Putin's loyalist returns church to Catholics in Nizhny Novgorod
In one of Russia’s most important cities, the local governor, Gleb Nikitin, made an unprecedented move by including the Catholic church among the historic buildings slated for restoration, and by returning it to the city’s small Catholic community of several hundred multiethnic believers. The goal is to show that in today's Russia, the "state religion," in addition to promote militant Orthodoxy, also aims to unite other confessions and religions.
A decidedly unexpected piece of good news has recently warmed the hearts of Russian Catholics: the original Church of the Assumption in Nizhny Novgorod has been returned to the parish after it was allowed to reopen in 1994.
Nizhny Novgorod is one of the most important cities in Russia, rivalling with the Siberian city of Novosibirsk as Russia’s third-largest city after Moscow and Saint Petersburg. While the capital has 15 million residents, and the imperial city in the north exceeds three million, the large city at the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers in central Russia is home to over two million people.
Since Vladimir Putin's enthronement in 2000, almost no parishes have been reopened, and the pre-revolutionary church buildings had often destroyed or seized, and never returned, left to the companies or institutions that occupied them in Soviet times.
The one exception is the former Church of the Immaculate Conception in Ryazan, south-central Russia, which had been converted into a school. Thanks to the patient and constructive work of the parish priest, the Slovak Josif Gunchaga, who has cared for the small local community since 1996, it was returned in 2018.
Currently, the local congregation is using one of its rooms, pending future restoration of the entire building. Meanwhile, a group of African students from the local medical university in Ryazan, have breathed new life in the local community. In fact, several hundred Catholics live in Nizhny Novgorod, from different ethnic and national backgrounds, including Poles, Lithuanians, Armenians, Africans, and many others.
The current pastor, Father Georgy Kromkin, is a Russian citizen and has led the community since 2017, following in the footsteps of Father Mario Beverati, who served in the parish for 20 years. Ordained priest by the then Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, he was in a sense a spiritual son of Pope Francis.
Built in the late 19th century, the church is in a central neighbourhood, and like most Russian Catholic churches, it was used by important state institutions that seemed unwilling to surrender it to Catholics.
In exchange for the original building, the parish was granted the right to use an old stable, a mere ruin, which was painstakingly restored along with other small nearby houses. It was consecrated as a chapel several times until it reached the size of a Bethlehem-style "manger church”, barely enough to accommodate the faithful.
Unlike Ryazan, in Nizhny Novgorod, it was not the parish priest who got the building back. Father Kromkin has had to maintain a very low profile to avoid accusations of proselytising or Catholic propaganda.
In the last years of his predecessor, a dispute had arisen with the local Orthodox Church over plans to open a Carmelite convent on land purchased with funds raised by Father Beverati, who saw this project as an important Catholic contribution to Russia’s religious life. Local civil and religious authorities in Nizhny Novgorod and beyond rejected this project, so much so that he was forced to return to Argentina.
As soon as he took office, the new parish priest visited the Orthodox metropolitan, also named Georgiy in honour of the holy victorious martyr, to apologise for the unfortunate insistence on the monastic project, something of great spiritual value but certainly out of step with Russian society of the Putin years.
Originally from Belarus, the austere 60-year-old Metropolitan Georgy (Danilov) granted the 40-year-old Georgy Kromkin a two-hour audience to discuss various religious issues in the city, with a great meeting of the minds on many. Still he advised Catholics to "keep quiet”.
Central Catholic Church authorities were not involved in the decision to return the Nizhny Novgorod church. The Archbishop of the Mother of God in Moscow, Italian Paolo Pezzi, installed in 2007 to replace the Belarusian Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, is reluctant to allow local Catholics to undertake overly visible initiatives, backed by successive apostolic nuncios, including the current office holder, Archbishop Giovanni D'Aniello.
The idea of returning the church came instead from Nizhny Novgorod Region’s brilliant governor, 57-year-old Gleb Nikitin, a staunch supporter of President Vladimir Putin, who has been in office since 2018, when he replaced his corrupt predecessors, and restored prestige to the "capital of the Volga."
Nikitin has included a "Latin Quarter" in his plan to redevelop the city's most prestigious sectors, restoring their prestigious historic buildings, including the Catholic church in the park explicitly designated as the “Catholic Quarter”.
He proposed to Father Kromkin that the old building be returned this year and restored next, almost entirely at the expense of the Region with the support of the city mayor, 40-year-old Yuri Shalabayev, and Orthodox Metropolitan Georgy.
The governor's plan reflects an evolution in Russia's current "state religion”, which, in addition to promoting militant Orthodoxy, intends to show its ability to unite other confessions and religions by opening places of worship – mosques, synagogues, and Buddhist temples – in various federal locations.
Until now, Catholics had not been included in this project, but Governor Nikitin wants to take advantage of Nizhny Novgorod's favourable urban planning to bring them in.
This is not the first example of an "imperial church" in Russia, both today and in the past. Indeed, this "Constantinian" evocation is typical of many glorious buildings, from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt under Yeltsin, to the glory of Mayor Luzhkov) to Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, the most majestic building in 19th-century world architecture. Not surprisingly, city authorities are reluctant to grant the cathedral to the Orthodox metropolitanate; and the list could go on.
In Nizhny Novgorod, the governor has already built a replica of Saint Petersburg’s Cathedral of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, which was erected after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and is the only church that is entirely adorned with mosaics inside, depicting the faces of saints and emperors. Today, the Cathedral on the Volga is also adorned with the new masters of Russia and the Holy War, from Stalin to Putin.
In the 1990s, a similar case involved Catholics, with the construction of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, also on the Volga. The construction was commissioned by then Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaymiev, as part of a plan to complete the political and religious setting of the local kremlin (fortress), where the great mosque and the Orthodox cathedral stand next to the synagogue at the foot of a hill.
The keys to Nizhny Novgorod’s Catholic church were returned to Father Kromkin yesterday, 28 August, a symbolic date since it falls on 15 August according to the Orthodox calendar, the day of the Assumption, after which the parish is named.
The providential plan is completed with the conversion of the land on which the disparaged Carmelite monastery was to be built into funds for architectural design, at the parish's expense.
The new-old church will be rebuilt by entrusting the work to parish members, again thanks to special divine intervention, since the best engineers and architects in the city are Catholic parishioners.
Father Kromkin also had the foresight of purchasing the “manger church” and will therefore have two places of worship, with one entrusted to “ethnic communities”, starting with the many Armenians. He will celebrate liturgies in all federal and "Russian-friendly" languages, offering more reason to glorify sobornost, the spiritual union of peoples, religions, and cultures that has constituted for centuries the foundational principle of the ideology of the “Russian world”.
The "patriotic" wind blowing through the Catholic Church in Russia is not limited to the fortunate episode of the church in Nizhny Novgorod, one of the most significant parishes of the four dioceses named after saints rather than places, out of respect for the historic Orthodox nature of Russian Christianity: Mother of God in Moscow, Saint Clement in Saratov, the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, and Saint Joseph in Irkutsk, eastern Siberia.
While not supporting the war in Ukraine and calling for peace, Catholics are trying to remain engaged in a dialogue of “hope”, to cite Archbishop Paolo Pezzi, and to look to the Russia of the future not as a gloomy kingdom of ideology, but as an opportunity for rebirth, for a new Assumption into heaven with love for all peoples.
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