The czarist government had sent him to jail in Siberia because he was a Catholic priest, not Orthodox. After the Russian Revolution, when he'd become head of the Russian Catholics, the communist state persecuted him as a Christian. Fr Leonid Feodorov died on 7 March 1935 of what were called "natural causes," but were the result of the breaking of his health by his own over-working and his many brutal imprisonments. He was beatified on 27 June 2001 and is commemorated on 7 March.
Here historian Donald Attwater tells Fr Leonid's story, as part of a report on Christian unity. (The last third of this except describes his attitude to the Orthodox and to Christian disunity.) The whole article can be found here. It appeared in the 16 January 1953 issue. Fr Leonid's full story can be read on Santi Beati.
