Russian Catholics marked All Saints Day and a national Memorial Day for Repression Victims on with services in commemoration of tens of thousands imprisoned and killed under communist rule.
"At local initiative, the faithful prayed for all the priests, monks and laypeople who did not wish to renounce their beliefs and were convicted on false charges", a Catholic journalist, Olga Dubyagina, told Russia's online Siberian Catholic Newspaper. "We also prayed for their loved ones, for those needing strength to forgive and those needing to be forgiven - for those who wrote denunciations, pronounced the sentences and carried them out".
The newspaper said candles had been lit at cemeteries for Catholic prisoners and deportees as far afield as Irkutsk, where a liturgy also took place at a Chapel of Peace and Reconciliation containing urns with ashes and earth from Soviet-era execution sites. It added that similar ceremonies had been held at Pivovariska, where thousands were buried during waves of repression in the 1930s, and at Tunka, where Catholic priests had been exiled after Poland 1863 January Uprising against Russian rule.
Poland's Catholic Information Agency, KAI, said commemorations had been staged at a former exercise range for the NKVD paramilitary police at Butovo, outside Moscow, where Catholics were among over 20,000 shot during Stalin's 1937-1938 Great Purge, and at St Petersburg's St Katarina church in memory of 45,000 repression victims buried at the city's Levashovsky Cemetery in 1937-1954.
The agency added that similar ceremonies had been held at five other St Petersburg cemeteries for former Catholic soldiers with Poland's wartime underground National Army, the AK, who died in NKVD-run labour camps after the end of the Second World War, as well as in military cemeteries at Katyn and Miednoje, where thousands of interned Polish officers were secretly murdered and buried by their Soviet captors in 1940.
Russia is currently home to around 773,000 Catholics of various nationalities, according to the Vatican's Annuario Pontificio, making up just half a percent of the population, with an archdiocesan see in Moscow and three suffragan dioceses in Saratov, Irkutsk and Novosibirsk, as well as a separate apostolic prefecture of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
The Church's martyrology commission, set up in 2003, is seeking the beatification of 16 Catholics, including two bishops, Antoni Malecki (1861-1935) and Edward Profittlich (1890-1942), and three Dominican nuns: the Cambridge-educated Anna Abrikosova, who died at Moscow's Butyrka prison in 1936, Camilla Kruszelnicka, who was shot in 1937 at Sandomokh in Karelia, and Galina Jentkievicz, who died in Kazakhstan in 1944.
In her commentary, Olga Dubyagina said praying for repression victims had become "very common" in Catholic churches since the annual Memorial Day was established by a 1991 decree of Russia's Supreme Council. She added that it was now normal to read out lists and testimonies of those "seized and convicted on false charges" under communism, a process routinely accompanied by "sorrow, pain, tears and silence", and pledges "never to allow a repetition of the repression".
At least 21 million people are believed to have died in persecution campaigns and "terror famines" after the 1917 revolution, including 106,000 Orthodox clergy shot during the Great Purge alone, according to Russian government data.
A total of 422 Catholic priests were executed, murdered or tortured to death during the period, along with 962 monks, nuns and laypeople, while all but two of the Catholic Church's 1240 places of worship were forcibly turned into shops, warehouses, farm buildings and public toilets.
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