Ep. 21: From Moscow to the Motherhouse – Dominican Martyrs Under Communism (Sr. Maria Gemma, O.P.)
6/17/20261 hr 13 min
Every Sister has a beautiful, unique story of how they became a bride of Christ...but not many of them can say they walked by the headquarters of the KGB to attend Mass at the height of Communist rule. For Sr. Maria Gemma, that was just one of many highlights in her journey to the convent. Along the way, she discovered a deep love for the Moscow Dominicans, a fascination with Russian literature, and a calling that could only be satisfied by Christ Himself.
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First 90 secondsSister Maria Gemma· Guest0:00
And shook me awake and said, "I think there's something going on in Moscow that you're gonna want to know about."
Sister Miriam· Host0:05
Oh, yeah.
Sister Maria Gemma· Guest0:05
'Cause he would get up... He worked for the phone company.
Sister Miriam· Host0:07
Oh, okay.
Sister Maria Gemma· Guest0:07
A very simple man, and he would get up- Mm ... and listen to the news in the morning.
Sister Miriam· Host0:10
Oh.
Sister Maria Gemma· Guest0:10
And the news had said that Gorbachev had been put under house arrest, and everything was in a state of- Wow ... turmoil in Moscow, and the tanks- Wow ... were rolling in.
Sister Miriam· Host0:17
Oh.
Sister Maria Gemma· Guest0:17
So I'm on- I'm, like, on the phone pulling the cord, 'cause this was the days when you had a cord on your phone- [laughs] ... pulling the cord to the nearest TV, watching the tanks roll through Moscow- Wow ... and trying to get ahold of anybody that I could in Moscow. That was, you know, really a... It was a really beautiful thing. So I got to work with scientists and businessmen and students, and we had some really craji- crazy projects that we were working on. We were trying to, um, establish, uh, a potato processing facility, um, that we would take potatoes that would lay in the ground 'cause they had blemishes and couldn't really move to market.
Sister Miriam· Host0:57
Mm.
Sister Maria Gemma· Guest0:57
And so I came back on the Greyhound bus, 23 hours each way, in February, uh, making rosaries, making cord rosaries- Mm-hmm ... all the way, and all the way back, to ask for papers, and then I ended, ended up entering that, that summer. And at that point, the community was 13, and then the 12 of us entered. So we doubled the community. We tripled the food budget. [laughs] We had to buy the big white vans.
Unknown speaker1:22
[laughs] [upbeat music]