The History of the Parish of Saints Peter and Paul the Apostles

The history of the Parish of Saints Peter and Paul began in the late 17th century. By this time, a considerable number of foreigners of the Catholic faith were living in the German Quarter in Moscow – primarily European merchants and military personnel in Russian service. However, the authorities did not permit Catholic priests to reside in Russia, nor did they allow the construction of a Catholic church, until historical circumstances developed in a way that was favourable to Moscow’s Catholics.

Of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s six sons, only three outlived their father. Following the death of Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich, whose only son had died in infancy, two tsars were crowned at once: Alexei Mikhailovich’s younger sons, Ivan and Peter. Ivan, aged 16, was a frail, sickly young man who showed no interest in affairs of state. Peter (the future Peter the Great) was 10 years old. Princess Sophia was appointed regent for her younger brothers; her closest associate was Prince Vasily Vasilyevich Golitsyn, who headed the Posolsky Prikaz (in modern terms, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Prince Golitsyn and Princess Sophia pursued a policy of rapprochement with European countries, as Russia was keen to forge a broad coalition against the Ottoman Empire, whose expansion posed a threat to Christian states. At the same time, they were forced to take into account the existence of an influential conservative party, which viewed anything new and foreign with suspicion, particularly the adherents of the ‘Papist faith’. One of the leaders of this party was Patriarch Joachim.

In these historical circumstances, the Catholics of Moscow drew up a petition to Tsars Ivan and Peter, requesting permission for a Catholic priest to reside in Moscow, for ‘foreigners of the Lutheran and Calvinist faiths have both pastors and places of worship, whilst we have no spiritual guidance, and this causes great harm to our souls’. Indeed, Protestant ministers had been ministering in Moscow, with only brief interruptions, for over a hundred years, since the time of Ivan the Terrible. Although Protestantism differs dogmatically from Orthodoxy far more than Catholicism does, the Russian tsars had always been more lenient towards it. The reason for this was that Protestants readily agreed to promise not to preach to Orthodox people or to admit them into their congregations, whereas for Catholics such a promise would have been a betrayal of their faith. Thus, in 1684, the Moscow Catholics submitted a petition to the tsars via Prince Golitsyn. General Patrick Gordon – a brilliant military commander of Scottish descent who had been in Russian service since 1661, a devout Catholic, who would later become one of Peter I’s closest associates. In the same year, 1684, an embassy arrived in Moscow from Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who was also interceding on behalf of his fellow believers. Since, ever since the time of Ivan the Terrible, all requests for permission for Catholic priests to live in Moscow had invariably been rejected, Prince Golitsyn was reluctant to give his official consent, but verbally permitted Johann Schmidt, a Jesuit who was part of the imperial embassy, to remain in Moscow.

Johann Schmidt became the first pastor of Moscow’s Catholics. On Sundays and Feasts, he celebrated Mass and preached at the home of the Dutch merchant Van Troyen. Just a few weeks after beginning his mission in Moscow, he wrote to Berent, the head of the Lithuanian Province of the Society of Jesus: ‘I have laid the foundations for a school, prompted to do so both by my vocation and the service of the Order, and by the extreme necessity that weighs heavily upon us here. <…> These beginnings are, of course, modest, but I hope that Catholics from Kyiv, Smolensk and other regions and towns, and already two boys (whom I have begun to teach to read and write Latin letters <…>) have, in four days, learnt the order of service during the Holy Mass; I make use of their services daily’. The following year, 1685, Father Johann, citing his advanced age and poor health, asked the tsars to permit another Jesuit to come to Moscow as his vicar. Thanks to Golitsyn’s patronage, a second Jesuit, Albert de Boyer, arrived in Moscow, but he died in 1686. In his place, the 39-year-old Czech Jiří David, a colourful and energetic figure, became Johann Schmidt’s vicar.

As early as the year of Father Jiří David’s arrival, the Moscow Jesuits purchased their own house, registering it in the name of Francesco Gasconi, an Italian merchant living in the German Quarter. On 5 May 1687, on the Feast of the Ascension, the ‘church tent’ – that is, a temporary chapel – was consecrated. At the same time, Gascone and General Patrick Gordon – the two most active members of the Catholic community, who had used their connections and influence to further its development and had also donated considerable personal funds to its needs – began raising money for the construction of a permanent wooden church. However, the Jesuits were not destined to see this church. In 1688, the elderly Father Johann Schmidt returned to his homeland, and in his place, Father Tovia Tikhavsky arrived in Moscow in early 1689 – as it turned out, for only a few months.

In August 1689, the conflict between Princess Sophia and Peter I, who had just turned seventeen, escalated into open confrontation. The regent and the tsar simultaneously issued conflicting orders to the troops: Sophia ordered the troops to come to her in the Kremlin, whilst Peter ordered them to come to him at the Trinity-Sergius Monastery (now the Lavra). At the critical moment, Patrick Gordon decided the outcome of the confrontation in favour of the rightful sovereign by leading the foreign regiments in swearing allegiance to Peter. Sophia was confined to the monastery, whilst her favourite, Prince Golitsyn, was sent into exile.

For a short time, the downfall of the pro-European Golitsyn and the rise of Patriarch Joakim, who had also supported Peter, led to a strengthening of the ‘conservative party’. In October, the Jesuit priests Jiří David and Tobiáš Tichavský were expelled from Russia. Emperor Leopold protested against this expulsion, but in response the Russian authorities produced correspondence from Father Jiří David that they had intercepted. The insinuations contained therein gave grounds to suspect that he had a mistress and a daughter in Moscow. Although these accusations were never proven, Father Jiří spent the rest of his life under the supervision of his fellow Jesuits. On several occasions he asked to be sent back on a mission (at that time, the Jesuits were actively preaching Christianity in Latin America and the Philippines), but his requests were invariably refused.

Father Jiří David, however, made a significant contribution to the culture of his time. Whilst still in Moscow, at the request of the Bollandists—who were publishing the multi-volume collection of hagiographical literature *Acta Sanctorum*—he compiled a collection relating to the saints venerated in the Russian Church. On his return to Bohemia, he published a Russian primer based on Meletius Smotritsky’s *Grammar*. But Father Jiří David’s principal work was the treatise *The Current State of Great Russia, or Muscovy* – an extensive description of Russia’s political and legal system, customs, morals, way of life, literature and climate. This account of life in our country on the eve of Peter the Great’s reforms, written by an intelligent and observant chronicler, constitutes an invaluable historical document.

However, Patriarch Joakim’s rise to power was a temporary phenomenon, whilst Patrick Gordon’s influence grew ever greater following the accession of Peter I – the tsar needed a talented general who was prepared to share European military expertise. As early as 1691, the autocrat agreed to allow two Catholic priests to come to Russia, provided they were not Jesuits. And the following year, two new priests arrived in Moscow from Bohemia – Francis Xavier Lefler and Paul Joseph Jarosch. According to some sources, they were diocesan priests; according to others, they were Franciscans. Shortly afterwards, the construction of a wooden church in the courtyard of Francesco Gascone’s house was completed, and fundraising for the construction of a stone church began immediately. Patrick Gordon had obtained Peter’s verbal consent for its construction, but the tsar’s written decree was not issued at that time, as both the tsar and the general had set off to lay siege to Azov.

General Patrick Gordon can rightly be regarded as one of those who, alongside Peter the Great, helped to shape the new Russia. A century later, his fellow countryman and distant relative, Lord Byron, would write of him:

General Patrick Gordon
served faithfully
with his sword under the rule of Moscow,
helping
to educate the people of that strange land,
who regarded shaving as a misfortune.

But beyond that, Patrick Gordon became the founding father of our parish. He died in 1699, and Peter I closed the eyes of his friend and mentor with his own hand. The general was buried beneath the altar of the wooden church that had been built with his active involvement.

Following the death of Patrick Gordon, and despite opposition from the Orthodox clergy, the Protestants of the German Settlement and officials of the Embassy Office, the construction of the stone church was completed. The exact date of its consecration is unknown, but as early as 1706, Prince Menshikov, whilst on a diplomatic mission in Rome, told Pope Clement XI of the existence of a stone Catholic church in Moscow.

Originally, the church stood on the corner of Nemetskaya Street (now Bauman Street) and Kirochnaya Street. It suffered considerable damage in the fire of 1812 but was rebuilt. However, by this time the size of Moscow’s Catholic community had grown significantly and, more importantly, Catholics no longer lived in a concentrated area in the German Quarter; most of them had now settled in the city centre. In 1839, construction began on a new church in Milyutinsky Lane. In 1849, the building, designed by Alessandro (Alexander Osipovich) Gigliardi, a member of a renowned family of architects, was completed and consecrated.

One of the altars in the new church – the Altar of St Emilia – was built with funds provided by the renowned Moscow architect Mikhail Dormidontovich Bykovsky as a memorial to his wife. Bykovsky, the son of a Russian mother and a Poles who had become Russified, was a pupil of the great Domenico (Dementiy Ivanovich) Zhilardi, the cousin of the architect who designed our church, an official for special assignments to the Governor-General of Moscow (i.e. effectively Moscow’s chief architect), director of the Moscow Palace School of Architecture, and the designer of numerous Orthodox churches and secular buildings in Moscow. His wife, Emilia Lvovna, was a member of our parish. The daughter of Luigi Minelli, a native of Rome and a popular music teacher in Moscow, and the sister of Konstantin Minelli, a talented architect and a fellow student of Bykovsky under Gilliardi, she died in 1841, shortly after the birth of her son Konstantin.

The doctor Friedrich Joseph Haaz (1780–1853), an outstanding philanthropist known in Russia as Fyodor Petrovich, who was nicknamed the ‘holy doctor’ during his lifetime. Dr Gaaz was born in the town of Bad Münstereifel near Cologne and received his medical education at the finest universities of the time – in Jena, Göttingen and Vienna. In 1802, the young doctor arrived in Moscow at the invitation of Prince and Princess Repnin, who had been his patients in Vienna. He lived in Moscow for half a century, leaving our city for any length of time on only three occasions – twice he travelled to the Caucasus to investigate the healing properties of mineral waters, and in 1814, as a regimental doctor in the Russian army, he reached Paris. After a brief visit to his hometown of Bad Münstereifel, Dr Gaaz turned down the brilliant prospects awaiting him at home and returned to Moscow, which had been ravaged by fire – here, the need for a doctor was far greater. He soon established an extensive private practice, treating the most distinguished and wealthy people in the capital; through his medical skill, he amassed a considerable fortune, buying a house on Kuznetsky Bridge and an estate with a weaving mill outside the city. However, Gaaz devoted several hours a day to providing free consultations for patients of limited means. In 1828, the Governor-General of Moscow, Prince Golitsyn, an enlightened nobleman with a deep concern for the people, established a committee in Moscow to oversee prisons, comprising civil servants, merchants and the Orthodox clergy... Golitsyn proposed that Friedrich Joseph Gaaz should serve as the representative from the medical profession. Golitsyn’s invitation and Dr Gaaz’s response seemed to echo the conversation between the young man in the Gospel and Christ, but here the outcome was the exact opposite. Haas had kept all the commandments since his youth, and now he took the final step: following Jesus and serving Him through the suffering prisoners, he gradually sold off and distributed his entire estate.

It was not only his practical care for the needs of the exiles and prisoners, but above all his human compassion – in the very deepest sense of the word ‘com-passion’ – that made Gaaz a friend to those in his care. He had the prisons refurbished, handed out money and fruit to those being transported, and campaigned – and succeeded! – from the police authorities the introduction of a new design of shackles – lighter in weight and with cuffs lined with leather on the inside, so that the metal would not freeze the prisoners’ hands. To prevent families from being separated, he bought out from the landowners the serf children whose parents had been sent to Siberia. He did not hesitate, quite literally, to get down on his knees to plead for mercy for sick prisoners from the Governor-General and the Tsar. He interceded on behalf of the convicts, striving to make their lives as easy as possible. The prisoners coined a saying about him: ‘Gaaz never says no’. Gaaz spent his final years in two rooms at the Police Hospital, where he was the chief physician. He travelled in an old, ramshackle carriage, for which he bought horses that were destined for slaughter. When Friedrich Joseph Gaaz died in August 1853, his funeral had to be paid for out of the public purse – he had nothing left but a handful of small change in his pocket. Twenty thousand people followed his coffin – Moscow was bidding farewell to its doctor. Haas’s biographer, the eminent Russian lawyer A. F. Koni, quotes the oral testimony of Senator Artsimovich: ‘V. A. Artsimovich was governor of Tobolsk in the second half of the 1850s. Whilst touring the province, he once stopped in one of the villages at the cottage of a former exile who had long since been granted permanent residence and was living comfortably and in prosperity with his large family. When Artsimovich, as he was leaving, had already taken his seat in the carriage, the host—a dignified old man with a grey, bushy beard, dressed in a blue caftan of fine cloth—who had come out to see him off, suddenly fell to his knees. Thinking that he wished to ask for some form of leniency or a full pardon, the governor demanded that he rise and explain the nature of his request. ‘I have no request whatsoever, Your Excellency, and I am satisfied with everything,’ replied the old man, without rising, ‘but only… – he burst into tears with emotion – just tell me, at least you, as I cannot find out for certain from anyone else: tell me, is Fyodor Petrovich still alive in Moscow?!”

Friedrich Joseph (Fyodor Petrovich) Gaaz served for many years as warden of the parish of Saints Peter and Paul; he contributed funds towards its construction and bequeathed spiritual and moral books from his library to the parish. In 1909, a monument to the ‘holy doctor’ was unveiled in the courtyard of the Police Hospital (now the Research Institute of Hygiene and Health Protection for Children and Adolescents). Still standing today, it is visible from the street – its address is 5 Maly Kazenny Lane. The unveiling ceremony was attended by representatives of the Orthodox clergy and the parish priest of our parish, Dean Antony Vasilevsky, who later died in Soviet exile.

In 1998, at the request of Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, Apostolic Administrator for Latin Rite Catholics in the European part of Russia, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, initiated the process of beatification for Dr Gaaz in his home diocese. In 2011, the beatification process was transferred to the Archdiocese of the Mother of God in Moscow, and Fr Wilfried Welling, chaplain to the German Catholic community, was appointed postulator.

Another distinguished member of our parish, and also a well-known philanthropist who left his mark on the history of Moscow, was General Alphonse Leonovich Shanyavsky (1837–1905). A descendant of the noble Shanyavsky family, Alphonse was born on the family estate in the Sedlets Province of the Kingdom of Poland, but from the age of seven he was educated at the cadet corps in Tula, Orel and St Petersburg. He served in the Life Guard and took part in the colonisation of the Far East under the command of Count M. N. Muravyov-Amursky. After retiring from the service, he made his fortune at the Amur gold mines and moved to Moscow in 1882, where he became renowned as a patron of the arts. At his own expense, he founded a grammar school in Blagoveshchensk-on-the-Amur, an agricultural school in Chita, and, together with his wife Lydia Alekseyevna, helped to revive the women’s medical courses that had previously been run by the Military Medical Academy in St Petersburg but were closed in 1881. In 1897, thanks to generous donations from the Shanyavskys, the courses were revived under the name of the Women’s Medical Institute (now the I. P. Pavlov Saint Petersburg State Medical University). However, Shanyavsky’s greatest contribution to Russian education was the establishment of the People’s University in Moscow, funded by the money he bequeathed in his will. Education at the People’s University was open to everyone without exception who wished to study, regardless of whether or not they held a secondary school certificate, and irrespective of their religion, nationality, gender or social background. And although the People’s University was not authorised to award a state-recognised degree, it was taught by the finest scholars of the time, and many people flocked there, driven by a thirst for knowledge. When, in 1908, three years after Shanyavsky’s death, the People’s University first opened its doors, it was flooded with all those who, under the laws then in force in Russia, were unable to study at other universities. In the first semester, 400 students attended lectures; by 1912, their number had risen to 3,600. The university’s teaching staff included such distinguished figures as the philosopher and legal scholar E. N. Trubetskoy, the lawyer A. F. Koni, the historian Y. V. Gautier, the psychologist P. P. Blonsky, the chemist A. N. Reformatsky, the biologist N. K. Koltsov and others. Among those who studied at the university were Sergei Yesenin, Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky – who would later become an outstanding geneticist and specialist in the effects of radiation on the human body – and Alexander Chizhevsky, who was already a budding scientist in those days, a pupil of Tsiolkovsky, and later a researcher into solar activity and the developer of a method for using ionised air in medicine. Another, comparatively small but significant contribution by Alfons Shanyavsky to the educational and cultural life of Moscow was the establishment of the Russian-Polish library at our parish.

The poet Jurgis Kazimirovich Baltrušaitis (1873–1944), who led the Lithuanian community within the parish, was also an active member of the Parish of Saints Peter and Paul. Jurgis Baltrušaitis was born in the village of Paantvardis into a poor peasant family; he learnt to read and write first by himself and then under the guidance of the local priest. He graduated from grammar school in Kovno (now Kaunas), then, in 1893, enrolled at Moscow University and, having moved to Moscow, became a parishioner of the parish of Saints Peter and Paul. He wrote poetry in both Russian and Lithuanian, became close to the Symbolist poets, and was friends with Balmont, Bryusov, Ivanov, Skryabin, Stanislavsky and Komissarzhevskaya. Today, Baltrušaitis is unjustly forgotten, but in his day Nabokov spoke of the five great ‘Bs’ of early 20th-century Russian poetry, referring to Balmont, Bryusov, Blok, Bely and Baltrušaitis[1]. Baltrušaitis introduced Catholic allusions into Russian poetry (the poems ‘Ave Crux’ and ‘Ave Stella Maris’). Furthermore, being fluent in many languages, Baltrušaitis translated the works of George Byron, Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, Oscar Wilde, Maurice Maeterlinck, Rabindranath Tagore and others into Russian.

From 1920, Jurgis Baltrušaitis headed the diplomatic mission of the Republic of Lithuania in Moscow (serving as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from 1922). Although the poet found his government post a burden, it gave him the opportunity to facilitate the departure of many representatives of the Russian intelligentsia to Europe, thereby saving them from Bolshevik terror. In 1939, Baltrušaitis left Moscow after being appointed counsellor at the Lithuanian Embassy in Paris, where he was when the Second World War broke out and Lithuania lost its independence. Baltušaitis died in German-occupied Paris on 3 January 1944 and is buried in the Montrouge cemetery. The Lithuanian School No. 1247 in Moscow is named after Jurgis Baltušaitis.

In 1937, Father Mikhail Tsakul, who for many years had been the parish priest of the Catholic parish of Saints Peter and Paul in Moscow, was arrested and shortly afterwards shot. The church was closed. Initially, there were plans to turn the building into a cinema, but they did not manage to do so before the war broke out. After the war, the church housed the ‘Giprouglmash’ Research Institute. In the 1990s, the revived parish fought to have the church returned to them, but to no avail: ‘Giprouglemas’ OJSC privatised the former church building, and part of it is now let out as office space. However, a keen eye can still discern the building’s former purpose from the contours of the office block. For many years now, services for the Parish of Saints Peter and Paul have been held in the Church of St. Louis.