October 16, 2005
Mary Varick
I have been very pleased with the response of people to our Sunday review of saintly people who have lived in the New York area. I was looking around for a good set of topics to focus on, and it turns out that this is one that people are interested in.
Today I want to talk about Mary Varick, a seriously physically handicapped woman who did incredible things. Mary lived in northern New Jersey in the Archdiocese of Newark and became seriously incapacitated fairly early in life. She always traveled by wheelchair with her faithful husband and other friends to move her.
Mary was not only well-known for her smile and absolutely cheerful disposition, but also for the fact that she brought hundreds of people on pilgrimages to Soviet Russia. This was in the dim, dark days of Soviet persecution of the church. I often wondered what the Russian officials must have thought about this devout woman with her band of pilgrims going to visit the ruins of a persecuted church. The pilgrims would go to Moscow and St. Petersburg, which was then called Leningrad. They would visit many churches, mostly Russian Orthodox, although there was a Catholic Church in Moscow at the time named after St. Louis, King of France. I’m sure they must have thought Mary was a secret agent, and in fact she was. She wasn’t bringing back and forth messages or stirring up revolution; she was bringing charity and love. I’m sure that many of the Russian people who ran into these pilgrims would be impressed by the strength of their Christian faith that brought them to Russia under such a dark cloud of persecution.
Some years after Mary started her pilgrimages, I had the opportunity to visit Moscow on my way to Calcutta. The persecution of the Church had been relaxed considerably at that time. I was struck by the number of people who quietly greeted me in the street and whispered into my ear in Russian, “Father, Father”. I was overwhelmed by surprise when a Russian soldier who was at the airport examing passports kissed my hand and said “Slava Jesu Christo”, which means Praised be Jesus Christ; although, he did carefully look around before he did it.
Thousands of souls like Mary Varick living in Russia quietly kept the faith alive, but it’s interesting to know that one little layperson, despite being seriously handicapped, could do all that she did. When Mary died, one of the most senior priests of the Archdiocese of Newark spoke to me about the possibility of opening her cause of beatification. If anyone reading this message knows whatever happened to that possibility, I’ll be happy to hear it. In the meantime, I have in my mind a picture of this smiling face of an old woman in a wheelchair going up to the cathedrals inside the Kremlin.
Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR
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