February 2005 | Vol 41 No 2 | Index
 

From the Director…

A Heritage of Destruction
By Fr. David O’Rourke, O.P.
Vilnius, Lithuania

any years ago, when I first started reading the missionary letters my mother received, most of what the missionaries described (most of them Maryknoll priests and sisters) was their work to convert and baptize non-believing peoples in Africa and Asia.  Anything and everything they did – from opening schools and medical clinics, to providing drinking water and seeds for planting – was needed and much appreciated.  In many ways, their missionary work seemed similar to what would be done a few years later in the Peace Corps.

oday things can be quite different.  The scope of some work has widened considerably to include social and human issues that played a much smaller role in past years.  In the work I do for part of each year in the former Soviet Union, it is essential to know what it was like to live for 50 years under the thumb and terror of the Soviet secret police, the KGB.  The system of control, fear, and corruption that they inflicted has left wounds that are still not healed.

For upwards of five years I have been working (for part of each year) in the now-restored Republic of Lithuania.  And even before my plane touched down five years ago, I could see that this place was different.  The  entire airport, acres and acres of it, was and is surrounded by a high, concrete wall topped with barbed wire.   From 1940 up until 1992, this traditionally Catholic and independent country had been occupied by Soviet troops.  Its democratically elected government was dissolved and its leaders arrested.  It was absorbed into the Soviet Union and the people were required to learn Russian.  It was controlled directly from Moscow by Stalin’s secret police, known as the KGB.  Those years were terrible beyond belief.  There were arrests of entire families, deportations to Siberia and slave labor camps, imprisonments, killings, and exiles.  People died and simply disappeared by the tens of thousands.

The terror of those years is now behind the people.  But 50 years of active persecution, including the planned destruction of family and religious life, leave a terrible heritage.  My work began with helping the newly established Family Center of the Archdiocese create family ministries.  But little by little I began to understand how much I needed to know about what the Soviets had done during their occupation.

ut simply, in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin decided that in order to impose Soviet Communism on Russia, he had to destroy the two institutions that could oppose his plans: the family and the Church.  So he quickly set about destroying the Russian Orthodox Church – killing the clergy, shutting and destroying the churches and monasteries, and prohibiting the practice of religion.

The family was tougher to get rid of, but it was possible.  What Lenin did was set up new collective institutions that took over the traditional family tasks, from rearing tiny children to caring for the sick and elderly.  Meals were cooked and served in collective dining halls.  People lived in larger, non-family groups.  Marriage became a quick, civil ceremony that could be ended with ease.  And it was this secularized, anti-individual, anti-family, and anti-religious system that the Soviets imposed on Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in 1940.  And in many ways they were successful in destroying religion and family life.

So our work in the Family Center was not just coming up with good programs in support of family life.  It also meant dealing with the heritage of destruction the Soviets left behind when their troops and tanks went back to Russia in 1992.  My missionary work required that I get to know this history.  And that meant learning how the KGB worked and imposed their will on the country.  Fortunately for me, the KGB Archives are right across the street from our Dominican Church.  And there are still a number of the partisan resisters who fought the Soviets, who are willing to share their stories with me. 

In a setting like this you never quite know what turn your work might take.  My first surprise came when I was asked to teach the semester course in the Practice of Family Therapy to graduate students in social work at Vilnius University, which I did.  The most recent is a result of the hours I spent in the KGB Archives and in interviewing survivors of the resistance.

When I first went to Lithuania five years ago I traveled in Eastern Europe with Fr. Ken Gumbert, O.P. another Western Dominican, who teaches film-making at Providence College.  He was on sabbatical that year and planning to film the story of Soviet persecution of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia.  My hours in the KGB Archive taught me that there was another heroic story worth telling about the Lithuanian resistance to Stalin’s terror.  So Fr. Ken and I decided that we would try to make a documentary on the resistance for American public television as well. 

eing available for the Family Center, working with the Dominicans as they rebuild their life, ministry, and presence (which can mean everything from celebrating daily Mass in Lithuanian to raising funds for needed rebuilding) and telling the story of the resistance to Stalin’s takeover, might seem like a very disconnected series of efforts.  It really isn’t.  It is simply a reflection of life in this country.  For everyone here is doing all these same things. And as a priest, even an old one now with limited energies, my work means that I share their life during the time that I am here.  And that during the many more months each year when I am in California, I support that work, staying in daily touch using the incredible communication resources we now all have at our disposal.