Maria Skobtsova

Life and Ministry

Elizaveta Pilenko was born at Riga in AD 1891 to a Russian aristocratic family of Black Sea wine-growers, married twice, was the first woman to study at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, served as deputy mayor of Anapa during the Russian Civil War, and emigrated through Constantinople to Paris in AD 1923. Widowed and bereaved of her younger daughter Anastasia, she took monastic vows in AD 1932 under the Russian Orthodox archbishop Evlogy as Mother Maria of Paris, and opened a hostel for impoverished Russian émigrés and abandoned women at 77 rue de Lourmel in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. With her chaplain Father Dimitri Klepinin she ran a soup kitchen, a chapel, a sewing room for the destitute, and a tuberculosis sanatorium at Noisy-le-Grand. Her unmonastic style and her insistence on serving the poor outside the cloister scandalized the more rigorist Russian émigré church but was defended by her bishop and by the philosopher-theologian Sergei Bulgakov, who served as her spiritual father.

Circumstances of Death

After the German occupation of Paris in AD 1940 Mother Maria's hostel became a refuge for Jewish families, hiding fugitives, distributing forged baptismal certificates from the parish register, and helping Jewish children escape to the Free Zone. With Father Dimitri and her son Yuri Skobtsov, she was arrested by the Gestapo on 8 February AD 1943 and deported via Compiègne to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She survived two years of camp labor, encouraging the other women, leading impromptu prayer services, and continuing to embroider an icon of the Mother of God under the standard issue. On 30 March AD 1945, with the Soviet armies a few days from the camp, she was selected for the gas chamber. According to multiple survivor accounts she took the place of a young Jewish woman in the queue for the gas chamber the next morning, and was gassed on 31 March AD 1945 — Holy Saturday by the Orthodox calendar.

Legacy

Mother Maria was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in AD 2004 as Saint Maria of Paris, together with her son Yuri, Father Dimitri Klepinin, and Ilya Fondaminsky. Her witness is that the monastic vocation is fulfilled at the gas chamber door: the nun who refused the cloister for the rue de Lourmel refused the queue for the gas chamber by taking another's place, and the supper of the cross which she had served to the poor of Paris she ate herself in the morning of Holy Saturday at Ravensbrück. Her writings on the Sacrament of the Brother have become a foundational text of modern Orthodox social theology.