Yevgeny Petrovich Balabin SJ (also ''Evgenii''; , August 17, 1815, St. Petersburg - January 30, 1895,

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

) was a Russian

Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

priest and a member of the

Society of Jesus The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rome. It was founded in 1540 ...

. He was a prominent Russian Catholic of the 19th century. Balabin was born August 17, 1815, in

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

. His father was Lieutenant General Pyotr Ivanovich Balabin. His French mother, Barbara (Varvara Osipovna), was highly educated and fond of literature. Her

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was attended by many prominent writers of the capital. The diplomat Victor Balabin was his brother. Balabin received an excellent education. He was educated at the Noblemen's Boarding School attached to

St. Petersburg University Saint Petersburg State University (SPBGU; ) is a public research university in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Russia. Founded in 1724 by a decree of Peter the Great, the university from the be ...

. After finishing his education he entered the civil service. In 1852, while in France, he joined the Catholic Church, following the conversion of his close university friend Julian Astromov. On 27 June of that year, Balabin entered the Jesuit novitiate. In 1853 he was found guilty in Russia of "apostasy from Orthodoxy." The sentence for this was "to be deprived of all rights of oblestatus, recognized as eternally exiled from the boundaries of the Russian state and in the event of their unauthorized residence in Russia, to be banished to Siberia for perpetual exile.". After completing his novitiate, Balabin entered the Society of Jesus. From 1854 to 1859 he studied at a seminary at Vals near

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in France. From 1855, he was an active assistant of Ivan Sergeyevich Gagarin and Ivan Mikhailovich Martynov in the organization of the Parisian Society of Cyril and Methodius and the development of what became the "Slavic Library" in

Meudon Meudon () is a French Communes of France, commune located in the Hauts-de-Seine Departments of France, department in the Île-de-France Regions of France, region, on the left bank of the Seine. It is located from the Kilometre Zero, center of P ...

, near Paris. In 1861, Balabin visited

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as part of an effort to create a Bulgarian Jesuit college.Jeffrey Bruce Beshoner, ''Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin: The Search for Orthodox and Catholic Union'', University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, p. 135. However, Balabin had less ambitious plans than Gagarin for a Jesuit presence in the East, writing "In his solicitude for the salvation of our brothers of the East, Gagarin has conceived of many projects for the seminary to be established at Jerusalem, in Syria, and we speak often; but these projects seem impractical." In 1863, Gagarin, Martynov, and Balabin founded a journal, named ''Kirillo-Mefodievskii Sbornik'', aimed at unifying the Russian Orthodox and Catholic churches. However, this journal ceased publication in 1867. The efforts of Balabin and other Jesuits to convert Russians to Roman Catholicism influenced the young

Andrey Sheptytsky Andrey Sheptytsky, OSBM (; ; 29 July 1865 – 1 November 1944) was the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Galicia and Archbishop of Lviv from 1901 until his death in 1944. His tenure in office spanned two world wars and six political r ...

, later Metropolitan of Lviv. In 1880, the Jesuits were expelled from France. From 1888, Balabin worked at the Collège de la Sainte Famille in

Cairo, Egypt Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

. He died on January 30, 1895, in Cairo.

References

External links

* VA Alimov
Russian Catholicism II half of the nineteenth century.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Balabin, Eugene Converts to Roman Catholicism from Eastern Orthodoxy Former Russian Orthodox Christians Expatriates from the Russian Empire in France Expatriates from the Russian Empire in the Ottoman Empire Expatriates from the Russian Empire Expatriates in Egypt 1815 births 1895 deaths Saint Petersburg State University alumni 19th-century French Jesuits