Mission in the Night

A spectacled little priest with a scraggly, greying beard emerged from a private audience with the Pope and his face lit with a sudden shy smile. "The Holy Father said 'Bravo!' " he recalled incredulously.

The Pope's "Bravo" was no surprise to those who knew where 46-year-old Jesuit Father Pietro Leoni had been saying his Mass for the past ten years.

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 by the retreating Reds. Recalls Father Leoni: "The churches were reopened, and the people to whom God had been denied for years happily came back to the Christian faith." When Soviet troops were on the point of reconquering Odessa early in 1944, Father Leoni and another Jesuit decided to stay to minister to the city's Roman Catholics. As Father Leoni told the story to TIME Correspondent Robert Christopher:

"I stayed in my church, kneeling in prayer. All of a sudden, an armed Red soldier in an untidy old uniform entered the church. He advanced timidly, seemingly bewildered and frightened, and fell on his knees in front of the altar. When I approached him and he heard my step, he jumped up, ready to fire. But then he calmed down and smiled at me, and before he left, he put a coin in the alms box. He went out of the church looking around suspiciously, as though he had committed a crime."

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 ten years."

At first, Leoni was shifted from prison to prison: 2 1/2 months in the notorious Lubianka, 3 1/2 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 a tiny aluminum cylinder, and out of it made a chalice so small that I could hide it in my closed fist. From a piece of cloth, I made a purificator and the other holy cloths, all tiny.

"At night, when everyone was asleep, I would get up from my bunk, and on a rough box I would prepare the altar and celebrate Mass. For the consecration ot the Eucharist, I used little crumbs of bread and five or six drops of wine. The most difficult thing to find was the wine, but the Lord saw to it that I never lacked. Sometimes I made it myself, fermenting the juice I squeezed out of bunches of dried grapes that I got from a fellow prisoner in exchange for many platefuls of 'Volga.' I kept this precious wine in a perfume bottle the size of a matchbox."

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 was due to the fact that the Lord never let me lack a little bread and a few drops of wine to celebrate the Mass. For me and a few companions in faith and misfortune, it was this alone which gave us the strength and warmth in those horrible polar nights."

Pietro Leoni's ordeal ended because of one of those sudden, capricious twists with which Moscow pushes people toward death or away from it. As part of their approaching peace offensive, the Russians decided last April to send Prisoner Leoni home. Since then, he has had a reunion with his 84-year-old mother, his four brothers and sisters. He has been caught up in radio broadcasts, interviews, medical examinations. His missionary spirit is undimmed. Said Father Leoni last week: "Naturally, I am happy to be back in my dear, free Italy, but I do not regret the terrible years in Russia during which I was the instrument used by God to carry the comfort of religion to many poor unfortunates. If I could go back and choose freely, I would want to relive those ten years of inferno exactly as I did live them."

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