20 Dec 1891 poet and activist Maria Skobtsova, aka Mother Maria of Paris, was born in Riga, the capital city of Latvia. At that time Latvia was part of the Russian empire, and Pilenko grew up in Anapa, a town in southern Russia on the shore of the Black Sea. Her family was relatively wealthy and belonged to society's upper class. Her father directed a botanical garden and school, and for a time he served as the mayor of Anapa. Her mother was a descendant of the last governor of the Bastille prison in Paris, which fell at the start of the French Revolution (1789–99; a rebellion resulting in the overthrow of the monarchy and the rise of a democratic government)
The home Pilenko's parents provided was a devout Eastern Orthodox one. Eastern Orthodox Christianity believes in the complete authority of the Bible, the Christian holy text, and that Jesus's teachings were preserved in them without error.
She was given the name Elizaveta Pilenko. Her father died when she was a teenager, and she embraced atheism.After her father's death in 1906, her mother took the family to St. Petersburg, the political and cultural center of Russia at the time. The untimely death of Pilenko's father affected her deeply, and for a while she questioned her belief in God.
The early twentieth century was a time of great political unrest in Russia. During her years in St. Petersburg, Pilenko was drawn into radical and revolutionary circles. She was attracted to goals such as the overthrow of the repressive monarchy and the desire to help lift the crushing poverty of many Russians. Even as a teenager she longed to do something great with her life, in the service of others.
In 1910 she married a revolutionary poet named Dimitri Kuzmin-Karaviev. Pilenko soon gave birth to a daughter, Gaiana, but the marriage proved short-lived and the couple divorced in 1913.
During this period Pilenko began to rethink her uncertainty about God and was drawn back to Christianity and gradually came to accept the truths of the Faith. She moved. now with her daughter, Gaiana.to the south of Russia where her religious devotion increased.
At the end of the Russian Revolution, she took part in the All-Russian Soviet Congress, as a delegate of the Social Revolutionary Party. She wrote about the experience in dire terms, including being dismissed by Trotsky’s lieutenant who told her 'Your role is played out. Go where you belong, into history’s garbage can!”d her “
On her way home, she was nearly executed several times, and that experience seals her dissatisfaction with revolutionary politics. She wrote, “My loyalty was not to any imagined government as such, but to those whose need of justice was greatest: the people. Red or white [the two sides in the revolution] my position is the same—I will act for justice and for the relief of suffering. I will try to love my neighbor.”
In 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, she was elected deputy mayor of Anapa in Southern Russia. When the anti-communist White Army took control of Anapa, the mayor fled and she became mayor of the town. The White Army put her on trial for being a Bolshevik. However, the judge was a former teacher of hers, Daniel Skobtsov, and she was acquitted. Soon the two fell in love and were married. Soon, the political tide was turning again. In order to avoid danger, Elizaveta, Daniel, Gaiana, and Elizaveta's mother Sophia fled the country. Finally they arrived in Paris in 1923. Soon Elizaveta was dedicating herself to theological studies and social work.
In 1926, her daughter Anastasia dies of influenza, which prompted the end of her marriage. But Maria ended up working with the poorest of the poor in Central Paris. Rather than letting her successive tragedies destroy her, she felt she saw “a new road before me and a new meaning in life, to be for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance or protection.”
In 1932, with Daniel Skobtov's permission, an ecclesiastical divorce was granted and she took monastic vows.something she did only with the assurance that she would not have to live in a monastery, secluded from the world. In religion she took the name Maria. Mother Maria made a rented house in Paris her "convent". It was a place with an open door for refugees, the needy and the lonely. It also soon became a center for intellectual and theological discussion. In Mother Maria these two elements—service to the poor and theology—went hand-in-hand. She was also known to visit Russian émigrés in mental hospitals
.Her refuge became so successful, that she had to find larger quarters. A home at 77 Rue Lourmel in the 15 th arrondissement was rented that allowed her to feed over a hundred a day and offer lodging if needed. Most of her days started by going to Les Halles, the old food market in central Paris. She would beg for food or buy as cheaply as she could whatever provisions needed. She became a regular sight at Les Halles, where merchants often were willing to give her their leftover overripe fruits and vegetables. Many were taken back by her appearance in religious garb, as she was seen smoking cigars and cigarettes while strolling along.
In 1939, Metropolitan Evlogy sent Fr. Dimitry Klepinin to serve Mother Maria’s community. Fr. Dimitry proved to be a partner, committed even unto death, in the community’s work among the poor.
Her writings attest deeply to how her radical Socialist-Revolutionary ideals stuck with her. She gave up the idle hope that human revolution could achieve anything on its own terms, but she never gave up hope that all things could and would be achieved through Christ. Indeed, in her essays, she excoriates both capitalism and communism by name for their mutilation and violent enslavement of the human person, and ends up advocating something that looks very much like distributism:
In fact, mankind has enough experience of the two opposing systems of coercion and violence. The old coercion of the capitalist regime, which destroys the right to life and leaves one only with the right to labour, has recently begun to deprive people of that right as well. Forced crisis, forced unemployment, forced labour, joyless and with no inner justification—enough of all that. But try going to the opposite system. It turns out to be the system of communist enforcement: the same joyless labour under the rod, well-organised slavery, violence, hunger—enough of that, too. It is clear to everybody that we must seek a path to free, purposeful and expedient labour, that we must take the earth as a sort of garden that it is incumbent upon us to cultivate. Who doubts that?
Her leftist bent extends to her personal ethics as well as to her social ones. She is highly critical of the tendency she saw within the Church to withdraw into one’s own shell of piety, to take only the vertical beam of the Cross descending from God to the individual man, and to leave behind the horizontal beam which embraces the other men and women around him as well. For Mother Maria, not only the crass and obvious impiety of greed, but also the much more subtle and insidious impiety of a philanthropy that is only seen as an occasion for the improvement of one’s own virtue or an exercise for the good of one’s own soul, is a form of selfishness which runs contrary to the Gospel. She writes:
A person should have a more attentive attitude to his brother’s flesh than to his own. Christian love teaches us to give our brother not only material but also spiritual gifts. We must give him our last shirt and our last crust of bread. Here personal charity is as necessary and justified as the broadest social work. In this sense there is no doubt that the Christian is called to social work. He is called to organise a better life for the workers, to provide for the old, to build hospitals, care for children, fight against exploitation, injustice, want, lawlessness. In principle the value is exactly the same, whether he acts on an individual or a social level; what matters is that his social work be based on love for his neighbour and not have any latent career or material purposes.
The social element of Christianity is, indeed, for her so inseparable from the core of Orthodox spirituality and the Gospel message She dedicated her life to easing the pain and suffering of hundreds in Paris plagued with hunger, racism, homelessness, mental illness, addictions and saving countless Jews during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
She expanded her ministry to setting up a school for children of émigrés, a house for single men and a rural house was turned into a sanitorium for TB patients. She then scoured the mental hospitals of France and rescued many who were confined because of language difficulties rather than mental illness and set up a house for them too. Despite all of the good she was doing, she ruffled the feathers of two priests who were sent to work with her, who left because she put charity and hospitality above religious piety.
The last phase of Mother Maria's life began when the German Nazis conquered and occupied France during World War II. While it would have been possible for her to flee France as the Germans were advancing toward Paris, she refused to leave. "If the Germans take Paris, I shall stay here with my old women. Where else could I send them?"
As Nazi persecution of Jews in France increased, the Orthodox community’s work expanded to include protection and care of the most helpless and. Maria turned most of her attention to helping save Jews from what she feared would be expulsion or deportation to the concentration camps in Germany and Poland. She worked with the French Resistance in helping Jews escape by secret routes south of Paris into unoccupied territory.
Early in 1942 the Nazis began their registration of Jews. Jews began to knock on the door of the house of hospitality asking if the chaplain, Father Dimitri Klepinine, would issue fake baptismal certificates to save their lives. With the support of Mother Maria, Father Dmitri issued the fake documents, convinced that Christ would do the same. When the order came from Berlin that the yellow star must be worn by all Jews, many French Christians felt that this was not their concern since it was not a Christian problem. Mother Maria replied, " "There is no such thing as a Christian problem. Don't you realize that the battle is being waged against Christianity? If we were true Christians we would all wear the Star. The age of confessors has arrived."
In July, 1942, mass arrests of Jews began to take place--12,884 were arrested of whom 6,900 were children. They were held prisoner in a sports stadium called Velodrome d’Hiver, where food and water became scarce just a kilometer from Mother Maria's house, before they were sent to Auschwitz. With her monastic robe gaining her entrance, she spent three days at the sports stadium distributing food and clothing and even managing to smuggle out some children by bribing garbage collectors to hide them in trash cans. Her house of hospitality was literally bursting at the seams with people, many of them Jews.
Eventually,all this work led to the arrest of Mother Maria, Fr. Dimitry, and their associates. Mother Maria was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, while Fr. Dimitry was sent to Buchenwald. Throughout the harsh cruelty of the camps, she ministered to others with the same compassion and love as always. Jacqueline Pery, who survived the holocaust and resided in the same building said “Maria was adored by all.” She added that during her last few months she was so sick that she had to lie down between roll calls. “her face revealed intense suffering, already it bore the marks of death”. “Despite all, she never complained.”
After great sufferings, they both perished, along with others from their community who followed/ Slse. She was taken to the gas chamber on 31 March 1945 on the eve of Pascha and as WWII was ending in Europe. It is believed that Mother Maria’s last act was to take the place of a Jewish woman who was being sent to death in the gas chambers, voluntarily dying in her place. Mother Maria was glorified as a saint by act of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople on January 16, 2004.
We know little of the actual life of many of the saints of the Church. In most cases we rely on hagiographic forms that can often be reduced to caricatures. But with Saint Maria Skobtsova we have an embodied personality—an intellectual, a divorced woman, a political revolutionary, and towards the latter part of her life, a nun. She was a woman who could be frank, outspoken, strong willed and even sometimes, quarrelsome. She was a monastic who defied conventional norms, among other things, smoking in public! She was someone who was shaped by the events of the 20th century—two world wars, forced emigration from her Russian homeland, and abject poverty—and who would subsequently lead a life of prayer, but one in the world, dedicated to helping others.
The memory of Saint Maria Skobtsova is now honored with a memorial sign in the famous Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Cemetery near Paris, where mostly Russian emigrants are buried. The marble slab in her honor reads: “Holy Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891-1945). Nun, poet, artist, resistance fighter. Exterminated by Nazis in Ravensbrück camp. Place of burial unknown.”
There is no tomb for Saint Maria Skobtsova who went to hear death in a gas chamber in place of another prisoner. Her ashes were mixed with those of other prisoners. The memorial project was supported by the Russian embassy in France and the RCSC in Paris.In 1983 by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mother Maria was posthumously awarded the order of the Great Patriotic War, 2nd Degree for her anti-fascist activities.
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