In Jesus of Nazareth–Holy Week, Pope Benedict XVI remarked on the striking parallel between the presence of the holy women at the cross of Christ and their role in the first appearances of the Risen Lord:
Just as there were only women standing by the Cross – apart from the beloved disciple – so too the first encounter with the Risen Lord was destined to be for them. The Church’s juridical structure is founded on Peter and the Eleven, but in the day-to-day life of the Church, it is the women who are constantly opening the door to the Lord and accompanying him to the Cross, and so it is they who come to experience the Risen One.
This truth over the centuries is ably demonstrated by Bronwen McShea in her fine new book, Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know. And no woman of our Catholic moment embodied this Christocentric fidelity – opening doors to Christ, accompanying him to Calvary, living in the joy of the Resurrection – more than Sister Nijolė Sadūnaitė, who died, appropriately, on Easter Sunday, March 31.
A clandestine religious in Soviet-occupied Lithuania from the time she was 18, Sister Nijolė helped create and distribute the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, a record of ongoing harassment, persecution, and martyrdom that had the honor of being the longest-running, uninterrupted dissident publication in the history of the USSR. Through surreptitious means, issue after issue of the Chronicle (which was produced in multiple copies on manual typewriters using ten sheets of carbon paper) was smuggled out of Lithuania to Europe and North America; it was then translated into various languages, to the intense aggravation of the masters of the multinational empire that was in truth a vast prison covering eleven time zones.
So, one by one, the leading figures in the publication of the Chroniclewere arrested by the KGB and sentenced to the GULAG camps. In 1975, Nijolė Sadūnaitė got three years of hard labor and three years of Siberian exile.
In the GULAG, she was tortured, imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital, and spent stretches in solitary confinement. In exile, she worked as a charwoman, having previously done manual labor in a factory and cared for abandoned children. All the while, she kept her religious consecration a secret from everyone except her family and a few close friends. Released from exile, she resumed her underground resistance activities.
When the KGB came looking for her in 1982, she went underground for five years, during which she wrote a memoir of her prison camp experience, which was published in 1987 as A Radiance in the Gulag – an apt title for the reflections of a woman of infectious joy, remarkable energy, and unbroken spirit. During the Gorbachev thaw in the late 1980s, Sister Nijolė, by then a national heroine, became publicly visible at the mass demonstrations that eventually led to Lithuania’s auto-liberation in 1990-1991.
From 1986 to 1987, I helped my friend Congressman John Miller (himself Jewish) form the bipartisan Lithuanian Catholic Religious Freedom Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Caucus’s work, in collaboration with the Reagan Administration, helped free two founders of the Chronicle from the GULAG, Father Alfonsas Svarinskas and Father Sigitas Tamkevičius, SJ (later the archbishop of Kaunas and a cardinal).
Those two white martyrs, as well as Sister Nijolė, eventually made their way to Washington, where I had the honor of meeting each of them (as I did a second time during a moving reunion in Vilnius in 2013). On her visit to the nation’s capital, Sister Nijolė wanted to visit Washington’s cathedral. Afterward, while standing in front of St. Matthew’s on Rhode Island Avenue, she suddenly took a pin with a stylized version of the Lithuanian national coat of arms from her handbag, affixed it to my suit jacket lapel, and gave me a great hug. I felt as if I, a civilian, had been decorated by a combat veteran.
Sister Nijolė’s funeral Mass was celebrated in Vilnius’s Calvary Church with most of the country’s bishops present. At the end, there were spontaneous cries of Santo subito! (or its Lithuanian equivalent) – just as there had been after the funeral Mass of John Paul II, whom the underground nun, resistance hero, and GULAG survivor revered.
I hope it happens, someday, that the Church recognizes the heroic virtues of Nijolė Sadūnaitė and canonizes her. I have no doubt, however, that in defending her and having been privileged to meet her, my life was touched by a saint, whose witness mirrored that of the holy women of Calvary and Easter.
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Did she realize that the Washington Cathedral was a protestant edifice? And I hope no one responds, “What difference does that make?”. Only the fact that it’s a beautiful building would make sense for a visit by a Catholic. It makes as much sense as going to see the Taj Mahal.
Isn’t St. Matthews in DC the Cathedral for the Catholic Archdiocese of DC?
I stand corrected; St. Matthew’s is the Catholic cathedral while the Washington Cathedral – a magnificent gothic structure – is protestant.
What cathedral did Weigel visit with the sister? The Cathedral of St. Matthew’s, Catholic, is on R.I. Ave. The Basilica Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is one of the tenth largest Catholic churches in N. America and honors the Immaculate Conception of Mary as America’s patroness. Wouldn’t a saintly sister want to go there?? Then there is the Episcopalian “National Cathedral.”.
Other questions:
1) Is this sister-friend of Weigel noted in either Benedict’s book or in McShea’s “Women of the Church”? Or are both books mentioned to hyphenate Sister to these authors of renown? Are these authors to tease us into a lesser glamour?
2) The Chronicles is an odd type publication. As I culled cards and leaflets from cardboard boxes in my garage this past week, I also culled books from shelves. My two volumes of “Chronicles” went into the ‘donation’ box. Of small and passing and strange interest when I first skimmed them, they never held much more for me. This is not to say that someone more worthy or different from me would find them as I did. But reading them had the same effect on me as if I had been reading, over and over and interminably, a news column of the local small town’s notables, the who’s who, what’s what, and where’s where, all of whom and where, were unknown except as a dot on a map. Each conveyed an objective overhang of farmer-almanac sense of uncertainly sure bad weather, crop failure, famine, disease, and death. Don’t get me wrong. The Chronicles stand monument to the horribly stale hatred of socialism. But really, for drama’s sake as well as for a more enduring sense of sorry history wouldn’t we rather read Solshenitzyn or the Passion of our Christ?
Like that statue of Ozymandias, the Chronicles stands as a monument to man that man will wish to destroy.
You clearly did not read properly, since Mr. Weigel specified “St. Matthew’s” in the next sentence. And my goodness, let’s show some appreciation of Church teaching: validly baptized Protestants are Christian; it is absurd to compare a visit to the National Cathedral with a visit to the Taj Mahal.
There was confusion with reference to the name: the protestant church is typically referred to as the “Washington cathdral”. But, the specific name given as St. Matthews is the Catholic cathedral. I stand corrected. As I said, why would a saintly religious sister want to visit the protestant cathedral other than to gaze at its magnificent architecture? But I needn’t have to school you about the essential differences between a Catholic church and those of the myriad ecclesial communities.
I agree, Edward. Confusion was clear about which cathedral Mr. Weigel took the sister. He first says he that sister wanted to visit “Washington’s cathedral.” He doesn’t name it. Then he says, “Afterward, while standing in front of St. Matthew’s…” It does not follow that they first went into St. Matthew’s as it does not equate to “Washington’s cathedral.” The St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral is notable for its stunningly beautiful architecture. It is entirely possible that any DC cathedral was the “Washington cathedral” the sister wanted to visit or that to which Weigel took her.
Generally this entire OP seemed written on the sleeve-cuff, sans paper, as one hastened to deadline. It reminded me of myself trying to spew and then edit or review the random structure of verbosely confused comments on this 1.5 x 3 inch rectangle screen which CWR allots to us lowly gutter-gallery dwellers.
The Taj is mystically and hugely spectacular. The National Cathedral doesn’t hold a candle to the Taj. Its setting alone, hovering and haltingly invisible in morning mist, shimmers atop a valley drop deep behind and below it. One can only imagine the glory of it prior to the Brit soldiers’ sacking of its (those Christian thieves, those knaves) embedded diamonds and other precious gemstones.
The Tag is a monument to the love of a man for his wife. Something the Episcopalians likely don’t clearly know or appreciate.
A beautiful, uplifting account of faith and lived crucifixion of Lithuanian Sr Nijole. Radiant indeed.
In the early1980’s, once when I was praying I had the distinct impression that I was to pray for an unknown woman in the Gulag. I did this for several years. I will never know who she was, but the thought came to me that could it possibly have been this sister. She survived so many awful things. Even if this is not true, the prayers probably helped someone.