I am very grateful to God that I was born into a true Catholic family. I consider this the greatest gift which God can give to someone, to grow up in a Catholic family, and I received, so to speak, the Catholic faith with my mother’s milk. This is an unspeakable grace which I consider greater than even the priesthood or the episcopate.
My mother, when she was a young girl, wanted to become a religious sister because during the Second World War in Germany, my mother was a 13-year-old girl, and she visited a convent of sisters for Mass in East Germany. She said, “When I grow up, I will enter your convent, she told the sisters. But then they were deported by the Soviet Army in October 45 to the Ural Mountains for forced labor. There, of course, she could not become a nun, a religious sister, because all the sisters and the convents were destroyed, the sisters were imprisoned, and so on. Then she started to pray that God would give her a good husband, that God would choose him.
So God made it that she met my father, Joseph. They married even in the absence of a priest, but in the presence of witnesses with prayers, so they celebrated the Sacrament of Matrimony in this way in the Ural Mountains.
I grew up in a profoundly Catholic family, and even my grandparents from both sides were also very devoted Catholics, and their parents also. We see how important a good Catholic family is, for generations it was already preparing the soil, the natural soil from which later growing devotions.
The second grace I consider is that I grew up in the persecuted Church during the communist times in the Soviet Union. To live in a persecuted Church, or in the clandestine Church, you receive special graces. I experienced this, which marked my entire life in the future, and this gave me the foundations of my Christian life, the experience in this persecuted Church in the Soviet Union, and then the experience of the house church, or what we call the domestic church.
This is the family, the Catholic family, as the Second Vatican Council called the family, a domestic church. In the absence of priests, even for years, we had no priests, but we kept the Catholic faith in the family. My mother was my catechist, and she taught my siblings and me very good catechism.
On Sundays, when there were no priests, we gathered, the parents and we children, and we sanctified the Day of the Lord with prayers. Even in the absence of a priest, we made spiritual Holy Communion, and this gave us strength.
My mother always said to my father, “We have to seek first God in our lives, and the rest will be given to us. I experienced this in my life. We always had the blessing of God. We were not rich, of course, in the Soviet Union; all the people had to live very modestly, but God always provided for us. My parents were very good.
Good, took very good care of us and gave us all that we needed, but they also educated us to a modest life, to prayer, and to be merciful. I remember these counsels and teachings of my parents, both of which were constant in our family.
Then I had another grace, another factor in my life and in my way of vocation. I consider having met and having had a holy priest, first, Blessed Alexis Zaritsky, a martyr priest. He was martyred and died in Kazakhstan, close to the city of Karaganda. My mother once saved him from the persecution of the police and hid him. He came several times to our family, and the last time was before he was brought again to prison, to the Gulag. He blessed me, I was a little child of one year old, and I consider this blessing of his, of this martyr priest, also as a foundation of my vocation, and his prayers for us.
Later, when we moved from Central Asia to Estonia, I was nine or ten years old, and we lived there for four years. We had the privilege of having a church in Estonia, more or less 70 miles from our town, a beautiful old church. There was also a very holy priest who was our pastor, Father Yanis Pavlovsky, born in Latvia. He was a Capuchin priest, and he gave me my first Holy Communion, and I made my first Holy Confession with this priest when I was about nine or ten years old.
This priest, who also spent many years in a concentration camp before, left upon my soul as a child a deep, unforgettable impression, simply by his radiance of holiness. He did not speak much, but all his behavior, the manner he celebrated Mass, the manner he spoke, the manner he preached, was so profound and simple and holy that it made a deep impression on me.
Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union, as children, we could not serve Mass. It was not allowed; only adult men could serve Mass. So I did not have the possibility to be an altar boy with this holy priest. But when we came to Germany, I was 12 and a half years old, I started to serve Mass. After the first time I served Mass, immediately I had, in some way, before my spiritual eyes, the face of this holy priest, my parish priest in Estonia, Father Yanis Pavlovsky.
From that moment, I felt in my soul that I had to become a priest, and since then, I have never had doubts about my vocation, thanks be to God.
A vocation has to be prepared in a natural environment. This is the family, the Catholic family, the domestic church, and also having good priests as examples who attract graces and transmit them to children and youth. Through this, God touches the souls of young boys and men and calls them to the priesthood, to a vocation. I consider this the second factor: good examples of priests on the way to vocation.
Also indispensable for a vocation is the constant prayer of the parents for their son who is on the way to the priesthood. When I became a priest and celebrated my first Holy Mass, after my first Holy Mass in the town where my parents lived in Germany, my father said to my mother, we prayed a lot for our son until he became a priest, but now we have to double our prayers for him, that he may be faithful and remain faithful as a priest.
They did so, thanks be to God. My mother is still alive, and sometimes when I speak with her on the phone, since my ordination as a priest, one of her last words to me is always, “You remain faithful to Jesus”.
These are words at the command of a mother, beautiful words. I could not have more beautiful words to hear from a mother, even as a bishop, you remain faithful to Jesus. This is the most important in our life, for every one of us, but especially for priests and those who have a holy vocation, to remain faithful to Jesus until death.
It means to remain faithful to the integrity of the Catholic doctrine, to the reverence of the true tradition of the holy liturgy of the Mass, to a holy life as a priest, and to not be contaminated by the fashions of the world, by the intellectual fashions of the world. I consider this the most important in the life of us and in the life of a priest.