It was not silence” “

Countless Christians were persecuted in the countries of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. For a long time people spoke of a “Church of silence”. But that definition is not liked by the witnesses of persecutions. “We – said the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic bishop Pavlo Vasylyk, who spent twenty years either in the gulags or in exile – never kept silence: we always spoke with our life”. The bishop was speaking to the Fides Agency, which has dedicated a dossier on its own website (www.fides.org) to the victims of persecution. We offer some data from it below. In the Soviet Union the persecutions against the Catholic Church, which began as early as 1918, led to its almost total destruction around 1939. On the basis of police data, 2,469 priests were arrested in the years 1923/1924 alone, and as many as 19,812 in 1931/1932. The same fate was probably shared by the monks and nuns of the 1,025 Orthodox monasteries. In September 1938 Father Braun, parish priest of the church of St. Louis of the French, wrote as follows in a letter sent abroad: “It’s sad for me to have to say that in the whole country there only remains one priest with the exception of Father Florent and me”. In Bulgaria the violent persecution against the Catholics began in 1948 with the expulsion of foreign priests and religious, and the closing down of seminaries and all charitable and educational institutions. Bishop Eugenio Bossilkov was tried and condemned to death in 1952. No one yet knows where he is buried. “The traces of our blood – wrote a bishop in a letter between 1948 and 1949 – shall open the way to a radiant future”. The persecution of the Church in Czechoslovakia may be summed up with the testimony of two of its pastors: Jozef Beran, archbishop of Prague, and Jan Christostom Korec. The former, after 14 years of deportation, died in exile in Rome in 1969. Korec, after various arrests, became a warehouseman and stevedore. After the collapse of the regime, John Paul II nominated him bishop of Nitra in 1990 and cardinal in 1991. For the Church in Poland the assassination of Father Jerzy Popielusko was perhaps the most brutal expression of the persecution. The priest, engaged in the pastoral care of workers since 1980 and closely associated with the “Solidarnosc” union led by Lech Walesa, was highly esteemed as a preacher. Just for that reason he became the target of many calumnies. On 19 October 1984, after giving a meditation to workers on the theme ‘Vanquish evil with good’ at Bydgoszcz, he was kidnapped, murdered and his body tossed into the river Vistula, on the outskirts of Wloclawek. In Romania the persecution was initially concentrated on the Greek-Catholics, whose Church was liquidated by the State on 1 December 1948. At a later stage the persecution turned its attention to the Catholic Church of Latin rite. The most atrocious year was 1951: threats, summary arrest, torture – no one was saved. In the Baltic States too the martyrs were numerous. Between 1944 and 1953 a third of the Lithuanian Catholic clergy died in prison. There were also numerous victims in Latvia and Estonia, including Bishop Eduard Profittlich, apostolic administrator for Estonia, who was arrested on 27 June 1941. No news of the fate of this bishop emerged till the early 1990s. Only with the opening of the Soviet archives was confirmation of his death in Soviet custody found: he died in the prison of Kirov on 22 February 1942. But one of the countries in Eastern Europe where religious life suffered particularly harsh persecution was Albania, where a ban on any form of religious worship was proclaimed in 1967. But this was but the culmination of a long persecution that had struck Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims alike since 1945. In spite of the ferocity of the persecutions, some religious traditions survived in the secrecy of family life. Lastly, it is calculated that some 17 million people met a violent death in the Ukraine in the last century. The best known figure of the persecution is the Greek-Catholic metropolitan Josyf Slipyj (1892-1984). Arrested on 11 April 1945, Slipyj was tried and condemned, but resisted all pressure to recant. After 18 years imprisonment in the gulags. the metropolitan was finally released in 1963, thanks to John XXIII’s personal intervention with Nikita Kruschev.