A Meeting with Mary Mansur
Eugene Ross and Gleb Podmoshensky started their monastic pursuit in Platina, CA, in the late 1960s. Mary and Catherine Mansur moved to the area in the mid-1970s to help in their missionary endeavors. They became spiritual children of Fr. Seraphim (Rose) and remained close to him until his repose in 1982. The students of this graduate class that studies the Russian Church Abroad as an anthropological phenomenon have been visiting the Mansur for a class dedicated to the missionary activity of the Russian Church Abroad.
Thank you for publishing the interview; I’d wanted to get her perspective on things for quite a while.
At the same time, the interview made me rather tired. It brought me back to the tired old polemics between the different jurisdictions I had forgotten. The interview described as a remembrance of missionary work in the 70s and 80s seemed instead to be a return to a world entirely closed in to itself. All those judgments of Greeks versus Russians – of the Tsarist monarchy! – as understood by converts. Still, there were comments at a deeper level which intuited the difference between being American and being Protestant. The comments by the young (Filipino?) hieromonk were very helpful.