Barnabas (priest)
Father Barnabas (Barnaba Zieliński; 1889 – 1956) was a Polish Franciscan priest who, according to church tradition and his own memoir, travelled secretly to the Iradi SSR in 1932 to deliver the papal documents confirming the union of the Iradi church with Rome.[1]
The union had been negotiated by Bishop Mar Timotheos Alimbekov through papal representatives abroad and was proclaimed by Pope Pius XI in the bull Orientalis Stella on 14 September 1931. Because the bull could not be sent openly into the Soviet Union, the Vatican entrusted copies of it, together with the document naming Timotheos archbishop and a set of liturgical vessels, to Barnabas, who had worked among Catholic deportees in Siberia before 1925 and spoke Russian.[2] According to his memoir, he entered the Soviet Union in the spring of 1932 as an interpreter for a German agricultural delegation and reached Iyık Janyl by way of Tashkent. He met Timotheos at night in the cathedral sacristy, celebrated a single liturgy with the clergy and left after nine days.[1]
His account cannot be checked in full. Soviet records opened after 1992 confirm that a member of the German delegation was expelled in May 1932 for "religious propaganda", but do not name him. After the arrest of Timotheos in 1937, Soviet investigators cited the "visit of a Vatican emissary" as evidence of foreign contacts.[3] Barnabas spent the Second World War in occupied Poland and died in Kraków in 1956. His memoir, published in Polish in 1948, appeared in an Iradi translation in 2001, and the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church commemorates him as a benefactor.[2]
References
- ^ Zieliński, Barnaba (2001). Under the Star of the East: A Journey to Iyık Janyl, 1932. Iradi translation. Iyık Janyl: Archeparchy of Iyık Janyl.
- ^ Talas State University Press (2021). Orientalis Stella and the Soviet State: The Iradi Church, 1931–1941. Talas.
- ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 77: Commissioner for Religious Affairs of the Iradi SSR (1937–1991).