A Broom in the Hands of God

;Among the multitude of Catholic clergy who arrived in Novosibirsk in August 1997 for the consecration of the new Cathedral, one elderly priest stood out in particular.
First of all, he wore a prelate’s red biretta with a pompom—a rare sight in Siberia—which he didn’t seem to take off anywhere, whether on the street or in a shop.
Secondly, despite his short stature, he possessed a mighty bass voice, like a church cantor.
Thirdly, his small eyes observed everything that was happening with the liveliest zest, signaling a readiness to get involved in just about anything.
And indeed, right there in the courtyard of the new cathedral, the stocky priest in the red cap gave a highly questionable interview to a Catholic TV studio, in which he cheerfully scolded all the visiting foreign priests for "mangling the Russian language." Yet, no one even thought to take offense: "That’s just Swidnicki! A restless priest, what can you do with him."
It was simply that over his lifetime, Father Joseph Swidnicki had earned the right not only to wear a prelate’s cap but also to have a few eccentricities—including saying exactly what he thought, sparing neither strangers nor his own.
His favorite passage from Holy Scripture was: "You are neither cold nor hot; oh, that you were cold or hot!" He himself was always at the boiling point.
Perhaps that is why his destiny consists entirely of sharp turns. In it, as in a drop of water, the entire history of Russia is reflected.
;When did the faith in a living God first appear in the young boy from the Ukrainian village of Murafa? Was it when he sat with his family in the cellar of their own house, praying, while overhead the advancing units of the Soviet Army fought the Germans? Incidentally, German observers were hiding in the attic of that very house, and the Soviet soldiers were greatly surprised when they entered the village: of all the structures, the only one to survive was the house they had been targeting. It was the year 1944.
...When the feisty sixteen-year-old teenager first arrived in Vinnytsia with his mother for confession—the nearest functioning Catholic church was located there—he was terrified that he would not receive absolution. But, to his astonishment, he heard from the confessor that he would become a priest.
To beg for the grace of a priestly calling, Swidnicki decided to pray for exactly thirty days before a statue of the Mother of God that stood... in a cemetery. He would get up at six o'clock in the morning so that no one would see him, sit in the bushes among the graves before the statue of the Madonna, and sing from the breviary. Evidently, the Virgin Mary heard the boy’s plea.
...However, nearly two decades passed before he was able to realize this grace through a stubborn struggle against circumstances. The KGB took a dislike to Swidnicki from his youth. It was they who opposed his admission to the Riga Seminary. This happened after Swidnicki rejected a certain "offer of cooperation" on their part. But the stubborn young man did not give up: he prepared for the exams on his own and secretly took individual subjects from the curriculum with the professors. (Swidnicki’s underground preparation even cost the rector of the seminary, Leon Koz;owski, his job: an order arrived from the secret services to dismiss him.)
After Bishop Vincentas Sladkevi;ius, who was in exile, secretly ordained the young priest in 1971, a new phase of trials began for him. The stigma of an underground ordination prevented Swidnicki not only from working openly but also from finding support among his own brethren, who shunned an untrustworthy colleague. Certain bishops wanted to know nothing about it. And priests said that he had no right to minister. Rumors circulated that he was a fake priest. Meanwhile, Swidnicki could not secure a document confirming his ordination: the curia was afraid to issue it. The desire to rid themselves of the new priest was mutual—shared by both the KGB and the Riga curia. Finally, a parish was found that would accept him. That was how Swidnicki ended up in Zhytomyr.
;Ecumenism was always one of Swidnicki’s core philosophical principles. While working with the youth in Zhytomyr, he often sent young parishioners to the Orthodox church and to the Baptists—"for ecumenical purposes." He wanted them to look at Catholicism with fresh eyes.
"The Church," he would say, "is not just priests, candles, and kneeling. Faith is a live contact with God."
Swidnicki had begun making friends with Orthodox believers and Baptists back in Zhytomyr. In 1973, a brotherhood community emerged, attracting all Christians regardless of denomination. This community was meant to move toward recognizing the Pope as the spiritual shepherd of the entire church. Interestingly, the fate of the leader of this organization, the Baptist Aleksandr Riga, whose bonds of friendship tied him to the young Catholic priest, turned out to be somewhat similar to Swidnicki’s: he was later subjected to psychiatric persecution in a mental hospital, and his faith in a living God was put to severe tests.
New attempts by the "KGB guys" to recruit Swidnicki were equally unsuccessful. For his sermons, his contacts with youth, and his ecumenical views, he was endlessly threatened with prison. "We'll exile you to the polar bears," they meant Siberia. (How could they have foreseen that the "restless priest" would end up in Siberia of his own free will, and even there would remain true to himself!)
Demanding of himself, he could also be harsh with his flock. He forbade his parishioners from drinking vodka even at wakes. They say he wouldn’t hear the confession of anyone who hadn’t managed to quit smoking for a month.
KGB agents slandered him and set parishioners against him. In the end, Swidnicki had to leave Zhytomyr after a year of work. He went to Tajikistan, then to Siberia. However, Father Swidnicki was never confined to any single place.
;"Aeromonk"—that was the nickname given to Father Swidnicki in Catholic circles. Anecdotes about his ability to dashingly traverse the entire Soviet Union still circulate to this day.
Picture Father Swidnicki drinking tea one evening while visiting a colleague in Novosibirsk.
"It’s late, time for bed," his host says.
"No, I need to go to the airport: I have a morning Mass tomorrow."
"Where?!"
"In Fergana."
"Good grief: from Siberia to Uzbekistan!"
And Father Swidnicki would unhurriedly pack his books and rosary into a suitcase, flag down the last trolleybus heading to the depot, convince the driver to alter the route and take him to the airport, and the flight attendants would rush him to the plane (even though boarding had, of course, ended long ago).
No tickets at the box office? Not a problem. Swidnicki flew wherever tickets were available, sometimes not knowing himself where he would end up celebrating Mass. He always carried a little address book containing every Catholic known to him. (Fortunately, he would manage to get rid of it during his arrest).
It is to Swidnicki that the credit belongs for establishing Catholic communities in a wide variety of cities. He flew and traveled to all the major cities of the Volga region, the Caucasus, the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Krasnoyarsk Territory—all the way to Lake Baikal. In just the six months before settling down in Novosibirsk, Swidnicki visited Catholics in 93 different localities! With 78,000 kilometers behind him—enough to circle the globe twice. Everywhere he went, Swidnicki sought out people who would take on the registration of parishes and even the construction of small churches. In Novosibirsk, he bought a house of prayer and set about building a church, but he didn't have time to finish it...
;...Swidnicki was arrested right in the sacristy, before he could celebrate the Christmas Mass. It was the year 1984.
;...Incidentally, on March 25th of that year, on the Feast of the Annunciation, the Pope solemnly entrusted Russia to the Mother of God in prayer. Was the arrest on that very day of almost the only Catholic priest in all of Russia a mere coincidence?..
As it happened, the pretext for bringing charges under the article "Dissemination of knowingly false fabrications defaming the state and social system" was a brochure titled The Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. A certain "parishioner" had begged him for it. It turned out to be a setup.
The priest was accused of distributing the Fatima message of the Virgin Mary, which contained a call for the entire world to pray for the conversion of Russia.
The next count read: "Organization of underground ecumenical religious groups."
...At the trial, the short-statured Swidnicki was demonstratively escorted by a full ten guards instead of the usual two.
When the defense witnesses went up to give testimony, they would stop near the priest and fall to their knees, despite the displeasure of the officials: "Bless me, Father, so that I may speak the truth." Adventists, Baptists, and Orthodox believers all came to the courtroom for the sentencing.
Когда Swidnicki addressed the court with the words, "Thank you for judging me," he was not being insincere. He knew what he was getting into.
;...The prisoners were marched along a road rutted by truck wheels. To the squelching of swamp muck underfoot, Swidnicki thought: This land is like us. Life has treated it very badly too.
..."A camp is a complexly organized and bizarre world," the prisoner later wrote in his memoirs, known in Poland under the title A Camp for Fatima. "There, a person is mangled spiritually and psychologically. Not infrequently, people go mad. In the camp, you can see vividly what original sin is and what its consequences are. A general-regime camp is a world of wolves."
It took the priest some time to learn who belonged to the prison classifications of "blatnye" (thieves), "slaves," "zapomoyennye" (the defiled), and "cocks." "Muzhiks" (peasants) were the "take more, throw it further, rest while it flies" crowd, while the "goats" were those who curried favor with the administration.
;...Once, before his ordination, during a general confession, a priest had told Swidnicki: "You will be a broom in the hands of the Lord, sweeping away the sins of the world." And now, the environment surrounding him manifested the very nexus of human filth and all mortal vices.
Once in his youth, in order to cultivate resilience to trials, Swidnicki had whipped his own bare back with a buckled waist belt ten times daily, slept on bare boards for three years, and eaten unpalatable food. It was as though he had been preparing himself for these trials.
He managed to maintain his dignity in confinement, earning authority among the inmates without becoming an informant for the administration. This was no easy feat.
At first, he received kicks from cellmates, shouts from guards ("I'll smash your face in, this isn't about swindling old biddies"), and threats from the jailers.
;Immediately upon his arrival, the prison authorities inquired whether he believed in God. Swidnicki smiled. The jailers interpreted this the wrong way. "See, it’s funny to you too, because you don’t believe in fairy tales!"
For that very faith in God, he had to fight daily, defending it through unceasing prayer. "Hail Mary, full of grace..."
"Neither privation, nor bars, nor even exhausting labor consume you quite like the hardened souls around you and the malice emanating from them. There is nothing more terrifying than this spiritual emptiness," he wrote.
In spite of everything, behind bars he never missed his daily priestly duties. Everything was just as it was on the outside—the breviary, the Mass, the rosary. If he couldn't manage it in the morning, he continued during work or afterward, plugging his ears with his fingers, sitting in the barracks or standing in the corridor, counting on his fingers. "Hail Mary..." And how many rosaries molded from black bread were confiscated from him during searches!
;Setting himself the goal of overfulfilling the daily quota for assembling crates for beer bottles, by the end of his term he became one of the best "manufacturers" of wooden boxes. And this was not only because meeting the quota in the camp is a guarantee of "camp happiness" and human dignity. Natural competitive zeal and a thirst for activity simply took over, even if the result of the labor was merely simple beer crates.
Gradually, the inmates grew accustomed to the priest. They knew that if Iosif Antonych was standing by the window, they shouldn't swear: he was praying...
Even non-believers would suddenly ask:
"Write me a prayer!"
Or:
"Bless me, I’m being called to court!"
And he would write for them on scraps of paper: "We fly to thy patronage, O Holy Mother of God, despise not our petitions in our necessities…"
And he would bless them.
;...It happened on March 25th—the Feast of the Annunciation.
"Inmate Swidnicki, by decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, you have been pardoned among one hundred and fifty clergymen!"
;...Walking about two hundred meters away from the zone, he turned around and blessed it. Reaching the district center, he went into a photo studio and had his picture taken in his prison clothes. Then, having changed into regular clothes, he went to confession.
;...With what exultation in his heart did Swidnicki walk into the white, clean Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary in Novosibirsk—the construction of which he had directed from behind bars!
"For a church like this, it’s not a pity to serve ten years!" he said in his very first sermon, looking into the happy faces of the parishioners.
;By a twist of fate, the new Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Lord in Novosibirsk was built directly opposite the building to which the newly arrested priest had once been brought.
"That’s where they first interrogated me," Swidnicki could now point a finger right from the church courtyard at that narrow window of the multi-story government building. "And that prosecutor is probably still working here."
Who back in '84 could have thought that a little over a decade would pass, and the pilgrim statue of Our Lady of Fatima would arrive directly from Fatima at the new, large church on the Feast of the Annunciation, and now people would be able to pray openly for Russia—right under the windows of that terrifying institution!
Incidentally, Father Joseph Swidnicki himself traveled to Portugal as part of the Russian delegation in 1996 and was personally present at the solemn handover in Fatima of the symbol of global hope for the conversion of this great and long-suffering country.
And did you know that when Russian speech is heard in Fatima, people all around applaud?
;Following the onset of religious freedom on the territory of the USSR, Catholic structures were restored. Strangely enough, Father Swidnicki turned out to be too inconvenient a priest under the new conditions, and not only for the authorities but for the church leadership as well.
Iosif Antonovich Swidnicki is back in Ukraine. Now he serves in Vinnytsia. The very place where he once went to confession for the first time and heard about his calling.