Red-Curtained Catacombs

...In the past year the Chronicle has acknowledged the existence of illegally ordained, underground priests, as well as a clandestine seminary...

...There is a temptation to regard Lithuania as just another sideshow in a century full of horror stories...

...As nearly every Soviet exile has pointed out, the regime can be surprisingly sensitive to the pressure of world criticism...

...And they did...

...Incidentally, this calls into question the integrity of the Western intelligentsia, which sophistically justifies the revolutionary violence of "emerging" nations but says nothing at all on behalf of recently submerged peoples...

...As in other Soviet republics, Lithuania's constitution guarantees the right of religious worship, but not the right to catechesis (without which, of course, the Church's many symbols and rites are stripped of meaning), or to evangelization...

...Lithuania's national identity is bound up in its Catholic faith--and always has been...

...They have harassed Muslims throughout Soviet Asia, forcibly suppressed and outlawed Ukrainian-rite Catholicism, subverted the Russian Orthodox Church from within, shut down Jewish synagogues, and mercilessly hounded Protestant evangelicals (like the ones presently holed up in the American embassy in Moscow...

...The answer, as in the case of the antiwar movement, is, we do not know nor does it matter...

...Sadunaite was seized with a' copy of the Chronicle in her typewriter...

...The question inevitably presents itself: How many such believers are there...

...lights worthy...

...E a r l i e r this summer, t h r e e Russian women were expelled from the Soviet Union for publishing a feminist samizdat journal...

...The last thing the regime wants is to provoke desperation, because this drives the Church underground, where combatting it is an infinitely more difficult job...

...It is the final, and the only impregnable, refuge from the modern state...

...Thus, over the past three decades, as American culture has become increasingly secularized, we have somehow lost the capacity to appreciate the gravity of purely religious persecution...

...Whether God exists or not --and I believe He does--man's eternal thirst for Him is a powerful witness against materialism and against the kind of human destiny that follows from it...

...And why He always will be...

...The objective of all this is, of course, the slow strangulation of the Catholic commu12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 nity through a program of brutality and nuance...

...The extent of Soviet crimes in Lithuania is difficult for Westerners to grasp...

...Indeed, Baltic nationalism gets very little attention these days, even among American Catholics, who, in decades gone by, were legendary for their anti-Communism...

...The Church in Soviet Lithuania does not enjoy legal legitimacy...

...L i t h u a n i a is one of the three Baltic states annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940...

...priests must therefore rely on their parishioners for their income, which is then disproportionately taxed...

...Inevitably this gave the Catholic Church a position of special importance in Lithuanian culture, a position which solidified when a distinctly Lithuanian and peasant-based clergy emerged from Polish ecclesiastical domination in the nineteenth century...

...S a d u n a i t e ' s story, on t h e other hand, sparked a couple of brief blurbs in the far more obscure religious press...

...According to Casimir Pugevicius, the editor of the English translations of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, "The present policy of atheisization is a kind of perverse continuation of prerevolutionary Russian policy, which was to root out national identity among minorities like the Poles or Lithuanians by fi)rcibly converting them to Orthodoxy...

...If the country were to be so revitalized, her allies in turn, concerted in what was now an effort not to beg for the most advantageous terms available but to secure the survival of a world political order, would have reason to become more resolute...

...Today, despite 40 years of intense antireligious education and propaganda, about 66 percent of the population is still active in the Catholic faith...

...The regime is as intolerant of "bourgeois" atheism - - t h e kind which, although critical of religion, is willing to compete with it on equal terms--as it is of religion itself...

...But there was also an unstated fear in the Soviet treatment of Sadunaite that is quite different from the repression dealt out to the feminists, or even to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn...

...The level of anti-religious pressure must be intense enough to promote the steady decay of the Church but at the same time ostensibly light enough to keep the illusion of hope alive among believers: Tile prospect of some sort of spiritual modus vivendi with the state must always seem to be just around the corner...

...Great Russians are now, for the first time, a minority in the Soviet Union, which means that the contradictions of Soviet cultural imperialism become ever more apparent...

...After World War II, Lithuanians waged a bitter and almost totally unreported eight-year guerrilla struggle against the Russians, a struggle they lost in the face of overwhelming Soviet numerical superiority, scorched-earth tactics, and counterterrorism...

...And as far as the State Department knows, none of them had any trouble bringing her family to the West with her...

...This socialist atheism bears little resemblance to its complement in the desacralized West...

...Since the election of John Paul II, the Vatican's Ostpolitik has changed...

...In the years since occupation, the Soviets have arrested and deported more than 300,000 Lithuanian artists, priests, intellectuals, and political leaders--the heart of the country's national spirit...

...But the bitterness of religious controversy also left its mark: We have sought, whenever possible, to remove sectarian disputes from the realm of political affairs...

...On the other hand, the active propagation of "scientific" atheism in Lithuania is not merely tolerated by constitutional mandate, it is heavily financed and aggressively carried out as well by the local Party machinery, and has become, in effect, the new state religion...

...Almost 90 percent of all Lithuanian children are baptized and almost as many receive their First Communion, in spite of Soviet law, which forbids children under 18 to go to Church unaccompanied by an adult and which fines priests for teaching catechism...

...And in this, the United States is but the whole world writ small...

...In the last two years, the authorities have also taken to "packing" parish councils with nonbelievers, who can then vote to close down the church on the grounds that it is no longer needed...

...This is why religion is, ultimately, "progressive": It is the guardian of hope, of the secret places of the human heart...

...And they believe the time has come for a renewal of American selfr e s p e c t and a resumption of American responsibility...

...This is probably less the result of a conscious prejudice than a function of the unique American schizophrenia regarding religion...

...In this way they may not only dissuade worthy candidates but also promote those who are morally and psychologically unfit, at the same time recruiting informers and agents provocateurs who may then sow the seeds of dissension within the local clergy...

...If the "new patriots" were truly to gain ascendancy--and there is much cheering though not yet conclusive evidence that they are doing so--it would make possible the first indispensable step in national revitalization: the assertion that American power is not only great but good...

...Lenin, it is a war we are, whether we will it or not, engaged in...

...How strong is the new patriotic impulse...

...Early in its modern history, Lithuania was a pawn in the geopolitical struggles between Russia and Poland...

...Look to the culture, in which an ideological battle is now being waged and in which b a t t l e the r e c e n t l y dominant opponents of American power grow ever more enervated and uncertain and, in their enervation and u n c e r t a i n t y , ever more thinly shrill...

...And the number of secret Religious sisters, like Sadunaite, now runs into the hundreds...

...In recent years, more than forty thousand atheist lectures, courses, education drives, and publicity campaigns have been mounted by the Soviets to eradicate religious influence from daily Lithuanian life...

...The modern Islamic upheaval has been characterized as the end of the Enlightenment, a rejection of both the ideological atheism of the East and the practical atheism of the West...

...None of them was sent to the gulag...

...176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176 Francis X. Maier RED-CURTAINED CATACOMBS In little Lithuania a gigantic passion persists to haunt the Kremlin and apparently to bore the West...

...Their exit produced an interesting study in c o n t r a s t s . None of them was beaten up...

...Francis X. Mawr is editor of the National Catholic Register...

...And one of Wojtyla's first moves after his election was the naming of a new cardinal in pectore ("in the heart"), the process used for raising bishops to the red hat who cannot be publicly acknowledged for reasons of personal safety...

...Believers who seek to worship must form small parish councils of 20, called dvitsakas, These groups-then "lease" the state-owned churches and sacred vessels from political authorities...

...Ethnically, culturally, and linguistically it THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 I 1 is distinct from "Great Russia": Its alphabet is Roman, its "psyche" is Western, and, because it enjoyed 22 years of independence from 1918 to 1940, its society is more self-assured and "relaxed" than that of its giant neighbor...

...Religion, however, is not a progressive issue, and, to make matters worse Nijole Sadunaite, it turns out, is a clandestine nun...

...That bishop is strongly rumored to be Lithuania's Julijonis Steponavicius, Archbishop of Vilnius...

...Despite her arrest and repeated KGB sweeps and crackdowns, the Soviets have failed to quash the Chronicle...

...Women's rights is a "progressive" issue (in the Marxist sense), and the international women's movement is vocal and well-covered by the Western press...

...On a practical level, the Soviets effect their religious persecution not only through psychological warfare, but also through physical intimidation and legal harassment...

...Today, the Party has taken the place of Russian Orthodoxy as the agent of cultural repression, but many of the techniques are the same, among them, the heavy official preference for the Russian language and alphabet at the expense of Lithuania's own...

...The irony is that, as the spiritual dimension of Soviet life has been systematically destroyed, what has resulted is a wave of cynicism among educated youth, which has led, in turn, to a religious revival...

...Sadunaite's activism is representative of a growing minority nationalism which the Soviets, despite official propaganda, have been unable to head off...

...But this Soviet strategy has now clearly failed, which accounts for the severity of Nijole Sadunaite's sentence...

...Yet in a world living under the long shadow of V.I...

...In a nation of barely three million people, the loss has been staggering...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 13...

...Lithuanians regard Karol Wojtyla--who, in Communist Poland, successfully outmaneuvered government authorities at their own game--as a man they can live with very comfortably indeed...

...Lithuania's Catholics have understood the sign: They are not forgotten...

...A war of ideas may not be as aesthetically pleasing as a dance of doubts and complexities...

...The activists, in turn, reacted with feelings of panic and betrayal...

...That is why God is hunted down so relentlessly by Soviet police...

...The great majority of these exiles died in labor camps or have never returned...

...Meanwhile, parents who provide religious education to their children face career reprisals, fines, and even prison sentences...

...Soviet security agents, through the state's Commissioner of Religious Affairs, interview every seminary applicant and hold veto power over every candidate to the priesthood...

...The regime also keeps the annual crop of new priests below the number of priests who die each year, thereby shrinking the clergy's ranks inexorably...

...As in Poland, the Soviet political repression has merely channeled the impulse for resistance back into the Church...

...It is certainly more demanding to conduct than a b a r t e r of n e a r - t e r m interests...

...The t h r e e Russian women--Tatiana Mamonova, Tatiana Goritscheva, and Nataliya Nalachovskaya--drew the attention of American network television news, national news magazines, and a variety of leading news dailies across the country...

...The priesthood is not recognized as a legitimate profession...

...Not surprisingly, the regime pays special attention to the country's only seminary, in Kaunas...

...But one can easily see why the Party chose to act as it did...

...The Lithuanian reaction to Paul VI's Ostpolitik is much easier to understand once these facts are digested: The Soviet government saw in the Vatican's overtures an official way of isolating Catholic activists...

...At about the same time, Nijole Sadunaite completed the final year of a six-year s e n t e n c e for d i s s i d e n t activities: t h r e e years hard labor in a strict regime Mordovian prison camp, and t h r e e years internal exile in Siberia...

...Unlike the feminists, she was not invited to emigrate...

...And her enemies, confronted by the two things they most f e a r , Western power and Western ideology, would once again grow cautious and respectful...

...In fact, one of the reasons for founding the Chronicle was to inform the Vatican of the real conditions of the Church in Lithuania...

...Sadunaite, like the Russian feminists, was also associated with samizdat activism--in this case, with the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, which documents religious persecution and other human rights violations in the Soviet Baltic republic...

...The Party, in treating her far more severely, betrayed its thorough knowledge of contemporary Western, and especially American, attitudes toward religion: Basically, the Soviets assumed they could get away with it...

...It continues to appear every two months--more than 40 successive issues have reached the West since the early seventies--and is now the oldest uninterrupted samizdat journal in the Soviet Union...

...At the time of its seizure in 1940 Lithuania was 87 percent Latin-rite Catholic...

...Children who persist in their belief (as documented by testimony at the Sakharov Hearings in Washington last year) face discrimination in the grading of their schoolwork, classroom humiliation from their teachers, and beatings from fellow students...

...But if America in particular and the post-Christian West in general tend to regard religion as a private--and therefore politically unimportant--affair, the Soviets very clearly do not...

...Amidst the ponderous acclamations on behalf of human rights in the American political and cultural rhetoric of the past several years, these violations of the right of religious belief have somehow suffered neglect and silence...

...The future of the political atmosphere, without support from which no one in office may conduct any but the most trivial of policies, lies in the relative strength of competing ideas...

...The disparity in the media coverage of these two incidents is almost as disturbing as the disparity in the punishment meted out...

...The moment may have come when we are to remind ourselves that, Lenin to the contrary, we need not inevitably lose...

...Lithuania's literacy rate and standard of living tend to be higher than the Soviet average, and Socialist Realism has y e t to extinguish residual Western influences in music and art...

...The West looked the other way...

...Of course, equally unsettling for the Soviets is the symbiotic relationship religious faith has developed with minority nationalism...

...But the plight of Lithuania's Catholics is merely the most dramatic example of what is now going on throughout the Soviet empire, where religious persecution is now more systematic, massive, and severe than at any time since the sixteenth century...

...We are a believing people: We were founded, at least in part, by religious refugees...

...as an institution, it does not exist...