James: Hello, and welcome to Great Britain in Focus. I’m James McCullough.
Pascal Mary: I’m Pascal Mary Rakovich. Today, we have a beautiful vocation story given by Bishop Athanasius Schneider, an auxiliary bishop from Kazakhstan.
James: Bishop Schneider grew up in the former Soviet Union in a persecuted and clandestine church. Despite this, he speaks of the graces he received that enabled him to follow his vocation to the priesthood.
Pascal Mary: So what were the greatest influences in the discovery of his vocation, and what does he consider to be most important for sustaining a priestly vocation?
James: Let’s now hear his story.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider: I am very grateful to God that I was born in 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.
So we see how important a good Catholic family is. For generations, it has been preparing the soil, the natural soil from which vocations grow. I also consider that I grew up in the persecuted church during communist times in the Soviet Union. To live in a persecuted or clandestine church is to receive special graces. I experienced this, which marks your entire life in the future. This gave me the foundations of my Christian life, the experience in this persecuted church, 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. I had the grace and privilege to have good Catholic parents, Joseph and Mary. My mother always said to my father, we have to seek God in our lives, and the rest will be given to us. And so I experienced in my life the blessing of God. We were not rich, of course, in the Soviet Union; everyone had to live very modestly. But God always provided. My parents took very good care of us and gave us all we needed, but they also educated us to a modest life, in prayer, and to be merciful.
I remember these counsels and teachings of my parents. They were constantly present in our family. In the absence of priests, even for years, 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, the parents and children gathered, and we sanctified the day of the Lord with prayers. Even in the absence of a priest, we made spiritual Holy Communion. This gave us real strength.
Another factor in my life and in my vocation was to have met and had a holy priest, first Blessed Alexis Zaritsky, a martyr priest. He was martyred and died in Kazakhstan, close to the city of Karaganda.
And my mother once saved him from the persecution of the police and hid him. He came to our family several times, and the last time was before he was ultimately brought again to prison, to the Gulag. He blessed me. I was a little child of one year old, and I consider this blessing from him, this martyr priest, also 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, although it was 70 miles from our town, with a beautiful old church. There was also a very holy priest who was our pastor, Father Yanis Pavlovsky from Latvia. He was a Capuchin priest and gave me my first Holy Communion. I made my first Holy Confession with him when I was nine or ten years old.
These priests, who had also spent many years in concentration camps before, left a deep and unforgettable impression on my soul as a child, simply through their irradiance of holiness. He did not speak much, but all his behavior, the manner in which he celebrated Mass, the way he spoke, the way he preached, was so simple, profound, 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 twelve and a half years old, and I started to serve Mass. After the first time I served Mass, I immediately saw, before my spiritual eyes, the face of this holy priest, my parish priest in Estonia, Father Yanis Pavlovsky. From this 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 on natural ground. This includes the family, the Catholic family, the domestic church, and 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 priests as examples on the path of vocation.
Also indispensable for a vocation is the constant prayer of the parents for their son who is on the path to the priesthood. When I became a priest and celebrated 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 must double our prayers for him so that he may remain faithful as a priest. They did this, and thanks be to God. My mother is still alive, and when I call her, one of the last words in every phone call since my ordination has always been, You remain faithful to Jesus. This is her word and command, beautiful words that I could not have heard more beautifully from a mother. Even as a bishop, to hear “You remain faithful to Jesus” is a blessing.
This is the most important thing in the life of every one of us, but especially for priests and those with a holy vocation: to remain faithful to Jesus until death. It means to remain faithful to the integrity of Catholic doctrine, to the reverence of the true tradition, to the holy liturgy of the Mass, to a holy life as a priest, and not to be contaminated by the fashions of the world or the intellectual fashions of the world. I consider this the most important in the life of all of us and in the life of a priest.
James: Fiorella de Maria is a Catholic writer specializing in historical fiction. She speaks about what distinguishes her Catholic writing from its secular equivalent.
Pascal Mary: She challenges the current trend of thinking that mankind moves forward in history toward a state of progressive enlightenment, believing ourselves to always be in a better position than in the past.
James: She also answers the important question of what the difference is between a Catholic imagination and a secular imagination in understanding our past and present. So let’s hear some of her insights.
James: So, Fiorella, I believe you’re a writer.
Fiorella de Maria: I am.
James: What do you write?
Fiorella de Maria: I write historical fiction and, more recently, crime fiction.
James: What sort of historical fiction?
Fiorella de Maria: The periods vary quite a lot. I have honed in on the mid-20th century because my crime fiction is set just after the Second World War. But I’ve written a book about the First World War, about the early days of the Second World War, and also about the slave trade, going right back into the 1600s. I like to go on lots of different journeys into the past. It’s like being a time traveler.
James: Yeah, doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs. So the book about the slave…
Fiorella de Maria: The slave trade was definitely the darkest book I’ve ever written, and I wouldn’t like to write anything like it again. But I come from slave ancestry, and Malta has a history of slavery, North African slavery. I’ve always wanted to write a book about my people’s experience of the slave trade. That was always something I wanted to do, but it is very much a once-in-a-career thing. You take that journey into the past just once because it is very dark and very depressing.
James: What’s the initial attraction to subject matter? Is it a story, a character, or a period of history?
Fiorella de Maria: It varies a lot. Actually, with the slave trade, I wanted to write a book about the Mediterranean slave trade, so I started off with a period and then thought of the characters. The more research I did, the more the setting came to life. In fact, the story I ended up writing was very different from what I initially envisaged. I wanted to have more humane characters than I realized I could, but when I actually did the research and realized what happened, I had to make the story a lot darker.
So in some cases, yes, it starts with a period. In other cases, it’s just an idea. With one of my books, Father William’s Daughter, it’s all about a priest who inherits a child. His brother is killed in a car crash, and his brother was a widower, so he has to look after this child. This all stemmed from the fact that when I was a child, my parents had written a will, like all responsible parents do, and they’d named my uncle as my legal guardian, who was in fact a priest. I remember thinking, what would actually have happened? Would I have gone and lived in his monastery or in his parish?
The story is in fact a tragicomic story about what happens. It develops all sorts of ideas about unexpected parenthood, but it literally came from a “what if” situation.
James: But answer me this, because historical fiction is very broad and there’s a wonderful scope. What is the difference from a Catholic perspective, as a Catholic writer entering into that world? Is there a difference?
Fiorella de Maria: I think there is because I’d like to hope that a Catholic writer would approach the past with a little more humility than…
James: Is that your strongest point? Humility?
Fiorella de Maria: Humility, yes. I’m very… books about my humility, seriously. I think, because we have this tradition and our sense of our place in history, yes, I would like to think that helps us perhaps to be a little more humble about where we stand in the great story of humanity. So perhaps when we look back into the past, we don’t do so with the idea of, gosh, we’re so progressive, we’re so modern, and weren’t they stupid? Hopefully, we would have a slightly more broad-minded attitude.
James: It’s really interesting because you use the word… The complaint about Catholicism is that it is not progressive enough, yet we are very much a historical religion, right? So does that play out in fiction, that it’s actually more progressive in a sense, being a Catholic historical fiction novelist?
Fiorella de Maria: I’d say it’s more open-minded. It’s entirely connected with perspective. Perspective is so important when you’re writing about the past. There’s that old line from The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country,” and I quote it extensively. In my book, the narrator keeps coming back to that line. You have a choice as a writer of historical fiction in terms of how you travel to that foreign country. Are you going to be the annoying tourist who expects all the food you’re used to and doesn’t want to interact with the locals, or are you going to be someone who goes on an adventure and really seeks to get to know that country? That, I hope, is what a Catholic writer can do.
James: Yeah, what’s the role then of the Catholic novelist in rebuilding culture?
Fiorella de Maria: It’s to recast the narrative. You recast the narrative.
James: You don’t propagandize, you don’t preach.
Fiorella de Maria: Nope.
James: That’s for the pulpit.
Fiorella de Maria: Absolutely. If you want to be a lecturer, be a lecturer. Or if you want to write a textbook, write a textbook. Recasting the narrative is the wonderful thing about historical fiction because so much of the way history is treated and mistreated is about making us feel good about ourselves.
James: What do you mean?
Fiorella de Maria: Well, it’s about saying, this is where we are. Aren’t we progressive? We’re so woke, we’re so enlightened, aren’t we wonderful? And so, therefore, how did we get here? We got here because the past was awful, history was terrible, and there was this wonderful journey to enlightenment. I think the Age of Enlightenment is very responsible for this idea of a constant move toward positive change. What Catholic writers should be doing is saying, just a moment, are you sure about that? Are you sure we really are more moral? We have better values than we had in the past? And to actually go back into the past and try to understand a little better how people really did live their lives, but to do it respectfully.
James: But can a historical fiction writer, a 21st-century young woman like yourself, born shortly before this century, really write with insight about somebody in the Second World War, the First World War, or the 17th century?
Fiorella de Maria: It’s a valid question. And I think, in all honesty, you can never completely get rid of those lenses, the focus of the modern world, because we grew up in this time. And in the end, however much research you do, you can’t really say what it was like living in 1850s London or in the trenches in the First World War. There’s always going to be some gap, if you like, of imagination. But I do think if you really immerse yourself in the period, which is what I do when I’m writing a book… For example, when I wrote about the First World War, I listened to music from that time. I read newspapers from the time, and newspaper articles from the time.
James: Is it true that you dressed for that period completely in First World War outfits?
Fiorella de Maria: I didn’t, but I learned a lot about the fashions of the times. I could tell you exactly what a woman was wearing. It’s important to really go into that much detail. But this is also where understanding the people comes in. One of the reasons a certain scriptwriter, I shall not mention, got into trouble with his period drama was that he was using expressions that had only just been coined in 1920. Someone in their 50s in a rural area would never have heard that expression. It’s also a question of understanding the people you’re writing about. For example, in my First World War book, there’s an older doctor who’s a bit conservative. I wasn’t going to dress him in the style of 1930, when he would have probably dressed more like the style of 1918. It’s things like that that make a difference, but mostly it’s about trying to strip away your own expectations.
James: But is there a sense, Fiorella, where… You know, the idea that all novels are not biographical, but is there also an idea that all novels are really about…?
Fiorella de Maria: If you look at any book written about the past, whenever it was, if you look at Ivanhoe, it tells you a lot more about the period in which it was written than the period it was trying to depict. Fair enough. I think that is unavoidable, and we have to accept that as part of the package when writing historical fiction. It is historical fiction; it’s not a historical document from the period. But I do think that if you go humbly on that journey, you can get as close as possible to that time. You have to really care about the characters. You have to respect them.
The biggest problem, I think, with so many writers of historical fiction now is that they patronize the past. They assume, before they even start their research, that the people they’re writing about were idiots. They’re already looking down on them, as if they were children who hadn’t developed enough yet. If you go into the past and really embrace it, and say, these were my brothers from another time, you can start to reconstruct the values they would have held.
James: Okay, I get that. But is there a sense where you and I are living now, this historical moment, this epoch, is ours? And is there a case that our fiction or creative energy should be exploring, interrogating this moment in time, rather than looking back to other times, exploring other crises, other dilemmas, other contradictions that people dealt with 100 years ago, 200 years ago?
Fiorella de Maria: Well, I don’t think there’s any reason why you can’t do so by going back into the past. Because, as I’ve already suggested, in order to understand the world we currently live in, we have to understand how we got here. We have to have an honest view of how we got here. One of the problems I always feel with the way history is taught in British schools is that children are taught, say, the Second World War or the First World War. They’re not taught about the unification of Germany or Italy, or any of the big upheavals in Europe in the 19th century that created that world. You can’t understand it right unless you understand what came before. I do think that a very important way of perhaps challenging the way we see ourselves is to understand how we got here and to understand how people really did live in the past, not the strange caricature we’ve created.
James: So, Fiorella, what you’re talking to me about is some kind of understanding of Catholic salvation history, that history is a stream, and that you are plugging into a stream which is not a series of isolated events, but something continuous, with a beginning, which was the Garden of Eden, a middle, which is Golgotha, and an end, which is the Second Coming.
Fiorella de Maria: That’s exactly what I mean. It’s tapping into, as you say, the stream, rather than seeing history as if it were a series of isolated events completely separate from one another, that do not draw on one another. It’s mostly a question of imagination. I don’t think it’s even difficult. It’s because of imagination and friendship with the past, the sense of fellowship with the past.
James: I think that’s really interesting. Talk to me a bit about the Catholic imagination. What’s the difference between the Catholic imagination and, say, the secular imagination, which passes for so much literature today?
Fiorella de Maria: I think the secular imagination is quite narcissistic. If you imagine someone looking in a mirror as opposed to looking out of a window, maybe that’s the image I would use. Yes, the Catholic imagination is about looking out, not looking in so much.
James: So are you rejecting the whole sort of Freudian construct?
Fiorella de Maria: Well, the Freudian construct has mostly been rejected. Let’s face it, apart from in my English faculty, as far as I can work out, the only place where they taught Freud seriously…
James: But also sort of modernism in literature, it’s all about stream of consciousness, it’s all about internal debates. You’re saying that is just narcissism.
Fiorella de Maria: I’m not saying there’s no room at all for any kind of internal conversation, because so much of our spirituality involves an internal conversation, at least a private conversation. It’s also connected with our understanding that we are more than the sum of our parts. We are more than our minds and our bodies. We have a soul. We’re on a journey. It’s a very different way of seeing human life and the human journey. It was the way most people saw the world once, but it’s become less usual. I think contemporary fiction is very aggressively secular, but there are trends going the other way. There are books that are maybe trying to capture some sense of the spiritual journey, of the spiritual life, but it’s very much at the moment on the fringes. It comes back, in the end, to imagination, to that sense of fellowship with the past. The past is a foreign country, but the people of the past are not foreigners.
James: Okay, so is the past a foreign country?
Fiorella de Maria: Yes, the world changes, and people do things differently.
James: But human nature doesn’t change.
Fiorella de Maria: But human nature doesn’t change. That’s what I mean. In the past, the traditions may have been different, the way people saw the world might have been different, the social mores may have been different, but human nature does not really change.
James: Taking the analogy of the stream flowing through history, are we saying the stream is human nature? It never changes, it just keeps flowing, but the pastures on either side of that stream are different.
Fiorella de Maria: Yeah, you should write a novel.
James: With you?
Fiorella de Maria: Maybe. Yes.
James: Now we’re in a wood. Do you know who was in a wood, who got lost in a wood?
Fiorella de Maria: Dante, correct. Nella selva oscura, which means, in the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself in a wood where the way was lost.
James: But I think tonight, we haven’t lost our way, have we? Because the way is, as the Good Book says, The Way, the Truth, and the Life, absolutely. And that’s true for a Catholic novelist, absolutely, even true for you, I would hope so.
James: Thank you for joining us. Full versions of these interviews will be made available on our social media channels.
Pascal Mary: And don’t forget, if you’d like to support the work of EWTN Great Britain, do visit our website ewtn.co.uk, and click on the donate button.
James: So until next time, goodbye, and God bless you.