But Church’s Struggle for Religious Freedom Continues in Lithuania : Catholic Cleric Overcomes 25-Year Soviet Exile

The day after he was installed as the Roman Catholic bishop of Kaisiadorys in Soviet Lithuania, Vincentas Sladkevicius was summoned by the Communist official in charge of religious affairs here, along with the bishop who had secretly consecrated him without government permission.

“I’ll call you scoundrels to account!” the official threatened.

“The state was trying very hard then to make us subservient, to squeeze all independence out of the church, to strangle us,” Sladkevicius recalled in a recent interview. “That was 1957, and a terrible time for the Catholic Church in Lithuania and all churches throughout the Soviet Union.”

Within a month, Sladkevicius, then 37, was banished by government decree to the small farming hamlet of Nemunelio Radviliskis, which was not only far from his diocese but had a population of only 200. He spent the next 25 years in a small peasant’s cottage there under virtual house arrest, prohibited from carrying out any of his pastoral functions.

Classic Conflict

Now, however, Sladkevicius is back with his diocese, has been elected president of the Lithuanian Catholic Bishops Conference and was elevated last June to the church’s college of cardinals.

Reflecting recently on the prolonged and bitter struggle between the Catholic Church and the Communist regime here, a classic conflict between church and state, the cardinal warned that the struggle is not over. As he appraised the far-reaching political, economic and social reforms of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and assessed the impact they will have on the church’s efforts to obtain full religious freedom, he argued that gains made now under that liberal leadership have been won through the long years of struggle in a much harsher political environment.

Time for Prayer

Of his own struggle in 25 years of internal exile, he recalled: “This was a time for prayer, for reading, for study, for reflection--but most of all, for prayer. I had no congregation. I could not even function as a parish priest, let alone as a bishop. I could not preach, I could not baptize, I could not confirm young people, I could not ordain new priests.

“I could say Mass--that is our prayer, and they could not stop me from praying--but only by myself, not for the people. And to leave the village, I had to have special permission. . . .

“They wanted me to compromise, to ‘cooperate’ with the state, as they put it. I said I would never collaborate, that this is God’s church, not the state’s. So they said they would leave me alone with God. And they did--for 25 years!”

Through those years, Sladkevicius not only refused to accept the state’s terms for his return to Kaisiadorys, which was administered by other priests in his absence, but he joined in protests against further government restrictions on religious activities.

With Bishop Julijonas Steponavicius of Vilnius, who remains exiled from his diocese after nearly 27 years, Sladkevicius became an almost legendary figure among Catholics here--a symbol, they said, of the “church militant” in Lithuania, where Catholicism has been deeply rooted for 600 years, where the church is the oldest national institution and where religion is woven through the whole fabric of life.

Denounced by Soviet authorities as “clerical extremists,” the two bishops became the subject of countless petitions to the Kremlin asking for their release, of high-level negotiations between the Soviet Union and the Vatican, of protests through the 1960s and 1970s and even of violent demonstrations by Lithuanian nationalists.

As the government intensified its efforts to promote atheism and counter the intense Catholicism here, younger priests moved into the forefront of the church’s struggle for full religious freedom, knowing they enjoyed the full support of Sladkevicius and Steponavicius even as some conservative members of the church hierarchy urged them to moderate their position and to cooperate with the government.

“The church calls upon us to live our faith according to the Gospel,” Sladkevicius said. “What else can we do?”

Compromise Needed

And so Sladkevicius remained in internal exile until 1982, when the government, in one of a series of gestures made in recent years to ease conflict with the church, allowed him to return to his red-brick cathedral in Kaisiadorys, a farming community about 35 miles west of Vilnius on the road to Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city.

“They saw that it was they who had to make the compromises,” he suggested. “They saw that this persecution of believers does not bring the results they want.

“They wanted all the people to become atheists, but they saw that the people kept their faith, even though they might not show it publicly. Persecution even confirmed the people in their faith and united them. Our resistance became stronger, not weaker.”

Sladkevicius, 68, sees the steadfastness of Lithuanian Catholics as being rewarded now by the government’s overtures to the church.

Enrollment at the Catholic seminary in Kaunas has increased to 125 students, with permission for a further 25, and the 27 priests ordained last June were the largest number since World War II. Several priests, ordained without government approval after studying secretly, have recently been named as assistant pastors and to take over a few of the 100 or so parishes, about a sixth of the total, that no longer have priests.

Study in Rome

With the average age of Lithuania’s 674 priests now 57, and 107 of the priests in their 80s and 90s, the church’s future depends on the renewal of the clergy.

Church leaders also have hope now of sending some seminarians and young priests to Rome to study.

All the Lithuanian priests imprisoned for violating government restrictions on religious practices have now been freed, according to Catholic activists here. The last of the more than 10 who were jailed in the late 1970s and early 1980s in a crackdown on the church, Father Sigitas Tamkevicius, returned from internal exile in Siberia early this month; however, one priest was released only on condition that he emigrate to West Germany.

Keston College, which monitors the Soviet observance of religious freedom, reported this month that all those jailed for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” had also been released.

Sladkevicius has twice traveled to Rome with other Lithuanian bishops for meetings with Pope John Paul II and discussions with Vatican officials, and in June he went to Rome again to become the first Lithuanian in modern history to be publicly made a cardinal.

Steponavicius, although still prohibited from carrying out his church work, was permitted to go to Rome for three weeks last month in what church officials saw as a sign that the 77-year-old prelate, widely believed to be the “secret cardinal” created almost a decade ago by Pope John Paul II, might be freed shortly from internal exile.

Vilnius Cathedral, the focal point of Catholicism in Lithuania for six centuries, was returned to the church last month after nearly 40 years’ use as a state art museum.

Several other churches, also taken over for secular uses in the anti-religious campaigns of the 1950s, were returned earlier.

Sladkevicius and other church leaders meet regularly now, not just with the commissioner for religious affairs, the successor to the official who banished Sladkevicius in 1957, but also with other senior government and Communist Party officials to discuss the church’s needs and the problems of Lithuania.

And even the once-incessant government campaign to promote atheism, particularly among the young, has been relaxed to the point where Lithuanian schoolchildren quietly receive religious instruction in most parishes despite old prohibitions on such teaching.

“As a nation, we are as Catholic as Ireland or Poland,” a priest in Vilnius remarked, noting that probably two-thirds of the 2.6 million Lithuanians are Catholics, though government estimates put the figure at 30% or less and declining. “I also think our faith is stronger simply because of the struggle we face to practice it, to keep it. Baptizing your child is really a declaration of faith, solemnizing your marriage in the church requires conviction and courage, coming to church on Sunday says where you stand--and our churches are packed . . . .

“The Soviet authorities may finally have recognized the strength of our faith, and as a result, we may be moving toward a balanced relationship between church and state.”

Regulations Eased

The government’s motives, in fact, are complex.

Under Gorbachev’s liberalizations, restrictions on all churches as well as on individuals who have remained religious have been significantly relaxed in the past three years. One of the first moves by Algirdas Brazauskas, the new Communist Party first secretary in Lithuania, was to return the Vilnius Cathedral in an important gesture of good will.

But many Lithuanians believe that the recent upsurge in nationalism here was so clearly linked to the resilient Catholicism that the Kremlin concluded that the freer practice of religion was less of a danger than that posed by even greater Lithuanian nationalism.

“There have been very big changes in our country, though we are not at all sure they will stay,” Sladkevicius commented. “But those are political changes and economic changes. They are very, very significant, I think, and affect us all.

“As far as the church is concerned, however, I would say that the changes are still insignificant, very small. Why? Because they are relaxing the restrictions on the church, not removing them. We cannot yet speak of true, full freedom of religion in our country.”

Lithuanian Catholics use as an index of religious freedom the vitality of the church in the 1920s and 1930s, the country’s brief period of independence. At the outbreak of World War II, the six dioceses here had 1,451 priests plus 435 men studying for the priesthood at four seminaries. There were 27 monasteries, 76 convents and 1,022 churches and chapels.

Through centuries of persecution under the Russian czars and an equally long struggle to free themselves of Polish domination, Lithuanians had held tenaciously to Catholicism. Even in independent Lithuania, the church fought state control.

“What we want, and what we insist upon, is for the government not to control our religious activities in any way,” Sladkevicius said. “The government could do this, but so far it has not. It still wants to keep all things in control, within limits.

”. . . Mikhail Gorbachev is sincere when he says he wants change, I think, and he has begun to bring change. But I don’t think he wants to end control of the church, only diminish the restrictions on us.”

Yet, Sladkevicius counsels patience, warning Lithuanians that pushing too hard might bring a government backlash. Autonomy for Lithuania is quite possible under Gorbachev’s reform program known as perestroika, or restructuring, the cardinal said, but restoration of Lithuanian independence, lost with the forced incorporation of the republic into the Soviet Union in 1940, would take “a miracle.”

“For God, the impossible does not exist--all things are possible,” he said. “But that would be a miracle. Still, perestroika is a miracle . . . .”

Learning to Wait

Celebrating an open air Mass last month in Vilnius’ Gediminas Square, the first such service in nearly 50 years, Sladkevicius told the congregation of 20,000, “Let us learn to be patient, let us learn to wait.”

Similarly, he has told the new Lithuanian Reform Movement, which has adopted a strongly nationalist program demanding Kremlin recognition of Lithuanian “sovereignty,” that “every good thing must grow--nothing happens all at once.”

The church, he said, has “very big hopes” for Sajudis, as the Lithuanian Reform Movement is known here.

“People have begun to speak how they truly think, and we hope the government will listen and that changes will come in the future,” Sladkevicius continued. “But we must watch and observe, and then we will say our words about Sajudis. Right now, we don’t know what direction it will take, but it seems to have great influence with the government.”

At its founding congress in Vilnius last month, Sajudis called for full religious freedom, including the right to preach openly, to educate children in church doctrine, to publish church newspapers, magazines and books, to carry out charitable work and to build churches in new residential areas of the cities.

“When good things begin,” said Sladkevicius, reflecting the patience acquired over the 25 years of internal exile, “we must learn to wait and not be in a hurry, not to try to get all things at once.”