Saint Maria Skobtsova, Gutsy, Courageous And Charitable To The End

Europe is once again battling invasions of terrorism and  violence, not yet with the same dimensions as during the life of  Maria Skobtsova, also known as Saint Maria of Paris and Ravensbruck.

She dedicated her life to easing the pain and suffering of hundreds in Paris plagued with  hunger, racism, homelessness, mental illness, addictions and saving countless Jews during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

I wanted to tell her magnificent story that I find amazing in many ways in what she was able to accomplish as a woman and  an unlikely nun, who went against the grain, except in her mission to implement the gospel of Jesus Christ.

They say, we all have the potential to be saints in the making, and as you will see, Maria’s destiny towards sainthood evolved despite loss of faith, radical revolutionary ideas, failed marriages, personal tragedy and grief.

She was born Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko in 1891, Riga, Latvia, then a part of the  Russian Empire.  Her family was aristocratic and devout Orthodox Christians.

The family moved to the southern Russian town of Anapa on the Black Sea. Her father died when she was 15, after which she became an atheist.  Her mother eventually moved the family to Saint Petersburg,  and they often returned to  their  home in Anapa.

Maria took up socializing in intellectual radical revolutionary circles, where she met and married a Bolshevik, Dimitry Kusmin  Karavaev.  It was a short lived marriage and they divorced in 1913.

Afterwards she felt drawn back to Christianity, and in 1916 was admitted as the first woman in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery to study theology.    Afterwards she moved to Moscow where she gave birth to her first child Gaiana.

In 1918, she returned to Anapa where she was elected mayor.  Shortly afterwards she was arrested and accused of being a Bolshevik by the White Russian Army.

Her judge Daniel Skobtsova, acquitted her and before long they fell in love and married. At the time the Bolsheviks,  were gaining more control over Russia, which precipitated Maria, Daniel, her daughter and mother to flee Russia for their own safety.

They headed towards Georgia, where Maria gave birth to her second child, a son, Yuri. Then they were off to Yugoslavia, where her third child Anastasia was born.

Maria and family finally arrived in Paris in 1923.  Maria’s world disintegrated in 1926 with the death of Anastasia from meningitis.

Shortly afterwards she separated from Daniel, who took their son Yuri to live with him.  She started thinking seriously about becoming a nun, feeling compelled to mother all in whatever need or suffering they were afflicted.

She continued to attend religious classes and groups at Saint Serge Institute, which to this day remains the  largest Russian Orthodox Theological school in France.

After she was granted a religious divorce in 1932, she took vows as an Orthodox religious.  She had already conveyed to her bishop, that she would refuse to live in any convent, preferring instead to take her ministry to the streets.

With financial help from the church, she was able to rent a small house that she turned into a soup kitchen.  During those times, Paris was flooded with Russian refugees fleeing the communist takeover.

Unable to master the French language, they often were unemployed, and many struggled to survive in their adopted country.  Becoming a Taxi driver was one way to circumvent the language problem and during the thirties, there were over 3,000 Russian taxi drivers in Paris.

Besides Russians, there were countless others from various Eastern European countries riddled with poverty, often homeless, and regardless of their faith, they were all welcomed to find refuge at Mother Maria, as she was known.

When it came to finding money to fund her charities, Maria believed in the old Russian fable about the ruble that could never be spent.  If a ruble was spent with love and charity, it was said to always come back equal or more to the sum spent.

Her refuge became so successful, that she had to find larger quarters.  A home at 77 Rue Lourmel in the 15 th arrondissement was rented that allowed her to feed over a hundred a day and offer lodging if needed.

Most of her days started by going to Les Halles, the old  food market in central Paris.  She would beg for food or buy as cheaply as she could whatever provisions needed.

She became a regular sight at Les Halles, where merchants often were willing to give her their leftover overripe fruits and vegetables.  Many were taken back by her appearance in religious garb, as she was seen smoking cigars and cigarettes while strolling along the food stalls.

Her dark brown habit was often wrinkled and stained with paint from painting icons and  she looked at times disheveled.  She raised eyebrows and criticism from her fellow religious colleagues for what they considered unbecoming behaviour of a nun.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh recounted being shocked seeing her sitting on the outside terrace of a bar on Blvd Montparnasse in full nun’s dress smoking and drinking a beer.  He later came to regret his initial critical renunciation and wished retrospectively that he had gotten to know her.

She expanded her ministry to setting up a school for children of émigrés, a house for single men and a rural house was turned into a sanitorium for TB patients.  She then scoured the mental hospitals of France and rescued many who were confined because of language difficulties rather than mental illness and set up a house for them too.

Despite all of the good she was doing, she ruffled the feathers of two priests who were sent to work with her, who left because she put charity and hospitality above religious piety.

She had little patience for what she considered petty religious rules.  “We must not allow Christ to be overshadowed by any regulations and customs, or even any piety”.

She was often known to arrive late to religious services or leave in the middle of them because of some more pertinent things she felt had to do for her refugees.  She wrote “piety, piety; but where is the love that moves mountains?”

Finally a young priest, Father Dimitri Klépinin, was sent who she felt mirrored her priorities and theological perspectives on implementing the love of Christ.

By June 1940, the Nazis had taken over Paris. Soon afterwards, they began to require all Jews to be registered and to wear a large yellow star  sewn on clothing.  Jews were soon denied be able to go out to public places and were given only one hour a day to shop.

Maria was said to be very aware of the dangers of staying, but decided against leaving, saying: “I shall stay here with my old women.  Where else could I send them.”

It was then that Maria turned most of her attention to helping save Jews from what she feared would be expulsion or deportation to the concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

She worked with the French Resistance in helping Jews escape by secret routes south of Paris into unoccupied territory.  Many Jews sought her help, and Father Dimitri never turned away a Jewish person requesting a baptismal certificate.

Not only did he issue certificates, but duly registered each name in his church directory, just in case the Nazis would want to cross check names, which they ended up doing several times.

The worse was to come in 1942, when over 16,000 Jews, were rounded up and forced into the Velodrome d’Hiver, where food and water became scarce.  Over a third of these were children.

The vast majority were of foreign origin as the French Jews were initially excluded for deportation.   Maria used her religious robes to often bring in food and necessities placed underneath them to the detainees.

With great daring, she enlisted the help of some garbage collectors to rescue several children by hiding them in garbage cans, enabling them to escape once on the outside.

When Nazi officers would come to Rue Lourmel and ask if she was hiding any Jews, she would bring out the holy icons of  Mother Mary, Theotokos and Jesus and shove them in their faces.

When others questioned why she would risk her life to save Jews, she revealed her protective perspective around the Jewish roots of Christianity,  that all Christians should honor.

She answered; “Don’t you realise that the battle is being waged against Christianity too. If we were true Christians, we would all wear the star.”

Eventually her luck ran out, and she, her son and Father Dimitri were all arrested by the Gestapo in February, 1943.  All three were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

In February of 1944, Yuri was dispatched to the gas chambers.  Four days later Father Dimitri died on the dirt floor of pneumonia.

Maria was then sent to Ravensbruck.  Throughout the harsh cruelty of the camps, she ministered to others with the same compassion and love as always.  Jacqueline Pery, who survived the holocaust and resided in the same building said “Maria was adored by all.”

She added that during her last few months she was so sick that she had to lie down between roll calls.  “her face revealed intense suffering, already  it bore the marks of death”.

“Despite all, she never complained.”  In 1945 on Holy Saturday of Easter week, she was said to have taken the place of a Jew selected to die that day and she died in the gas chambers of Ravensbruck.

She was canonized in 2004 as an Orthodox saint at the Russian cathedral of Paris.  Roman Catholic Archbishop Jean Marie Lustiger, who was born Jewish and whose parents died in the camps , placed her on the calendar of Catholic saints of France as well.

Though I am rarely on Rue Lourmel, I do go often to where the old food market, Les Halles was located.  I think of her plying down the various alleys with her black cart piled high with whatever she could obtain to feed the hungry.

Getting back to Rue Lourmel is quite a long haul, and frankly I still marvel to how she was able to do this almost daily. Maria said that when she dies and gets in front of God, she wanted to be able to answer ” have you fed the hungry, and clothed the naked”.

She did so much more, even giving up her own life to save another.  Maria is indeed a most beautiful saint and I hope you will find her as much of an inspiration as she is to me.