Word: leoni
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Encounter in Odessa. Pietro Leoni was born in a small mountain town in "Red Emilia," hotbed of Italian Communism, and was educated for the priesthood at the Vatican's Russian College, training center for Russian priests and missionaries bound for the U.S.S.R.-if and when they are permitted there. When Italian troops marched into the U.S.S.R. in 1941 alongside their Nazi allies, Russian-speaking Jesuit Leoni went along as a chaplain. In 1943, released by the disintegrating Italian army, he decided to stay on in Russia as a civilian priest and settled in Odessa, which had been abandoned...
Chalice in Vorkuta. For a whole year, the Soviet authorities permitted Pietro Leoni and France's Father Jean Nicolas to administer the sacraments to Roman Catholics in Odessa. The Russian Orthodox priests watched suspiciously. Of them, Father Leoni says bitterly: "They do not serve God - only the Communist regime." Then, one day in 1945, Father Nicolas disappeared. Recalls Father Leoni : "Later that day, two men came up to me and said 'Come with us ; it's just a question of a few formalities. You'll be free in ten minutes.' Those ten minutes lasted...
...first, Leoni was shifted from prison to prison: 2½ months in the notorious Lubianka, 3½ months in Lefortovskaya Prison, and then 35 days in Butyrka, in Moscow. All this time was taken up in "investigation." Finally, after seven months, "I was taken one morning before an official who, never looking me in the face, informed me that I had been tried without my knowledge and had been condemned to ten years of forced labor 'For espionage on behalf of the Vatican and anti-Communist propaganda...
After the "trial," Father Leoni was sent to a prison camp, Mordovia, between Moscow and the Urals. "There, hunger was our constant companion. Every day they gave us 20 ounces of rye bread, two cups of tea and two dishes of 'Volga.' We called the soup they gave us 'Volga' because it was nothing but water. On this diet the prisoners were expected to do heavy labor -mostly cutting lumber in the forest around the camp. Nonetheless, I succeeded in carrying out my mission as a priest-secretly. A Hungarian turner who was Catholic found...
Twist in Moscow. One day, a fellow prisoner from Mongolia approached Father Leoni, told him he wanted to become a Catholic. After Leoni baptized him, the man turned out to be an informer. Jesuit Leoni was put on trial for carrying on religious propaganda and for other crimes-unspecified. Sentence: 25 years of forced labor at Vorkuta, the notorious slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle. Recalls Leoni: "At Vorkuta, it is winter twelve months of the year and summer the rest of the time. That I spent over seven years at Vorkuta without dying or going crazy...