Before and after the Russian Tsarist regime control and Communist occupation of Lithuania, the Catholic Church was always a defining center of gravity for the small but proud Baltic state.

Recently, MercatorNet headlined this recall of political victory in the pivotal year 1989, written by former president Vytautas Landsbergis.

I was then in the Lithuanian liberation movement, Sajudis, just recently elected to lead its Council…

Sąjudis already had its own Seimas, elected by the politically active society as an alternative democratic parliament of the Lithuanian people, more representative and legitimate than that appointed by the local Communists with Moscow’s approval. The Sajudis Seimas convened on 15-16 February 1989 in Kaunas and adopted a “Declaration on the liberation of Lithuania from unlawful Soviet captivity”, a liberation which had already begun and “would not stop at half-ways”.

It was a heady time. The year before, Fr. Sigitas Tamkevicius was released from a Siberian prison camp, where he’d spent five years of cold, hard labor for the ‘crime’ of being a Catholic priest. But the irony is that he was sent away on trumped up charges. In fact, Tamkevicius was one of the original founders of The Catholic Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers in November 1978.

The Committee acted publicly by publishing about 50 documents, but did not seek any political goals. They are invaluable weapons in the struggle for religious freedom. The Soviet government silently tolerated the activity of the Catholic Committee, but later lost its patience and began to terrorize the members of the Committee. 

By then, he was already the main force behind the underground publication Kronika, (The Chronicle), typing up in secret the accounts of persecuted Christians and smuggling them to sympathetic colleagues who transported them to the West for publication.

In the Baltic countries, the Communist authorities always found the sources of dissident publications within two years. The Chronicle published for 16 years in stealth, out of the reach of the furious officials who searched for the source. The only reason Tamkevicius was taken captive was his activity in ‘The Catholic Committe for the Defense of the Rights of Believers’, along with some trumped up charges.

I know this from having the good providence of spending time this weekend with his Excellency Sigitas Tamkevicius, S.J., Archbishop of Kaunas, Lithuania, and President of the Lithuanian Bishops Conference. He was in Chicago to celebrate the millennium of Christianity in Lithuania, together with Chicago Archibishop Francis Cardinal George and the sizeable Lithuanian community.

The time with him was precious. What was the tipping point for his arrest and punishment, when the Communists couldn’t track the source of Kronika? The ascendancy to higher power, he explained, of Yuri Andropov, who cracked down severely on dissidence. “He said all dissidents had to be eliminated” said Tamkevicius, who was sent to a remote camp in Siberia.

During his five years there, he was allowed minimal contact with the outside world, maybe two pieces of mail a month, with very strict censure. Authorities showed him a list of those who had sent him mail he’d never receive. He had to labor in metal works, sometimes switched to making gloves, always with six fences surrounding the camp, made of wood, metal and electric fixtures in a mix of enclosures.

“What sustained you?” I asked. “How did you endure this harsh imprisonment?” ”My faith”, he said, as if it were a given.

For him, it is a given. The materialism and consumerism today poses almost more of a threat to the soul than persecution, he said matter-of-factly. Which reflects the thinking of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI on consumerism and the West, both of whom knew persecution first hand.

The Chicago Lithuanian community celebrated their faith with Archbishop Tamkevicius this weekend in a series of events which culminated in that liturgy with Cardinal George. Vytautas Landsbergis was an honored guest.