A сonversation with Saint Luke about money that burns the hands
How could a priest take money from the hands of a tyrant who shot the clergy?
This question hangs in the air every time the conversation turns to Archbishop Luke's Stalin Prize. It is 1946. A decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, two hundred thousand rubles, the name of the awarded hierarch printed on the same sheet as the portrait of the leader – the persecutor of the Church. Archbishop and Professor Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky), whom that very authority had arrested three times, tortured during interrogations, and driven into exile, accepts the money. And not only accepts it but sends the following telegram to Moscow:
«I ask you, most esteemed Joseph Vissarionovich, to accept 130,000 rubles from the prize of Your glorious name awarded to me to help orphans, victims of fascist monsters. Bishop Luke, Professor Voino-Yasenetsky».
It is not easy for us to understand this. Let us try to ask the uncomfortable question directly to the saint.
How does a prize from a tyrant accord with the Gospel?
— Your Grace, You accepted a prize from a man whose subordinates tortured You in prison. Does it not seem to You that this is a dangerous deal?
— Surgery for me is not a profession but a ministry, answers Saint Luke. I serve God by healing His suffering children.
Remarkably, he says not a word about politics. He only explains the nature of his action. The money was given for work — for years in operating rooms, for monographs written in exile barracks, for hands that put thousands of wounded back on their feet. Not for silence about executions but for surgery.
— But You could have refused. That would have been a courageous gesture.
— There is no merit of mine in receiving the prize, the confessor calmly objects. It is God who gave me reason and strength. This prize should belong to Him, not to me.
Here is the key to answering our question.
Saint Luke did not consider the money received to be his own. It was merely an instrument that fell into his hands, — the same as a scalpel or an episcopal staff. An instrument does not defile the hands if you know what you hold it for.
One hundred thirty thousand rubles went to orphanages on the same day the confirmation telegram arrived. The remaining seventy — to children, relatives, needy priests of the eparchy. He kept nothing for himself. The cassock on the archpastor remained old and patched as before.
Stalin replied: "Accept my greetings and the gratitude of the USSR Government for Your care of orphans." These words of the leader were even printed in "Izvestia". Archbishop Luke received what he needed: public status. But he immediately put it to use.
A cassock in the presidium: why irritate the authorities?
To all official meetings – medical congresses, consultations, to the offices of commissioners for religious affairs – Archbishop Luke always came in his cassock and with a panagia on his chest. He sat in the presidium next to NKVD generals and party nomenclature. They felt uncomfortable, but they remained silent.
When Tambov officials tried to demand that he remove his cassock before entering secular institutions, he answered with one phrase: "Otherwise I will stop operating". The authorities had no response to this.
— Your Grace, what was the meaning of this action? You could have worked quietly in civilian clothes and done the same good deed.
— My episcopal duty commands me first of all to care for the spiritual welfare of the flock, and only then for the bodily health of the wounded, Archbishop Luke answers confidently.
A cassock at a medical congress — this is not a thrown gauntlet. This is the saint's reminder of who he was for the Church and in whose name he acted. Remove the cassock — and surgeon Voino-Yasenetsky becomes an ordinary surgeon. Keep it — and behind every operation, behind every petition to open a church, behind every letter to a commissioner stands the Church. For him this was a fundamental difference.
The status of Stalin Prize laureate gave Saint Luke the right to write harsh letters to local officials. And he used this right without hesitation — demanding an end to illegal levies on the clergy, opening boarded-up rural churches in the Tambov region. The name of Professor Voino-Yasenetsky was heard in government offices. This was an invisible battering ram, and he used it.
On the love of money that unites us with Soviet clergy
Next to the medical charts of the wounded on his desk lay lists of the "twenties" — initiative groups of believers asking for churches to be opened. Two different worlds in two different documents lay on one desk. Just as the same hands held both scalpel and episcopal staff.
But here there is an unexpected turn. The archbishop, who had just donated colossal money to orphans and lived in a patched cassock in a modest room on Komsomolskaya Street, wrote a circular epistle to his priests with searing content.
— Your Grace, what did You warn the clergy about then?
— To my deep sorrow, the overwhelming majority of the eparchial clergy... was infected with love of money, says the saint, with no softness in his voice. You have forgotten, forgotten about the enormous importance for success in Christ's work of non-acquisitiveness, and by your love of silver you repel believers from yourselves, I wrote to them.
We commonly think that people who have passed through prisons and exile automatically become indulgent toward the everyday weaknesses of their neighbors. But Voino-Yasenetsky was different. Precisely because he himself had gone through persecutions, he was strict and demanding with the clergy. He knew like no one else the value of non-acquisitiveness as the main instrument of pastorship.
A priest who thinks about money cannot think about his flock. This was a hard-won axiom for the hierarch.
It is uncomfortable for us to read this. Because we are that very "overwhelming majority" that the saint recalled in his epistle. Not necessarily clergy. These are all people for whom comfort has long become part of the Christian way of life, rather than its opposite.
What we call compromise
Sources have not preserved Stalin's personal reaction to the telegram where the exiled prisoner, having received his prize, signed himself as Bishop Luke. There are no drafts of the leader's resolutions on this matter — only the edited final response in the newspaper. What he thought reading this signature, we do not know.
But we know what Voino-Yasenetsky himself thought. He thought about orphans who needed money. About churches that needed to be opened. About priests who needed to be disciplined. About patients who needed to be operated on. All this fit into one coordinate system — not Soviet or anti-Soviet, but ecclesiastical. State policy was the atmosphere in which this system functioned - and nothing more.
We would call this compromise. But the saint did not seek compromises, he simply served God and the Church.
There is nothing more to add. Indeed, in serving people was the main meaning of life of this remarkable saint, whose example continues to inspire us, who have essentially become contemporaries of that difficult era in which confessor Luke lived and served.
