and sisters.

(01:06:28):
The Poles are not going to save Russia. The Russians
hate the Polish. Read Dostayevsky. You know, they can't get along.
The Poles aren't gonna do it. And Bishop Maser knows that.
On his episcopal shield he has Our Lady of Fatima,
he has the triumph of the Immaculate Heart. You know.
This is his vision for Russia. All right. So he's

(01:06:49):
inviting in Americans and Filipinos and Germans and a Slovaks
and Koreans and Japanese to come in to share in
this mission of the triumph of the the heart of Mary,
and he brings us in for a year long program
to learn the language and to learn the culture. So
important to learn those things. If you don't know you

(01:07:10):
can low the language. If you don't know where the
people are coming from, you don't know the people, you
can't understand why it is that. What Mary was saying,
why the Orthodox Church is the way it is today
is a historical situation that you have to know five
hundred years of the history of the Orthodox Church to
understand where they are and where they're coming from. Today.
You have to understand that the Russian people were to

(01:07:30):
a feudal people when Lenin came in and did the
Bolshevik Revolution. The vast majority of the Russian people were
like the people who lived in twelve hundred in Europe,
just simple, basic farmers who would do whatever anyone told
them to do. And that's why the Communists revolt was
so successful. Okay, and that's why that's the hope, brothers

(01:07:52):
and sisters. I don't want to take too much longer,
but so the first thing that Tom and I did
when we got there, Brother Tom and I is well,
we had here it down downtown Corpus Christor. We had
bought this crystal clock and we pulled the clock out
of the middle of the crystal, and that was going
to be our monstrance, okay, and we're going to establish

(01:08:16):
eucharistic adoration there. So the first day we were there,
we put that up and we got little picks that'd
been in there and put the Eucharist in there. Well,
two days later I came into my room where I
was living, and it was laying on the floor smashed.
I was like, whoa, what happened here? Well, the bishop's secretary,
Jid Joseph, had taken it and smashed it. He was

(01:08:36):
He was like, well, eucharistic adoration is good, but let's
use a real monstrance. Guys, come on, and he got
out this beautiful, beautiful monstrance, and basically it was just
given to that purpose of doing Eucharistic adoration. And since
that time they've had Eucharistic adoration every day there for
most of the year that after the cathedral was built

(01:08:56):
we were there. They did it right in the cathedral
and people would come from from outside come into the cathedral.
Another experience that I had a lot of those people
are Poles. Are they're the children of Poles, Polish Lithuanians,
et cetera, who were exiled into Siberia, into the into

(01:09:16):
the into the gulags, and are there, you know, are
the children at them. One day I was in the
cathedral taking my turn watching the cathedral, and then walks
this very stately woman with her friend, well dressed, you know,
for for your kuittzk and she says, uh vigaviriti. But
you know, you know, you speak Russian. I said, yeah,
I speak a little Russian, you know. She says, well,

(01:09:37):
my name's Marina Lubinski. I am a professor of kinetic
physics across the street at the university. And she said,
hold the chair in physics at the university. She says,
you're a Catholic. Yes, yes, this is the Catholic cathedral.
She says, well, my Polish grandmother made me swear on
her deathbed that if the true faith ever came back here,

(01:09:58):
I would present myself for baptism, all right, and so
that's what I'm here for, you know, That's what I'm
here for. Brothers and sisters, that that happens every day,
and that because people people walk in off the street
and say, what must we do to be saved? What
must we do to achieve baptism. The difficulty is people

(01:10:21):
about my age and older had atheism so ground into
them by the system that the idea of the faith
just kind of bounces off them like water off a duck.
But people my age and younger didn't have so much
of the atheism, and they've seen the lie that materialism
is is it's it's they're big time. It's it's coming

(01:10:42):
in really big time. And so they're the ones who
come in and they say, well, what have you got
to offer? What have you got to offer?

Speaker 8 (01:10:50):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:10:53):
One more story, one more story. We have a beautiful,
beautiful pastor at Joseph, Father Joseph, the Slovakian priest, who
speaks just perfect Russian, and he gives these beautiful, just heartfelt,
very theologically correct sermons that drive some of the people
crazy because they don't they don't have those categories yet.

(01:11:15):
But for people like us who can appreciate it, it
did beautiful. So he was up there one day one
Saturday vigil Mass, and he was giving a sermon and
it was about. It was the gospel of the of
the of the shrewd Manager, all right, and how the
manager took and took the to the dead and reduced

(01:11:36):
reduced it down, and Jesus commended him for that. He
needed to be shrewd. So Father Joseph was giving this
killer homily about the need for Christians to just be
you know, da da da da, and to be stewards
of their money. Meanwhile, in the front row, right in
the front row as a bus driver and his friend

(01:11:56):
who are about two bottles into their five bottle of vodka.
A journey for the day, okay, and the guy just
starts speaking out to him. He says, so you expect
me to manage my money? How can I manage my
money if I don't have any money? And so people
like trying to shash the guy. You know, well, look

(01:12:18):
this guy is, he's trying to tell me I got
to manage my I can't even keep a job.

Speaker 9 (01:12:21):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
So I walked up and I grabbed him, and I
walked out into the back with him and his friend,
and I said, you know, you know, you really you
gotta be quiet during Mass, and he was. So we
started talking and he found out I was an American
and he just started crying and he threw his arms
around me and it embraced me, and you know, he

(01:12:42):
was drunk, but uh, but he really, you know, he
expressed a deep desire to be united with the Americans again.
He said, you know, we we we we heard how

(01:13:03):
evil you people were, and we hated you for so
many years, and we knew that wasn't true. And now
look you're here, You're here trying to help us, and
that's so beautiful. And he was just crying, and so
Tom and I Tom Eads and I took him back
and he uh, he eventually came around and was coming
to the catechism, and it was I would assume he

(01:13:23):
was baptized at you at some point in the in
the venture. But these are the wounds that are in there,
and our Lady's Society is really is really needed there.
And that again I saw when Tom and I were
there the prayer, that we were doing the Eucharistic adoration,
but brothers and sisters, when the sisters came. We were

(01:13:45):
there from May until September consecration at the cathedral and
after that learning Russian in the program when the sisters came,
Sister Mary Catherine and Sister Jessa, our life changed dramatically.
Our world just changed and got better. Right, we were complete.
We didn't know we were lacking up until that point,

(01:14:07):
and then when they came, it just changed everything, and
it you know, and people would come up, you know,
some of the other people in the program there, there's
a lot of other religious and there's a lot of priests.
There's even some secular priests there, and that would come up,
and well, what is this society that you guys haven't
Why is it You guys like each other, like hang
around with each other, You even recreate with each other,

(01:14:31):
you like do stuff together besides just praying together. What
is it about you guys?

Speaker 8 (01:14:35):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:14:36):
And it's not like we always got along. I say, no, no,
it's not that that we always did get along. You know,
we have we had our own conflicts, but we were
just trying to be faithful to our rule of life
and just in doing that, that's a tremendous witness to
a society that is so wounded, not just I think

(01:14:58):
we were living with, but I'm thinking in Russia still
wounded in the area of family I'm going to leave
you with one final vision, which is it's an image
that Mary told me about, Mary Kloska. Every morning they
get up and they walk early in the morning to
go over the masts of the Claricians in Krasna risk
and there was a construction project going on, and there's

(01:15:21):
all these Russian men, construction workers, and they're putting the
bricks in and they're kind of lazing off, you know.
Communism just ruined their work effors, you know, in this kind.
But over them is a foreman, and the foreman is
a Russian woman. And that's very common there because basically
in communism, men just completely abdicated their authority over to

(01:15:45):
the state. And who came and picked it up? Women?
Women wear the pants in Russia. Okay, they're the ones
who are in charge. So here's this Russian foreman, women
screaming at these guys. Do you guys, you lazy bumps?

Speaker 8 (01:16:01):
Get you that at her?

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
And they're just in terror of her. They're just, you know,
she's the only reason why they why why the job's
getting done. And I thought, isn't that interesting? What used
to be one of the most patriarchal cultures in the world.
That's what the Russian culture was. The father was was
the strength and the center of the of the family,
and that's where the faith came from, and that's where

(01:16:23):
that's where people looked up to. And if the man died,
very often the woman would commit suicide because she was
so devoted to her husband before and now it's been
so controverted. This this is the triumph of the immaculate heart.
Brothers and sisters, this is this is what's going to happen.
It's not the categories that have been given to us.
Are the categories we work with the fact that it

(01:16:45):
was a feudal society. We don't have to go in
and make them sophisticated and bring them through, bringing them
through adolescents as it were, so that they can become independent.
Our lady is going to do a major triumph. And
the image of the fore women, who's a woman leading
the men in their job to me is a microcosm
of the image of what our lady is going to

(01:17:06):
do with the Russian people. You know, she loves them
so much and they're so dear to her because of
their littleness, because of their simpleness, because of their woundedness,
and they're going to do what she says. They're gonna
follow her, you know, and they're primed for that. The devil,
he can do what he wants, but he's just doing
God's will. What he did there is just preparing the

(01:17:28):
ground there for the triumph of her immaculate heart. God
wants our Lady's society to be a part of that,
a big part of that. And I don't think we
can discount the importance of the Russian mission.

Speaker 9 (01:17:41):
I want to.

Speaker 10 (01:17:54):
Thank you Mary, thank you Father Tom. That concludes our session.
So this morning we'll have a little break before we
have Mass at eleven and somebody we have what moment.

Speaker 1 (01:18:56):
Hello, God's beloved. I'm Annabelle Mosley, author, professor of theology,
and host of then Sings My Soul and Destination Sainthood
on WCAT Radio. I invite you to listen in and
find inspiration along this sacred journey. We're traveling together to
make our lives a masterpiece and with God's grace, become saints.

(01:19:19):
Join me annabel Moseley for then Sings My Soul and
Destination Sainthood on WCAT Radio. God bless you. Remember you
are never alone. God is always with you.

Speaker 2 (01:19:38):
Thank you for listening to a production of WCAT Radio.
Please join us in our mission of evangelization, and don't
forget love lifts up when knowledge takes flight.