Maria Skobtsova

Maria Skobtsova, known in religion as Mother Maria of Paris, was born Elizaveta Yurievna Pilenko in 1891 at Riga, then in the Russian Empire. She came from a family of the landed gentry; her childhood was spent largely at Anapa on the Black Sea and later in Saint Petersburg after her father's death. In the capital she entered the literary culture of Russia's Silver Age, associating with Symbolist writers including Alexander Blok, and she published poetry. In 1910 she married Dmitry Kuzmin-Karavayev. Their daughter Gaiana was born of this marriage, which subsequently ended in divorce. The revolutions of 1917 and the civil war that followed drew her into local politics: in 1918 she was chosen deputy mayor and then mayor of Anapa, where she sought to protect the town amid successive occupations.

During the civil war she married Daniel Skobtsov, a White officer, and they had two children, Yuri and Anastasia. When the White armies collapsed, the family left Russia by way of Georgia and Constantinople, lived for a period in Yugoslavia, and reached Paris in the early 1920s. There they shared the hardships of the Russian emigration. The death of the child Anastasia in 1926 from illness was a decisive spiritual turning point. Her second marriage was later dissolved by the Church. She worked with the Russian Student Christian Movement and among destitute fellow exiles, while reading theology and coming under the influence of Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) and the priest-theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Gaiana later returned to the Soviet Union and died there in the 1930s.

In 1932 Metropolitan Evlogy tonsured her as a nun, giving her the name Maria, and blessed an unusual vocation: not enclosure in a traditional monastery but a life of prayer and service in the streets and tenements of Paris. She opened a house of hospitality at 77 rue de Lourmel, with a chapel, a soup kitchen, and rooms for the homeless, the unemployed, alcoholics, the mentally disturbed, and impoverished intellectuals. Further houses and a small rural rest home at Noisy-le-Grand followed. Mother Maria insisted that monasticism must be incarnate in love of neighbor; she wrote essays and poems on the Cross, on the Orthodox understanding of the human person, and on the Church's duty to the outcast. Liturgy and kitchen work, icon corners and night watches over the dying, were held together in one rule of life.

The German occupation of France in the Second World War confronted the community with the persecution of Jews. Mother Maria, Father Dmitri Klepinin (the chaplain of rue de Lourmel), her son Yuri Skobtsov, and friends including the Jewish Christian Ilya Fondaminsky hid Jews, distributed food, and provided baptismal certificates and other papers that might save lives. In February 1943 the Gestapo arrested them. Mother Maria was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Fellow prisoners later testified to her courage, her sharing of food, and her efforts to keep hope and prayer alive in the barracks. On 31 March 1945 she was among those killed in the camp gas chamber, only days before Ravensbrück was liberated. She has no known grave.

On 16 January 2004 the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople glorified Mother Maria as a saint, together with Priest Dmitri Klepinin, Yuri Skobtsov, and Ilya Fondaminsky, honoring them as martyrs and confessors who had laid down their lives for others. She is commemorated on 20 July. Veneration spread especially in the Orthodox parishes of Western Europe and in churches that received the act of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Her life is remembered as a witness that Orthodox monasticism and the Gospel commandment of mercy can be lived in the modern city and even under totalitarian violence.