She Gives Us All Beauty and a Name

There is nothing that can be done about it now. She is dead and buried in Jerusalem. 

Yet if there was something, anything, we could have done, somebody, somewhere should have done it.

Humans did not, she died, and so Russia was lost. Elizabeth Romanov was a Grand Duchess, was a nun, did help the poor and the lost and so the Revolution killed her. A Revolution that begins by killing Elizabeth Romanov cannot prosper.

And of course the Revolution would kill millions of people, all of them souls created in God’s image and just as important to God as the Grand Duchess. She would be the first to say that the simplest worker shoved before a firing squad for believing in God was a martyr and her equal.

Stalin would later give a Russian twenty-five years of work camp just for being a Baptist. Elizabeth Romanov would wish us to know each name, but we do not.

As a result, we are left with her name . . . a woman that was not political at all, but a sister of mercy. A woman that Lenin, the monster of atheism at the heart of the Kremlin, had butchered with her brothers, because sanctity offended him.

Peasants found her body at the bottom of the mine shaft where they tossed her. She had lived some time, even after the grenades. Her habit was torn and she had bound the wounds of those around her. She had a name, was the flower of Christian Russia, and Lenin tried to wipe away the name and kill the flower.

He could kill her body, but her name lived. She was noble in deed as well as name and so in her death she gave a name to every woman that atheism would kill over the next seventy years. Lenin attacked old Russia, but by killing her near the first allowed old Russia to lead.

The plague of atheism is that it attempts to make ideas, or pieces of paper, serve in the place of humans. It talks of “humanism,” but ends up grinding up millions of humans for the sake of “science,” “communism,” or some ideal society.

Christianity incarnates the vision of goodness, just as God took on human flesh to show us Himself in Jesus. Worthy humans, saints, stand in for the rest of us. Elizabeth gave a body to the best of Christian ideals and died for them. Her name became the name of every peasant woman who died for making the sign of a cross. Her beauty became the beauty of every young girl who wasted away to premature old age in the gulags.

She led the way to Paradise, because tonight she was tortured, but died singing. She gives us all an example, beauty, and we can all take her name. Nobody can do anything to her now: she is free, powerful, and beautiful as a star, but then Lenin never did anything to her really. She was free in the pit, more powerful in her death than in life, and beautiful in her tomb.

Saint Elizabeth, new martyr, pray for us.