Catholic Official Asks Soviets to Free Priests, Bishop

The general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference has called on the Soviet Union to immediately release two Lithuanian Catholic priests who have been in prison for five years and to allow a Lithuanian bishop to return from internal exile in the town of Zagare, where he has lived since 1961.

Father Daniel F. Hoye made the appeal in a March 28 letter to Konstantin Kharchev, chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs of the U.S.S.R. He said that although U.S. bishops “continue to encourage” progress in arms control and East-West relations, “we cannot accept the persecution of our Catholic brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union, especially in Lithuania, Latvia and the Ukraine.”

Hoye’s appeal mentioned Father Alfonsas Svarinskas, 63, and Father Sigitas Tamkevicius, 49, who were founding members of the Catholic Committee for the Defense of Religious Rights in 1978, and Bishop Julijonas Steponavicius, 77, who was reportedly appointed a secret cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1979.

The two priests were arrested in 1983 and charged with engaging in anti-Soviet activity. Svarinskas is serving a seven-year term in a labor camp to be followed by three years in exile. Tamkevicius is scheduled to leave the labor camp in May and begin serving two years in exile. Steponavicius was exiled to Zagare for rebuffing government attempts to interfere in the administration of church affairs in the Penavezys Diocese.

In his letter to Kharchev, Hoye warned that “a failure to implement significant reform in the state’s policies regarding believers threatens to undermine current and future progress in superpower relations.”