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Millennial Propaganda Hides Soviet Repression
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14402 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1988 |
3,097 Words |
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Andrew Sorokowski
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It was Christmas eve in Kalynivka, a village in the Lvov region of the southwestern USSR. The church was packed with some 250 worshipers attending the midnight service. Father Petro Zelenyuk, a Ukrainian Catholic priest, celebrated the mass long into the early morning hours as the congregation sang the responses. At about 3 A.M. there was a commotion. Someone began shouting to the people to disperse. Several men made their way to the altar and tried to stop the service. The parishioners recognized them as local Communist Party officials, schoolteachers, and antireligious activists, led by the regional plenipotentiary of the state Council on Religious Affairs. One of the activists started trying to jostle people out of the church. A young man pushed him, and a scuffle broke out. The activists called the police, who reportedly made several arrests.
One morning a month later Nijole Sadunaite, a well-known Lithuanian Catholic and former prisoner of conscience, was trying to make a call at a telephone booth in Vilnius. She was planning to attend a service that day in memory of Fr. Juozas Zdebskis, a priest who died two years ago after being hit by a car. Suddenly a man came up and began to abuse and threaten her. Sadunaite walked away, but later that morning two men attacked her companion. One of them punched her hard in the stomach. Passers-by intervened, but Sadunaite suffered ill effects for some time after. Official involvement is suspected.
Such scenes hardly enhance the liberal image that the Soviet government is so anxious to project. It is particularly inappropriate this year, when massive celebrations of the millennium of Christianity in the East Slavic lands are to be held in Moscow and other Soviet cities.
Yet these are not isolated incidents. Sadunaite is one of many Lithuanian Catholic activists who continue to be persecuted. Among them are Fr. Alfonsas Svarinskas, who was reported last February to be among the 100 prisoners confined in corrective labor colony VS 389/35 in Perm, deep in the Russian interior, and his fellow-prisoner Fr. Sigitas Tamkevicius, whose whereabouts were not certain. While not illegal, the Catholic Church in Lithuania is severely restricted. The highly popular Archbishop Steponavicius has been confined for some 27 years to an isolated village. During the recent observances of Lithuania's 600th anniversary as a Christian nation, priests were forbidden to travel to or from Rome.
Zelenyuk's parish belongs to a church that the Soviet authorities brutally attacked in 1945-46 and whose existence they have refused to recognize ever since. The Ukrainian Catholic Church has 10 bishops, several hundred priests, and possibly four million faithful. Yet since the church cannot legally function, every religious gathering is fraught with danger. Priests are regularly fined or arrested for conducting services, and several have been murdered.
Violence and harassment
Despite the massive release of prisoners of conscience last year, Soviet persecution of religion remains widespread. It also varies in kind and degree. Near one end of the spectrum are violent incidents like those described above, and the confinement of believers in prison camps. Last August, Konstantin Kharchev, head of the Soviet Council on Religious Affairs, promised that all Soviet "prisoners of belief" would be released by November
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