Pietro Leoni
Pietro Leoni (1 January 1909 – 26 July 1995) was an Italian priest of the Society of Jesus and the Russian Greek Catholic Church. His memoir of surviving the Gulag, Spio dei Vaticano, was published after his return to the West.[2]
Pietro Leoni | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1 January 1909[1] Premilcuore, Italy |
| Died | 26 July 1996 (aged 87) Montreal, Canada |
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Biography
He was born in Premilcuore, Emilia-Romagna, Kingdom of Italy and educated at the Russicum, a Jesuit-run seminary established to prepare priests for the Russian Greek Catholic Church for missionary work in the Soviet Union and the Russian diaspora. In 1941 Leoni went along with the Italian Royal Army during Operation Barbarossa. In 1943 he was released from service as the Italian army disintegrated and he decided to stay on as a missionary priest in Odessa.[3] On April 29, 1945 he was arrested by the NKVD for anti-Soviet agitation and counter-revolution and sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag. He was released in 1955 through intervention of the Vatican.[4] Following his return to the West, Leoni served as pastor of the Russian Catholic community in Montreal, where he died on July 26, 1995.[5]
References
- Reflections on the Gulag, Volume 37
- Sergey Golovanov. "The Historical Destiny of the Russian Catholic Tradition of the Byzantine Rite, 1917 – 1991." Archived 2009-12-26 at the Wayback Machine
- "Mission in the Night," Time Magazine, June 13, 1955
- Elena Dundovich, Francesca Gori, and Emanuela Guercetti (2003). Reflections on the Gulag: With a Documentary Index on the Italian Victims of Repression in the USSR. Feltrinelli Editore. ISBN 978-88-07-99058-8.
- Methodios Stadnik. "Nec Plus, Nec Minus, Nec Aliter: A Brief History of the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church and the Russian Catholics."