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Continued... At the start of World War II Lithuania was an independent and democratic country. It was a Catholic country whose people celebrated their faith in wonderful religious folk festivals. But when Hitler and Stalin divided Eastern Europe between them, Stalin got Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In quick order all the churches were closed. The pilgrimages and festivals ended. The priests and nuns were imprisoned, exiled or killed. People who practiced their faith openly were arrested. The Soviets set out to destroy Catholic life in Lithuania just as they had destroyed Orthodox life in Russia 25 years earlier. They also destroyed all remaining traces of the significant Jewish culture that the Nazis left in ruins after their brief but lethal wartime occupation. When the Soviet system collapsed in 1991, the churches were re-opened. Many, like our magnificent 350-year-old Dominican church, were in ruins. And there were few priests. The churches are now being beautifully restored. But it is not so easy to rebuild what the Soviets did to the human spirit. Fifty years of KGB arrests, exiles, imprisonments and persecution took its toll on the people. Everyone knew that the Soviets were also deporting and killing people by the tens of thousands. I work in the Family Center of the Archdiocese of Vilnius. We are developing the kinds of sacramental preparation and family support programs we take for granted in our American parishes. But we have a problem. These programs are all designed for parish communities and, for the most part, there are no parish communities. The Soviets destroyed them all. Under the Soviets, only official Communist Party groups could get together and have meetings. So the few surviving priests worked in secret. People who practiced their faith did it secretly. The Soviets did leave a few churches open, which they could point to if Western media started talking about religious persecution. But everyone knew what happened to openly religious people. They also knew that the KGB was everywhere. That was the situation until 1991. When I started working in Vilnius a few years ago, I assumed that we would have a lot of community building to do. But I never realized how much. We Americans talk about parishes, but what we mean by that is so different from what I found in Lithuania. Until recently a parish meant a church building, where a priest comes to say mass. There were no parish facilities. There were no parish offices, no one to answer the phone, no phone to answer, no parish halls, no meeting rooms, no classrooms. Just a church building. And that was just on the level of facilities. On the human level the landscape was equally bleak. There were no people. During the KGB days people never got together to talk about things, or work together, or share ideas – about anything. People who did were suspected of plotting against the government. So they learned never to do that. Don’t be imaginative. Don’t make eye contact in public. Don’t offer to do anything. Don’t have good ideas. Never, ever, try to change something. Keep a blank face and say nothing.... |
