Early life
Bld Leonid was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 4 November 1879, into a Russian Orthodox family. His father, Ivan, was a moderately successful restaurant owner and the son of a serf. His mother, Lyuba Feodorov, a woman of Greek descent, raised him as a single mother after his father's early death. Although she attempted to raise her son as a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, she simultaneously encouraged him to read the popular novelists of the day.
He later recalled, "So I began to devour the best known French novelists of the day, Zola, Hugo, Maupassant, and Dumas. I became acquainted with the Italian Renaissance and its corrupt literature, Boccaccio and Ariosto. My head came to be like a sewer into which the foulest muck was emptied."
After his graduation from the Second Imperial Gymnasium in 1901, he enrolled in the Orthodox Ecclesiastical Academy in order to study for the priesthood in the Russian Orthodox Church. After much soul-searching, he left his studies at the Petersburg Spiritual Academy in the summer of 1902 and traveled to Rome by way of Austrian-ruled Lviv, where Metropolitan Bld Andrey Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church blessed his mission.
Conversion and ordination
On 31 July 1902, Bld Leonid was formally received into the Catholic Church at the Church of the Gesù in Rome. In the aftermath, he began studying at the Jesuit seminary at Anagni under the pseudonym of "Leonidas Pierre," which was meant to keep the Tsar's secret police, or Okhrana, off his trail.
Although Bld Leonid had originally promised to adopt the Latin Rite, while studying in the Jesuit seminary at Anagni, Leonid came to believe that it was his duty to remain faithful to the liturgy and customs of the Christian East. With the full permission and encouragement of Pope Pius X, he transferred to the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church. As a result of his decision, he was disowned by his former Jesuit mentor and afterwards depended for his finances on Metropolitan Bld Andrei of Lviv.
On March 25, 1911, he received ordination in Bosnia as a Byzantine rite priest. He spent the following years as a Studite hieromonk in Bosnia and Ukraine and was tonsured with monastic name 'Leontiy' on 12 March 1913.Return to Russia
On the eve of the First World War, he returned to Saint Petersburg whereupon he was immediately exiled to Tobolsk in Siberia as a potential threat to the Tsar's government which held Russian Orthodoxy as its state religion.
After the February Revolution, the Provisional Government ordered the release of all political prisoners. Pope Benedict XV named him Exarch of Russian Catholics of Byzantine rite. A three-day Synod of the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church opened in Saint Petersburg under the leadership of Metropolitan Bld Andrey.He served as abbot in the Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit in Petrograd, under his leadership the women's order of the Holy Family, the Community of Sisters of the Holy Spirit, and the Society of John Chrysostom were founded. He made presentations, participated in disputes with Orthodox clergy.
The Cieplak Trial
Open persecution of religion began in 1922. The clergy were forbidden to preach religion to anyone under eighteen years of age. Then, all sacred objects were ordered to be seized for "famine relief" and lay councils called dvatsatkii were installed in each parish by the GPU with the intention of making the priest a mere employee. When both the Exarch Leonid and the Latin Rite Archbishop Jan Cieplak refused to permit this, all Catholic parishes were forcibly closed by the State.
In the spring of 1923, Exarch Leonid, Archbishop Cieplak, Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz, and fourteen other Catholic priests and one layman were summoned to Moscow trial before the revolutionary tribunal for counter-revolutionary activities.
According to Father Christopher L. Zugger,
The Bolsheviks had already orchestrated several 'show trials.' The Cheka had staged the 'Trial of the St. Petersburg Combat Organization'; its successor, the new GPU, the 'Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries.' In these and other such farces, defendants were inevitably sentenced to death or to long prison terms in the north. The Cieplak show trial is a prime example of Bolshevik revolutionary justice at this time. Normal judicial procedures did not restrict revolutionary tribunals at all; in fact, the prosecutor N.V. Krylenko, stated that the courts could trample upon the rights of classes other than the proletariat. Appeals from the courts went not to a higher court, but to political committees. Western observers found the setting -- the grand ballroom of a former Noblemen's Club, with painted cherubs on the ceiling -- singularly inappropriate for such a solemn event. Neither judges nor prosecutors were required to have a legal background, only a proper 'revolutionary' one. That the prominent 'No Smoking' signs were ignored by the judges themselves did not bode well for legalities."
New York Herald correspondent Francis McCullagh, who was present at the trial, later described its fourth day as follows:
Unlike the other defendants, Exarch Leonid insisted on acting as his own attorney, which led to some of the most dramatic moments of the trial. According to Father Zugger,
Dressed in the traditional Russian black cassock, with his long hair and beard often described as 'Christ-like', Feodorov was a man of the narod, of the ordinary Russian people for whom the Revolution had been fought. His presence put the lie to the usual description of Catholicism as 'the Polish religion.' His presentation -- a moving testimony of Russian spirituality and the history of the Church in that country -- evoked the best of Russian Christendom. He pointed out that Greek-Catholics greeted the Revolution with joy, for only then did they have equality. There was no secret organization, they had simply followed Church law. Religious education, the celebration of Mass, and the administration of the Sacraments of marriage and baptism had to be fulfilled. He pointed out that the Church, accused of having neglected the starving, was at that moment feeding 120,000 children daily. Following a scathing rebuttal by Krylenko, Exarch Feodorov rose for his final remarks: "Our hearts are full, not of hatred, but of sadness. You cannot understand us, we are not allowed liberty of conscience. That is the only conclusion we can draw from what we have heard here."
With the verdict and sentences already decided upon in advance, Archbishop Cieplak and Monsignor Budkiewicz were both sentenced to death. Exarch Leonid and all the other defendants were sentenced to the term of ten years imprisonment.
The Gulag
The international uproar which followed the trial gave the Soviet government pause, however. In 1926, after serving the first three years of his sentence in Moscow's Butyrka prison, Exarch Leonid was transported to Solovki prison camp, located in a former island monastery in the White Sea.
He was a pioneer of ecumenism together with the Orthodox with whom he shared the harsh captivity. In Solovki, Roman Catholic Mass was offered in a chapel which had been restored for the purpose with the permission of the guards. Exarch Leonid would offer the Divine Liturgy of the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church every other Sunday. When the camp authorities cracked down on this in 1929, the Masses continued in secret.
Release and death
On 6 August 1929, Exarch Leonid was released to the town of Pinega in the Arkhangelsk Oblast and put to work making charcoal. After continuing to teach the Catechism to young boys, he was transferred to the village of Poltava, 15 km from Kotlas (not to be confused with the city of Poltava, Ukraine), where he completed his sentence in 1932. He chose to reside in Kirov, Kirov Oblast, where, worn out by the rigours of his imprisonment, he died on 7 March 1935.
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