Russian Dressing on Your Salad?

03-13-2022Pastor's LetterFr. John Bonavitacola

Dear Friends,

I guess we are back to no longer asking for Russian dressing on our salads. After years of the Russiagate hoax, it’s back to maintaining a posture of “despise all things Russian” in order to prove your bona fides and be allowed in polite society. Now we have this: Anastasia, a movie about the legend of a Russian princess who escaped the murderous Bolsheviks, is now cancelled by Disney because it is about a Russian.

Yet Disney won’t cancel its big hit Mulan, which is about China, despite the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslims. And wasn't it many of these same media outlets that preached to us non-stop about Islamophobia after 9/11 and not to blame all Muslims and to be careful to distinguish radical Muslims from the religion of Islam?

But now we are supposed to blame all Russians? Heap collective guilt on them because of the actions of the tyrant who rules over them? The idea of collective guilt gives rise to the darkest and ugliest of human instincts and has led to horrible genocides over the centuries. We can’t give it a foothold in our world.

I recently met a woman from Russia who is working in the US and I asked her what she thought about the war in Ukraine. She told me it was the Ukrainians fault for wanting to join NATO and the EU even though they have historically been part of Russia. “After all Putin warned them”, she said. Apparently, Putin has done a good job convincing Russians that Ukrainians are renegade teenagers that need to be pulled back into the family. When you dehumanize people it's a lot easier to believe they deserve what you are dishing out. Putin has clearly dehumanized the Ukrainian people but that gives us no license to do the same to every Russian we meet.

My maternal grandmother spoke a variety of Slavic languages, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian. Sometimes she said she was Polish other times Ukrainian. We just chalked it up to the fact that her parents both died when she was a young girl. But later in her life we tracked down her baptismal record as she had no birth certificate, and found out she was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church.

We asked her why she never told us and she said that her parents told her and her sibling’s not to say anything about it lest they be accused of being Russian Bolsheviks. Sad, she hid her identity most of her life. On the other side of the family during WWII, some of my great uncles from Italy were placed under house arrest and had their ham radios seized. The irony is that both sides were fleeing life under either Stalin or Mussolini.

It is immoral to dehumanize people because of their nationality or ethnicity or religion. We were told repeatedly not to use the term “China virus” because it dehumanizes Chinese people and can foment hostility and even violence. Fair enough. But now we are being told to treat Russians like outcasts. Russian artists, athletes, film makers, have been fired from their jobs because of what Putin and his henchmen have done.

The Russian soprano Anna Netrebko has been suspended from singing with Western Opera Companies and the Russian Conductor, Valery Gergiev of the Munich Philharmonic was dismissed from the Orchestra and the University of Milan canceled a course on Dostoevsky all because they are Russian. In Washington, DC a restaurant called the Russia House had all its windows smashed out and the owner is not Russian. I understand it must be incredibly difficult for the Ukrainian people not to give into hate of their Russian aggressors. But we should resist all temptations to go down the road of hate. We may not be able to stop Putin from destroying Ukraine but we can prevent him from destroying our hearts. St. John Paul II pray for us.

Love, Fr. John B.

P.S. Save the date: the last weekend of July, our Parish will have the honor to host the Relics of St. Bernadette coming from the Sanctuary in Lourdes, France! More details to follow.