“Christ in the cold war of Eastern Europe: the catacombs of the twentieth century and the martyrdom of the Church of silence, from the October Revolution to 2000”: that’s the title of the television documentary, produced by the RAI (Italy’s state broadcaster), which will be shown on TV in two instalments, on Good Friday, 29 March, immediately after the Via Crucis with the Pope at the Colosseum, and on Friday 5 April. Irina Ivanova Sofroninckaja, a Russian laywoman, was thrown into prison for not having disclosed the names of clandestine priests and bishops; the Slovak Salesian Jazet Izatovic worked as a manual worker by day and taught future priests in secret by night; the Polish Alojzy Soltys concealed religious books and sacred images in his hay loft, which were then clandestinely introduced into Slovakia: just some of the over 60 unpublished testimonies of priests, men and women religious, and laypeople, who kept alive the Catholic faith in nine Eastern European countries during the long Communist domination, suffering arrest, imprisonment, torture, threats, and harrassment of every kind. After a year’s work, these testimonies have been gathered together into the documentary guided ideally by John Paul II’s journeys to the countries of Eastern Europe. A ‘Church of silence’ that finds expression in the experience of Christo Proykov, Apostolic Exarch of Bulgaria: “There were over ten years without priests, without seminaries, without any religious freedom. It was there that my vocation was born to give my life to the Church. The Church is a mother who has suffered many blows in her history but is also an anvil that has broken many hammers”.
