Page 33 - Michael Journal — 2019 October
P. 33
“Only now I understand the USSR, she said, “I had to leave for a while to real-
When she returned to America after over a year in
the wonderful grace ize, ‘Oh, my God, how wonderful it is.’”
I don’t know the exact year that Svetlana met Fa-
that the Sacraments ther Giovanni Garbolino who lived in the United States
of Penance and but had done missionary work in Russia but their re-
lationship would change her life. Svetlana received a
the Holy Eucharist letter from Fr. Garbolino inviting her to make a pilgrim-
age to Fátima. Then later, he visited her in Princeton,
produce... New Jersey. The two were in frequent contact. Fr. Gar-
bolino also gave Svetlana a cross that had been given
I feel very different to him by a Russian student whom he met during his
missionary travels. Later, Fr. Garbolino had given that
from before, since same cross to Col. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin for his trip to
the moon.
I attend Mass every day.” vetlana, with the guidance of Fr. Garbolino, read
books by Catholic authors and on Dec. 13, 1982,
Sshe converted to the Catholic faith. Svetlana
u agree to this condition; she could not. “To remain si- wrote about her conversion: “Only now I understand
lent for another 40 years could have been achieved the wonderful grace that the Sacraments of Penance
just as well in the U.S.S.R.”, and the Holy Eucharist produce, no matter what day of
she wrote. the year, and even on a daily basis. Before, I was un-
In April 1967, Svet- willing to forgive and repent, and I was never able to
lana Alliluyeva landed at love my enemies. But I feel very different from before,
Kennedy Airport in New since I attend Mass every day”.
York carrying a manu- She added, “The Eucharist has given me life. The
script that would never Sacrament of Penance with God whom… we abandon
have been published in and betray each day; the sense of guilt and sadness
the USSR. It was titled that invades us then, all this makes it necessary to re-
Twenty Letters to a Friend ceive it frequently.”
and was about her life in This woman, who grew up essentially motherless,
the Soviet Union. It was a wrote, “I was taken into the arms of the Blessed Vir-
huge success and a best- gin Mary... Who else could be my advocate but the
seller. Just two years later she Mother of Jesus? She suddenly drew me close to her.”
wrote another bestseller about She traveled to Europe and back to America often
her life since her defection titled and then moved to be near one of her daughters in
Only One Year. Oregon. In the end, she did not die raising her fist in
She was famous but her personal life was still a anger at the world as her father had done but peace-
wreck. Switching from religion to religion and once fully in a Wisconsin nursing home in 2011, where she
again marrying, having a child, divorcing, and moving enjoyed sewing and reading and surely praying. v
often, she found herself disenchanted with America © 2019 EWTN News, Inc. Reprinted from the National Catholic Reg-
and wanted to return home. In fact, she did return to ister, 08/28/2019: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/matthew-arch-
the Soviet Union but almost instantly regretted it. bold/the-stalin-who-converted-to-catholicism
The Prayers of “Babushka”, her Grandmother
he importance of grandparents in one’s life cannot be underestimated. In her
autobiography, Twenty Letters to a Friend, Svetlana Stalina, the only daughter of
TSoviet dictator Joseph Stalin related “…We had been educated by atheistic par-
ents, by a secularized school, by our entire deeply materialistic society. There was no talk
of God …However those first 36 years in the atheist state of Russia were not completely
lived without God… my paternal grandmother, Ekaterina Djugashvili, an almost illiterate
peasant, …nurtured trust in God and in the Church. Very pious and hardworking, she
dreamed of making her surviving son—my father—a priest”.
This desire, of course, never did materialize, but Grandmother Ekaterina did plant
the seed of faith in her granddaughter, who years later embraced Catholicism.
42 MICHAEL October/November/December 2019 www.michaeljournal.org