21st Sunday After Pentecost

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory Forever!
21st Sunday after Pentecost
November 2, 2025

Sat   11/1/25 4:00pm Vigil Divine Liturgy +Peter and +Mary Kavchak by Drew Moniot
Sun   11/2/25 9:30am Divine Liturgy Caroline Hills by Cindy Hills
Wed   11/5/25 7:00pm Liturgy for Healing +Souls in Purgatory by Marian Luther
Fri   11/7/25 6:00pm Adoration
Fri   11/7/25 7:00pm Moleben to Jesus
Sat   11/8/25 4:00pm Vigil Divine Liturgy +John and Doris Antoszyk by Mark Antoszyk
Sun   11/9/25 9:30am Divine Liturgy Richard Maire by Cindy Hills

Variable Parts   Tone 4 - Pages 141 - 142
Epistle    Galatians 2:16-20
Gospel     Luke 8:26-39

Memorial Candle Request:    No Candle Request

Epistle Readers 1-Nov Mary Troyan 2-Nov Mike Dancisin   8-Nov John Baycura/Mary Motko 9-Nov Kathy Moyta

Please Pray for: Brian Buchkovich, Lejen Warner, Sharon King, Ole J. Bergh, Liz Moyta, Fr. Michael Huszti, Fr. Laska, Susie Curcio, Teresa Milkovich, Robert Saper, Anna Habil, Mike Dancisin, Diane Sotak, Anna Pocchiari, Larry Hamil, Beverly Jones, Maryann Russin Schyvers, Nick Russin and Ken Konchan

Attendance: 10/25 — 21  10/26 — 82; Collection: 10/25 & 10/26 - $1,358.00

Student Food Pantry: For the month of November, we will be collecting peanut butter, jellies and macaroni/cheese. Any questions, please contact Pam Gagen. Thank you for your support!

Diaconal Ordination Celebration: If you will be attending the November 30th, 3:00pm parish celebration of diaconal ordination, please signup downstairs by November 16th as we will need a headcount for the catered dinner. Donations of deserts will be needed for this dinner and a signup sheet for this may also be found on the bulletin board. Thank you!

Baking Help Needed: We will be baking nut rolls on December 4th and December 12th. Please help if you are available.

Ladies Guild: The Ladies Guild will have a meeting TODAY at 11:00am in the church.

Nut Rolls: Nut roll orders will be taken through November 16th. You may order nut rolls by calling 412-837-9446 or by filling out an order form located on the bulletin board. Poppy seed and apricot are available. Pickup dates for nut roll orders will be on December 5th and December 13th.

In the month November we commemorate and celebrate the saints that are not very well known but their lives are inspiration for many; the sacrifices and offerings of those anonymous saints shaped the history of our civilization and helped to overcome evil. Allow me to present one of these saints- A martyr, byzantine catholic nun known as Mother Catherine of Siena who lived during Communism in Russia.

It has been said, purportedly by G.K. Chesterton, that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing but in anything. Even worse is that the things which people believe are not merely godless but deadly and demonic. Take, for instance, the modem anti-Christian creeds that led to the French and Russian Revolutions and to the rise of the Nazis. These monstrous ideologies gave us the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber, each of which was a means to destroy those dissidents deemed to be enemies of the state. One such dissident was Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova, later known as Mother Catherine of Siena.

Mother Catherine was a Russian Byzantine Catholic religious sister who founded a convent of Third Order Dominicans in her Moscow apartment and would spend more than a decade of solitary confinement as a prisoner of conscience in Joseph Stalin's concentration camps before dying in prison.

Born in Moscow in 1882 into a noble Russian family, Anna Abrikosova studied at Girton College, Cambridge, before moving to France. She was received into the Catholic Church in the St. Vincent de Paul chapel of the Church of the Madeline in Paris in 1908.

After her return to Russia and her founding of the Byzantine Catholic sisters' community of the Third Order of St. Dominic, she and the other members vowed in August 1917 to sacrifice themselves to the Holy Trinity for the salvation of the Russian people. In this dramatic pledge to lay down their lives for Christ for the conversion of their country, they were perhaps inspired by the heroic witness of the Discalced Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne who were guillotined during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution.

Only two months after the sisters had taken their vows, the Bolshevik Revolution, in October 1917, ushered in more than 70 years of atheist persecution. In spite of the imminent danger to themselves, Abrikosova and the sisters continued their religious work, opening an illegal Catholic school for those who did not want their children brainwashed by the Marxist indoctrination of the compulsory Soviet public school system. They also translated many Catholic texts into the Russian language, in defiance of state censorship, circulating their translations in secret.

Inevitably, Mother Catherine and the other sisters of her community were arrested in November 1923. She was sentenced to ten years of solitary confinement and would be imprisoned at Yaroslavl from 1924 to 1932. Shortly before sentencing, Mother Catherine told the sisters of her community that every one of you, having given your love to God and following in His way, has in your heart more than once asked Christ to grant you the opportunity to share in His sufferings. And so it is; the moment has now arrived. Your desire to suffer for His sake is now being fulfilled.

After spending eight years in solitary confinement, Mother Catherine was diagnosed with breast cancer and was transferred to Butyrka Prison infirmary for an operation. Her left breast and some of the muscles on her back and side were removed, leaving her left arm paralyzed. In August 1932, following the operation, she petitioned to be returned to her cell in Yaroslavl but was told that she was now free and that her sentence was over. She walked directly from Butyrka Prison to the Church of St. Louis des Francais, resuming her labors for Christ in the Soviet vale of tears.

"This woman is a genuine preacher of the Faith and very courageous," wrote the underground Catholic bishop Pie Eugene Neveu, in a letter to Rome. "One feels insignificant beside someone of this moral stature. She still cannot see well, and she can only use her right hand, since the left is paralyzed."

Irrespective of the risk of arrest and reimprisonment, Mother Catherine reestablished connections with the surviving sisters of her order, intent on taking up once again the task of evangelizing the culture of death in which she found herself. She was duly arrested, along with 24 other Catholics, and was accused of forming a "terrorist organization" which was plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin, overthrow the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and restore the House of Romanov as a constitutional monarchy in collaboration with "international fascism" and "Papal theocracy." It was further alleged that their "terrorist" activities were being directed by the Vatican's Congregation for the Oriental Churches on the orders of Pope Pius XI himself. After being declared guilty as charged, Mother Catherine was returned to the prison at Yaroslavl. She died in prison from spinal cancer in 1936. Her body was cremated unceremoniously, and the ashes were thrown into a mass grave in the Donskoy Cemetery of central Moscow.

The surviving sisters would finally be released in the mid-1950s (after the death of Stalin). One of them, Nora Rubashova, would subsequently be interviewed by the great Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as part of his research for The Gulag Archipelago, his best selling exposé of the horrors of the Soviet prison system.  The article was modified from the original written by: By Joseph Pearce