Dear "Unsere Leute"* in America!
More than a hundred years ago a portion of our people migrated to America. The other portion remained on the banks of the Volga. The separation became final when the Communists came to power in Russia. All contact was lost, and all relations with friends and relatives were cut off.
How much greater, then, must our joy now be, that after many, many years we have found each other again. In the intervening years, our people in America and those in Russia have each had a separate development and history. In some ways we became different; but despite all the differences, amazingly much remained similar, thus binding us together.
We can still understand one another through our Volga German language. We sing the same songs. And above all, there is the Catholic faith, which makes us the same. We are children of the same Mother Church.
And today, you are celebrating a very special day; the departure ceremony for the first four Sisters of the Congregation of St. Agnes, who will come to Russia, to Chelyabinsk, to serve as missionaries. The faithful in the Ural region, among whom are many Russian Germans, are overjoyed as they await the arrival of the Sisters.
I share this joy with them and hope that the Lord will bless this small, modest beginning and let big things come from it. A hearty welcome, dear Sisters, to the land of your great-grandparents!
*[This phrase, meaning literally "Our People," has been used by the Volga Germans of Ellis and Rush counties in Kansas as a synonym for their ethnic group, which founded six autonomous villages near Hays, Kansas, in the 1870s. -- Fr. Blaine]
Dear Catholic people of the Church of Chelyabinsk,
We greet you with God's own love in our first letter to you.
On the feast of St. Nicholas, Dec. 6, the great saint of Russia and of all Catholics, we received with great joy the permission from the Russian government to come to Siberia. Because almost a month of the 90 days was lost before we got the papers, we spoke with Bishop Werth and Fr. Wilhelm and asked to get another permission from the govemment. When we receive it, we will come to you right away.
Our hearts beat with joy as we prepared to come to you. God has called us and we come as Abraham and Sarah went to a land God gave them. We come as Mary and Joseph went to Egypt to a land that they did not know. We come as Jesus came to do the Pather's work: the Mission of God.
We understand and speak the Volga German as the people in Kansas speak it but we will have to learn it from you as it is spoken in Siberia.
We have studied and understand the Russian language, but will have to teach it to us as you teach it to your little children until we can speak it, think it, pray it, and read it with you as adults.
We come to you just as who we have become by living a lifetime in God's service, and we come to you as your own Sisters to be with you in all that the Holy Spirit of God is doing in his church in Chelyabinsk.
We come to you in the light of the Star of the Magi. When we do get there, our Congregation of Sisters in religion will be with us in spirit and in prayer all day. The Volga Germans of Kansas will come with us in all the hopes and dream of our great grandparents who left Russia over a hundred years ago, but were always rooted in the land of the Volga that had been their home over 100 years before they left.
May your Christmas day and season be filled with the love, joy, and peace the Christ Child came to bring. Together we look with great hope to the blessings and promises the New Year of Grace, 1994, has for us.
The two letters above -- one from and one to Siberia -- are signs and instruments alike of another historic development the fast-moving saga of the reemergence of the church in that vast land committed to the care of Bishop Werth.
St. Joseph's Church, Hays, Kansas, was the site on Saturday, Jan. 8, of the commissioning for service in the spread of Gospel of four Sisters of St. Agnes (popularly known as Agnesians), who have committed themselves to assist Bishop Werth and Fr. Wilhelm Palisch, the German-born pastor, in ministry to the Catholics of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city of over a million people on the eastern slopes of Russia's Ural mountains.
Close to halfway between Moscow and Novosibirsk, residential cities of Russia's only two Roman Catholic bishops, Chelyabinsk is close to the dividing line between the the two apostolic administrations and about 875 miles west of Novosibirsk. The Agnesians will be the first Catholic Sisters ever stationed in the part of Siberia west of Novosibirsk and the first community of U.S. Sisters to serve anywhere in Russia.
The four Sisters commissioned were Sr. Lucy Ann Wasinger, 73; Sr. Mary Elise Leiker, 66; Sr. Mary Ann Schippers, 60; and Sr. Alice Ann Pfeifer, 40. All are natives of Ellis County, Kansas, and among themselves they can claim direct descent from 17 different families that came to Kansas from Russia's lower Volga region in 1875-1892.
Sr. Mary Mollison, recently-elected general superior of the Agnesians, and Sr. Caryl Hartjes, southwest U.S. regional coordinator, presented the Sisters for service, and Bishop George K. Fitzsimons of Salina commissioned them and presented them with mission crosses (icon crucifixes bearing images of the four Evangelists) and a large icon of Christos Pantokrator during the Hays ceremony. The icons had been made by Russian Orthodox monks in Geneva, Nebraska, and were gifts of the Volga-German Society of Ellis and Rush Counties.
Sisters Lucy Ann and Mary Ann will fly from Chicago on Feb. 15 to begin the mission.
In Chelyabinsk, they will live in a fully-furnished house on Augustine St. in the German sector, a house purchased by their congregation from a family wanting to migrate to Germany.
Precisely what they will be doing there remains to be seen, but both Sisters have immense experience, both as educators and pastoral assistants. They plan to spend much of their time at first simply listening to the people.
Sr. Alice Ann is not going with the first group, as she is in contact with several lay women considering service in Siberia and will possibly help them discern their call and prepare them to go with her. Sr. Mary Elise expects to travel sometime in the spring.
The Sisters have a combined total of 169 years in religious life.
Sr. Alice Ann has a Master's degree in English and taught for 12 years. Since 1988, she has worked as an author, illustrator, and editor of religious education publications for HI-TIME Publishing Corp. of Milwaukee.
Sr. Mary Elise has a Master's degree in history and taught for 36 years. She has been a counselor and tutor for intercity youth in Harlem since 1990, but spent the previous seven years as a counselor at Covenant House shelter for homeless and runaway teenagers in New York City.
Sr. Mary Ann has a Master's in education and taught for 38 years. Since 1990 she has been a pastoral minister to the elderly and homebound, and worked to empower the laity in that ministry.
Sr. Lucy Ann has graduate degrees in both general and religious education and in scripture and has done extensive teaching on every level from grade school to the university. She taught reading at Marquette University in Milwaukee and at Dalhausie University in Nova Scotia. She has also served as a high school principal in Elmhurst Ill., and as parish director of religious education in Hays and Mobile, Ala. She went to Mobile in 1973 as one of the first group of Agnesians to work in the southeastern part of the U.S. Over the years, she has also been active with Catholic youth groups, ecumenical dialog groups, and the charismatic movement. Since 1990, she has been in Tucson, Ariz., working at scriptural and interfaith efforts to develop grass-roots leadership aimed at bringing about systemic change.
Bishop Werth first met Agnesians during his 1992 visit to Ellis County. He met three of the four new missionaries and asked each to help him find assistants. None of them gave any serious consideration then to being personally involved, but the seed had been planted.
Sr. Alice Ann, who was not here at the time, had wished she could go to Russia as early as 1976, when the Volga-Germans celebrated their centennial in Kansas, but she figured the political situation would never allow it.
These seeds began to sprout when the American bishops asked the various congregations of women to consider helping the churches in the former Soviet Union get back on their feet. Sr. Jean Steffes, who was general superior at the time, set in motion a study to see if the community would be interested and able to do so. Because of Bishop Werth's personal contact, Siberia soon emerged as the community's focus in responding to the American bishops.
Sr. Alice Ann and two members of the congregation's general council visited Novosibirsk, Omsk, and Chelyabinsk in May and June of 1993 and reported favorably on the possibilities, and since then the four volunteers have engaged in intense programs of discernment cross-cultural awareness, and Russian language study.
Founded in Wisconsin in 1858 by immigrants from Austria and Germany, the Agnesians presently have nearly 450 Sisters in 30 U.S. dioceses coast to coast and another 32 in Central America. Their Central American mission, which began among the Miskito Indians of eastern Nicaragua in 1945, now extends into Honduras as well. Two of the Sisters, Maureen Courtney and native-Nicaraguan Teresa de Jesús Rosales, were killed there in an ambush on New Year's Day, 1990.
The Agnesians first came to Ellis County in 1879, and within a few years some of the young German girls from Russia had joined the community. Since then well over 150 women of Volga-German descent have done so.
The Agnesians' new missionary efforts will be supported through the CSA Siberian Ministry Fund, 475 Gillette St., Fond du Lac WI 54935, and donations are being sought.
The Sisters will eventually publish their own newsletter, and readers of a letter from SIBERIA may wish to get on that list too. Sisters Lucy Ann, Mary Ann, and Mary Elise can be reached at the Gillette St. address until the time of their departures. The phone number there is (414) 923-2121.
Lay women interested in serving with the Sisters in Siberia should contact Sr. Alice Ann by mail at 111 E. 2nd St., Fond du Lac WI 54935, or by phone at (414) 921-7738.
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