It seems scarcely correct to call Natalie Narischkin a convert. Her parents belonged to the Russian Church, and of course she was taught to regard herself as a member of the same. They resided, however, always in Italy, and Natalie was accustomed, in her childhood and youth, to associate freely with Catholic children and young people, and to accompany them to the churches and convents where they were wont to resort. Russian children receive infant communion, beginning with the day of their baptism, several times a year until they attain a proper age for confession, when there is a careful preparation and a solemn ceremony for the first adult communion, as with us. They are confirmed immediately after baptism. We are not told anything about Natalie’s receiving either infant or adult communion, but it is to be presumed that she was made to follow the usual practice, since there are Greek churches in Venice and other Italian cities. Her early associations were much more numerous, strong, and tender with the church of Italy and France than with the estranged church of her own nation. There was no difference in faith between herself and her Italian and French companions to make her sensible that the religion in which she was bred was different from the one in whose sacred rites she was continually taking part, at whose altars and shrines she frequently and devoutly worshipped. Even the peculiar ceremonies and forms of the Sclavonic and Greek rites were less familiar to her than those of the Latin rite. The only barrier between herself and her Catholic companions which could make Natalie sensibly feel a separation between them was her exclusion from participating in the sacraments administered by Catholic priests. This separation between priests and people professing the same faith, offering the same Sacrifice, administering and receiving the same sacraments, could only puzzle and surprise the mind of a child; but it requires a more mature understanding and complete knowledge to appreciate the obligation of renouncing all communion with a schismatical sect, however similar it may be to the true church. While Natalie was a child some of the little boys and girls with whom she played, particularly one little boy who became afterwards a martyr in China, used to assail her with controversy. Her older friends were more judicious, and waited patiently until her ripening intelligence and expanding spiritual life should prepare her for a more complete work of grace and a more perfect understanding of Catholic doctrine. In the instance of Madame Swetchine we see how much study and thought are necessary to produce in the mind of one who has grown up to maturity under the influences of the Russian Church a firm intellectual conviction that organic unity under the supremacy of the Roman See is essential to the being of the Catholic Church, and not merely the condition of its well-being and perfection. In Madame Elizabeth Gallitzin we discern how, in another way, national prejudice, and traditional hostility to what is regarded as anti-Russian, caused in her bosom a violent struggle against reason and conscience, even though the Catholic religion was that of her own mother. The case was wholly different with Natalie Narischkin. She did not think about the question of controversy at all, and was free from the national prejudices of a Russian. Her mother took no pains to instil them into her mind, or to place any obstacle in the way of the Catholic influences around her. She grew up, therefore, a Catholic, with only an external barrier between her inward sentiments and their full outward profession. The interior cravings of her spiritual life were the chief and real motive prompting her to pass over this barrier and find in the true church that which the broken, withered branch could not give. The requisite theological instruction in the grounds of the sentence of excision by which the Russian hierarchy is cut off from Catholic communion was a subsequent matter, and not at all difficult to one who was, like Natalie, intelligent, candid, and full of the spirit of the purest Catholic piety. There was really nothing in the way except the authority of her mother, whose chief motive of opposition was the fear of the emperor’s displeasure. When this obstacle was removed, Natalie easily and without an effort leaped over what was left of the external barrier.
We have anticipated, however, what belongs to a later period of her history. And going back to the time of her childhood, we will let Madame Craven herself describe the situation in which she was placed while she was growing up into womanhood. It will be noticed that Madame Craven speaks in the plural number, indicating that Natalie is not the only young Russian to whom her remarks apply. This will be understood when we explain that her sister Catharine sympathized with her in all her religious feelings, though she delayed, on account of her dread to encounter the opposition of her family, until a much later period her own formal abjuration.
“The entire childhood of these young girls had been passed at Naples, and they had been there environed by impressions which nothing in their Greek faith, no matter how lively it might have been, could counteract. The adoration of Jesus Christ, the veneration of the Holy Virgin and the saints, faith in the power of absolution and the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament, were the grand and fundamental doctrines which they had imbibed with their mother’s milk. Brought up at a distance from their own country, they might almost have believed themselves to be in the centre of their own religion, living as they were within the bounds of that great church which possesses all the gifts claimed by their own, with the added power of distributing and communicating them to all, without distinction of place, language, nation, or race. It is difficult to comprehend how any Russian whose soul is imbued with piety, on returning to his own country after having been brought up abroad, can find himself at ease in the bosom of Greek orthodoxy. In truth, it appears to us that the limits of a national church must seem very suffocating to any one who has felt, even for an instant, the pulsation of that universal life in the heart of the Catholic Church which is unconfined by mountains, rivers, or seas, which is contained within no barriers of any kind whatever, and bears the name of no particular nation, because it is the mother of all nations collectively. Therefore no one ever has been or ever will be able to fasten any denomination of this sort upon the only church who dares affirm that she alone possesses the truth in all its completeness. At the first view one would say that every church ought to make this claim under the penalty of being deprived of any reason for its existence. It is nevertheless true that only one loudly proclaims it; and those who hate as well as those who love the Catholic Church alike declare that she is a church in this respect singular among all others. Thus has she preserved through all ages a designation expressive of the idea realized in herself, and will preserve the same for all coming time! A multitude of her children have separated themselves from her, yet none of them have succeeded in despoiling her of the glorious title which suffices to make her recognized everywhere and by all. As for other churches or sects, when it is not the name of some man or nation which they substitute for her name, it is some kind of term or epithet which, even when it aims at giving a semblance of antiquity, betrays novelty in the very fact that it is necessary to employ it in order to be understood; and this is true in our own day just as much as it was in the time of St. Augustine. The overwhelming force of good sense and all the laws of human language determine that words express what they designate! At this day, as well as at that earlier period, neither friends nor enemies will ever give this grand name of CATHOLICS to any except those to whom it really belongs, and the same good sense proclaims as an indubitable fact which is that church whose children these are.
“Natalie had remained a long time without paying any attention to this controversy. She belonged all the while to the Catholic Church by all her pious habitudes, by all her childlike affections, finally and chiefly by the bond of the true sacraments which the Greek Church has had the infinite privilege of preserving, and which form a tie between ourselves and the Greeks whose value cannot be too highly estimated—a tie so powerful that even in one case where it is only imagined to have a real existence (i.e., with those Anglicans who persuade themselves that a chain wanting a multitude of links has not been broken) it has served in our days more than ever before to awaken in their hearts a sentiment inclining them to a nearer sympathy with our own. Belief in the truth of the words of Jesus Christ and in his real presence on the altar, the adoration and love of our Lord, the search after those who have possessed in the highest degree this faith and love, have opened the way by which a great number of souls have come to prostrate themselves before the tabernacles of the Catholic Church who had been previously outside of her visible fold, and had belonged to her only by virtue of their good faith and love of truth.
“With how much greater reason must one who belonged to the Greek Church have felt herself closely united to those whose faith was professed and whose practices were approved in respect to such a great number of points by her own church, which has even ventured to adopt the counsels of perfection and to speak of the 'spiritual life’ and of 'Christian perfection,’ after the manner of Catholics!
“But it is just here that she betrays her weakness; for when it is a practical question of undertaking and nourishing this spiritual life, where can she go to seek the living words, the sermons, the books, the apostolic men whom she requires? Where and from what source can one draw the vital force of this true and daily life, of this living life, if I may hazard the expression, always similar to itself, yet unceasingly renovated like the seasons of the year? Where can this vivifying influence be found, except in that same Catholic Church which, although it makes the mind bend under the necessary and salutary yoke of authority, never permits uniformity to engender tediousness, and possesses in its completeness that deposit a part of which the Greek Church suffered to escape on the day when it broke the bond of unity? Since then, although apparently rich, she has remained empty-handed; and while the Basils, the Athanasiuses, the Gregories, the Chrysostoms, and the numerous other holy and immortal doctors have had immortal successors in the Occident, the church of the Orient, once queen of eloquence and science, has become mute; and her children know not to-day whether she can speak or even write, since it is not given to them to hear her any more break silence; and, if they would warm up their piety by holy reading, and give their minds the sustenance they require, they are forced to have recourse to the Catholic Church, since it is there alone they can find their necessary aliment. Truly, we cannot help thinking that if the barrier which separates Greeks from Catholics were not upheld by hatred, it must fall down in an instant. This hatred is something which has no argument whatever in its justification, and which accepts, in behalf of the church which it covers as a shield of defence, the very conditions of death, immobility and silence, in lieu of a living existence.
“However this may be, and whatever more might be said on this vast and interesting subject, it cannot in any case be disputed that the divergences existing between us and the great Greek Church have nothing in common with those which separate us from Protestantism. Protestantism has tampered with and altered all our articles of faith, demolished the Christian mysteries most sacred to belief and dear to affection. It has retained neither the intercession of the saints, the worship of the Blessed Virgin, the sacraments of penance and the Holy Eucharist, nor the veneration of holy images. In fine, apart from the belief in the merits of our Saviour, of which every manifestation is severely restrained, there is nothing in common between Protestants and ourselves.[[9]] On the contrary, we may say, in respect to the Greeks, that for the simple faithful the difference between them and ourselves is invisible, because they have retained so many things which assimilate their religion to ours, as affecting the mind, the heart, and even the senses. Therefore, for many among them, the barrier does not become sensible until they find themselves disposed to pass over it in order to satisfy the inward need which they experience of participating in the riches of that other church, which seems so like their own, yet differs from it in possessing really what the other offers in a vain semblance.
“What, then, must be the sentiments of a sincere, fervent, simple, and upright soul, already bathed in the light which radiates from the great mysteries of the faith, and touched by the infinite love of Jesus Christ revealed in them, when it discovers the nature of the obstacles which lie in her path?
“She finds all the articles of her faith more solemnly affirmed; all the practices which her piety demands more numerous and accessible; confession, absolution, communion—all is there; and must she refrain from satisfying her thirst for them?
“Is it credible that a soul thus thirsty for truth, faith, and love should be much disposed to recoil from the difficulty of accepting one word more in the confession of faith,[[10]] or of recognizing the head of the universal church as the head of the church in the East as well as of that in the West? Again, is it credible that she will shrink back from the political obstacle, the greatest and most formidable of all—the only one, in fact, which she will find pain in overcoming and need courage to surmount?