August 2004 | Vol 40 No 8 | Index

Restoring the Human Spirit
by Fr. David O’Rourke, O.P.
Vilnius, Lithuania

When I first went to Lithuania, about five years ago, I was almost baffled by the survival of the faith. Since 1940, when Hitler and Stalin divided Eastern Europe between them and the Soviets invaded and took over this democratic republic until the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991, this traditionally Catholic people had lived under Soviet terror. For the Soviet secret police (the KGB) controlled every aspect of their lives. The only “break” they had from their years under Stalin and his successors were three years from 1941-1944 when Hitler turned against his former ally and occupied the Baltics on his way into Russia.

During their fifty-year occupation the Soviets and their agents of terror (the KGB) had done everything in their power to destroy religion. From arrests, exile, and killings of clergy, to closure of churches and their use as warehouses, to ridicule of school children who came from known Catholic families, to forced unemployment on religious people which reduced them to poverty, there was a non-stop pattern of religious persecution.

So when I first went there, just a few years after the Soviet system had collapsed, I was amazed that our church was full for daily Mass. It was still being rebuilt from the wreck it had been left in: wooden scaffolding reached to the top of this great church – the tallest in the city – and a new altar and pews had just been delivered. But these pews were full. And I had – and have – no explanation for this marvel of survival.

But this is not to say that those years of terror had not taken their toll. For on the way into the church and on the way out no one says anything to anyone. No one makes eye contact with anyone. They look ahead or they look down, and they walk in silence. Strange behavior? Not in a country run by a secret police who believed that anytime three people talked together in public they were plotting against the government.

So the work we are doing is not just in rebuilding churches and institutions. It is in restoring the human spirit. And in our Dominican church in Vilnius we are working principally with the young people. Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania; it is the home to the country’s two principal universities: Vilnius University where I taught, and the Pedagogical University which prepares all the teachers for the nation’s school systems. There are also two national music academies and the National Art Institute. So it is full of young people, to say nothing of being full of life. And our church and monastery are in the very heart of the city and of all this activity, ministering to these young people, as well as to the old people who come in every day for the noon Mass.

I have also added a new chapter to my work, largely shaped by a chance visit to the KGB headquarters across the square three years ago. It was on a Saturday morning, just a day after I had flown in from California. I was up very early, well before anyone else and still on California time (there is a ten-hour time difference) and went out looking for a coffee shop to help get the day started. I passed the KGB prison, which I knew was now an archive and museum, and of course it was closed. But I pulled at the door, it was unlocked, and I went in. In short order I managed to find the lights, a stairway going into the basement, and then found the cells where the KGB interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, and shot their prisoners. Most of them were young men and women who had taken up arms against the Soviet occupation of their country and the persecution of the Church.

It was one of the most chilling experiences of my life. As a writer I knew I was in the middle of a terrible history that needed telling. That realization led me to many days of work in the photo archives where the KGB kept the black and white photos of the young resisters they hunted down and killed, and to start interviewing the aging survivors of the resistance. I planned to write their story and illustrate it from the photo archives. But that plan has developed into a possible documentary film on the heroic resistance of this small band of patriots to Soviet persecution and Stalin’s tyranny.

Juggling a possible film about the past while trying to build for the future is a bit of an act for an old man. But it is all part of the new kind of missionary work when you are working to rebuild a religious heritage that was crushed by 50 years of horrific persecution. 

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