Leonid Feodorov

Russian Greek Catholic hieromonk and exarch (1879–1935)

Leonid Ivanovich Feodorov (Леонид Иванович Фёдоров; 4 November 1879 – 7 March 1935) was a Studite hieromonk from the Russian Greek Catholic Church, the first Exarch of the Russian Catholic Apostolic Exarchate of Russia, and a survivor of the Gulag at Solovki prison camp. He was beatified at Lviv by Pope John Paul II on 27 June 2001.

Feodorov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 4 November 1879, into a Russian Orthodox family. His father, Ivan Feodorovich Feodorov, was the son of a former State serf from Yaroslavl Governorate and had become the owner of the Malii Yaroslaviets, a highly successful St. Petersburg restaurant, which was one of the centers of the Imperial capital's artistic, literary, and intellectual ferment during the Silver Age. The restaurant's regular patrons included poet and philosopher Vladimir Soloviev and a young Joseph Stalin, who, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore, more than once braved the risk of arrest during Tsarist secret police manhunts out of a longing to eat at his "favorite hangout" of "Fedorov's restaurant." Leonid's mother, Lyubov Feodorov, a woman of Greek descent, raised him as a single mother after his father's early death. Lubov Feodorov used her husband's legacy of 15,000 rubles to send her son, out of a desire for him to move up in the world, to the First Imperial Gymnasium, where he was educated alongside the sons of the Russian nobility. Although she also attempted to raise her son as a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, she simultaneously encouraged him to read the popular novelists of the day. He later recalled, "So I began to devour the best known French novelists of the day, Zola, Hugo, Maupassant, and Dumas. I became acquainted with the Italian Renaissance and its corrupt literature, Boccaccio and Ariosto. My head came to be like a sewer into which the foulest muck was emptied." While attending the Second Imperial Gymnasium in St. Petersburg, Feodorov considered himself, after reading sacred texts of both Hinduism and Buddhism, to be a Nihilist. He often used to quote William Wordsworth's maxim, "War is the daughter of God", and intended following his graduation to become an officer in the Imperial Russian Army. Under the influence of the Gymnasium's Orthodox chaplain and teacher of religion, Fr. Konstantin (Smirnov), whom Father Paul Mailleux has termed, "one of the most remarkable Russian Orthodox priests of his time", Feodorov underwent a religious conversion and instead decided to study for the Orthodox priesthood. After his graduation from the Gymnasium in 1901, he enrolled in the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy in order to study for the priesthood in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Ecclesiastical Academy, however, was largely focused towards training civil service officials rather than priests, and Feodorov accordingly found it a great disappointment. During a crisis of Faith, Feodorov came to believe, "through the reading of the Fathers and of history", that the Roman Catholic Church is the one true church, "at a time when I was losing my faith". In response, he began discreetly attending the Tridentine Mass at St. Catherine's Church on Nevsky Prospect. At the Ecclesiastical Academy, his teachers took to calling Feodorov, "our Catholic." After much soul searching, Feodorv decided to leave his studies in the summer of 1902 and travel to Rome in order to openly convert to the Roman Catholic Church. In order to interrupt his studies and be granted a passport necessary for foreign travel, Feodorov needed the permission of the Academy Inspector, Archimandrite Theofan (Bystrov), who responded, "I know very well why you wish to go to Italy So be it, and may God keep you." Fr. Cyril Korolevsky alleges that Archimandrite Theofan, "was quite convinced of the truth of Catholicism, but like a number of others he could not bring himself to take the definite step." In reality, Archimandrite Theofan remained Orthodox even after the October Revolution, when he become a refugee from the Red Terror in Bulgaria and France. Leonid Feodorov and his Catholic spiritual mentor, Fr. Jan Szyslawski, travelled to Rome by way of Austrian ruled Lviv, where Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church blessed his mission.

On 31 July 1902, Feodorov was formally received into the Catholic Church at the Church of the Gesù in Rome. In the aftermath, he began studying at the Jesuit seminary at Anagni under the pseudonym of "Leonidas Pierre," which was meant to keep the Tsar's secret police, or Okhrana, off his trail. In a conversation with a fellow seminarian at Agnani, Feodorov predicted, "Russia will not repent without travelling the Red Sea of the blood of her martyrs and numerous sufferings of her apostles." Although Leonid had originally promised to adopt the Latin Rite, while studying in the Collegio Leoniano, a Jesuit major seminary at Anagni, Leonid became aware that the Pope wished instead for him to remain faithful to the liturgy and customs of the Christian East. With the full permission and encouragement of Pope Pius X, Leonid transferred to the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church. As a result of his decision, Leonid was disowned by his former Jesuit mentor and afterwards depended for his finances on Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky of Lviv. On March 25, 1911, he received ordination as a Byzantine Rite priest by Metropolitan Michael Mirov in Holy Trinity parish of the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church in the Galata neighborhood of Constantinople. He spent the following years as a hieromonk of the Ukrainian Studite Monks at Kamenica (existing 1908–1924), near Čelinac in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where his spiritual formation was supervised by a Greek Catholic Starets named "Elder Josaphat. Brother Leonid was tonsured with monastic name 'Leontiy' on 12 March 1913.

On the eve of the First World War, he returned to Saint Petersburg whereupon he was immediately exiled to Tobolsk in Siberia as a potential threat to the Tsar's government which held Russian Orthodoxy as its state religion. After the February Revolution, the Provisional Government ordered the release of all political prisoners. including Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow and Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd. At the time, Patriarch Tikhon was faced with the ongoing Soviet backed Living Church Schism and was determined defend the hard won independence of the Moscow Patriarchate from again being lost to control by the State. For this reason, Patriarch Tikhon was both meeting regularly to discuss possible reunion with both the Exarch and with Father Vladimir Abrikosov. The Patriarch was also urging those Orthodox clergy and laity who remained loyal to him to similarly meet with the Russian Catholics in order to discuss the possible reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Holy See under the terms laid down at the Council of Florence in 1439. This was why, when Fr. Edmund A. Walsh, the head of the American and Papal relief missions during the Russian famine of 1921, and the Exarch of the Russian Greek Catholic Church first met one another and conversed in Ecclesiastical Latin, Feodorov, who admired Patriarch Tikhon and felt only contempt for the so called Living Church, urged that the Famine Relief food supplies be entrusted to not only to Catholic clergy, but also to those Russian Orthodox priests who remained loyal to Patriarch Tikhon for distribution to the starving. Fr. Walsh enthusiastically agreed with the Exarch's idea and ensured that it was carried out. In Orenburg alone, his assistant, Fr. Louis J. Gallagher hosted six local Russian Orthodox bishops to his table to organize the delivery of food supplies to the starving. Meanwhile, according to historian Edward E. Roslof, to a much greater extent than the Rurikid and Romanov Tsars before them, the Soviet State and it's secret police, the GPU, had no intention of tolerating the possible reunion of East and West, and were especially determined to snuff out all efforts to preserve the continued independence of the Russian Orthodox Church from the State's power and control. Open persecution of religion began in 1922. The clergy were forbidden to preach religion to anyone under eighteen years of age. Then, during the Russian famine of 1921, all sacred objects were ordered to be seized for "famine relief" and lay councils called dvatsatkii were installed in each parish by the GPU with the intention of making the priest a mere employee. When both the Exarch Leonid and the Latin Rite Archbishop Jan Cieplak refused to permit this, all Catholic parishes were forcibly closed by the State.

On 6 August 1929, Exarch Leonid was released to the town of Pinega in the Arkhangelsk Oblast and put to work making charcoal. After continuing to teach the Catechism to young boys, he was transferred to the village of Poltava, 15 km from Kotlas (not to be confused with the city of Poltava, Ukraine), where he completed his sentence in 1932. He chose to reside in Viatka, where, worn out by the rigours of his imprisonment, he died on 7 March 1935. Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church said, "We expect that the exarch [Leonid Feodoriv] is on the road to glorification through beatification. Of course, it is much too early to talk about this, but all of us were strongly impressed by his holiness, strengthened by the crown of martyrdom and death; this certainly supports our expectations. On the other hand, as a Russian Catholic, as exarch, as someone who died at the hands of the Bolsheviks, it seems to us that he will be right in the center of attention of the entire Church." On 27 June 2001, Exarch Leonid Feodorov was beatified during a Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy in Lviv, Ukraine by Pope John Paul II. He remains deeply venerated among Russian Catholics and was highly praised by James Likoudis, a convert from Greek Orthodoxy to the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church, in his 2016 book, Heralds of a Catholic Russia: Twelve Spiritual Pilgrims from Byzantium to Rome.