A spectacled little priest with a scraggly, greying beard emerged from a private audience with the Pope and his face lit with a sudden shy smile. "The Holy Father said 'Bravo!' " he recalled incredulously.
The Pope's "Bravo" was no surprise to those who knew where 46-year-old Jesuit Father Pietro Leoni had been saying his Mass for the past ten years.
Encounter in Odessa. Pietro Leoni was born in a small mountain town in "Red Emilia," hotbed of Italian Communism, and was educated for the priesthood at the Vatican's Russian College, training center for Russian priests and missionaries bound for the U.S.S.R.—if and when they are permitted there. When Italian troops marched into the U.S.S.R. in 1941 alongside their Nazi allies, Russian-speaking Jesuit Leoni went along as a chaplain. In 1943, released by the disintegrating Italian army, he decided to stay on in Russia as a civilian priest and settled in Odessa, which had been abandoned by the retreating Reds. Recalls Father Leoni: "The churches were reopened, and the people to whom God had been denied for years happily came back to the Christian faith." When Soviet troops were on the point of reconquering Odessa early in 1944, Father Leoni and another Jesuit decided to stay to minister to the city's Roman Catholics. As Father Leoni told the story to TIME Correspondent Robert Christopher:
"I stayed in my church, kneeling in prayer. All of a sudden, an armed Red soldier in an untidy old uniform entered the church. He advanced timidly, seemingly bewildered and frightened, and fell on his knees in front of the altar. When I approached him and he heard my step, he jumped up, ready to fire. But then he calmed down and smiled at me, and before he left, he put a coin in the alms box. He went out of the church looking around suspiciously, as though he had committed a crime."
Chalice in Vorkuta. For a whole year, the Soviet authorities permitted Pietro Leoni and France's Father Jean Nicolas to administer the sacraments to Roman Catholics in Odessa. The Russian Orthodox priests watched suspiciously. Of them, Father Leoni says bitterly: "They do not serve God — only the Communist regime." Then, one day in 1945, Father Nicolas disappeared. Recalls Father Leoni : "Later that day, two men came up to me and said 'Come with us ; it's just a question of a few formalities. You'll be free in ten minutes.' Those ten minutes lasted ten years."
At first, Leoni was shifted from prison to prison: 2½ months in the notorious Lubianka, 3½ months in Lefortovskaya Prison, and then 35 days in Butyrka, in Moscow. All this time was taken up in "investigation." Finally, after seven months, "I was taken one morning before an official who, never looking me in the face, informed me that I had been tried without my knowledge and had been condemned to ten years of forced labor 'For espionage on behalf of the Vatican and anti-Communist propaganda.' "