It’s sometimes hard to tell, this time of year, but there’s more going on at Notre Dame than football. Spirited debate continues about the university’s Catholic identity and what that means for everything from curriculum and faculty hiring to the campus master plan. Those involved in that debate can now take inspiration from an impressive new project mounted by the university’s library, which introduces English-speakers to some modern Russian heroes of faithful discipleship.
In 2000, the Russian Catholic leadership published a remarkable study, Book of Remembrance: A Martyrology of the Catholic Church in the USSR, which included brief biographies of more than 1,800 Catholics—priests, religious, and laity—persecuted under Lenin and Stalin. The biographies were subsequently translated by Dr. Geraldine Kelley, and thanks to the work of a team led by Natasha Lyandres, Russian and East European Curator and Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, they’re now available online: https://biographies.library.nd.edu. The university’s digital resources made it possible to enhance the original Russian work, through a search engine that allows readers to work back and forth through the biographies, seeing the connections among these 20th-century heroes of the faith from both the Latin and Eastern rites.
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