The little country that said no to the Empire

Lithuania is a small country. Three million inhabitants, a strip of territory between the Baltic and Belarus, a capital - Vilna - whose name sounds like something old and resistant. It is not a country that Western history books often mention much. And yet in the 20th century, Lithuania waged one of the most extraordinary battles for religious freedom and national identity that the world has known.

The key to that battle is inseparable from the Virgin Mary.

In June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. It was not an invasion with battles: it was an occupation agreed with Nazi Germany in the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact, which had divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian powers. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia simply emerged one day as part of the USSR. In June 1941, just a year later, mass deportations began: tens of thousands of Lithuanians - intellectuals, priests, farmers, women with young children - were uprooted from their homes in the morning and sent to the Siberia work camps.

When the Second World War ended and the Soviets consolidated their control over Lithuania, the regime began its systematic war against the Catholic Church. Because in Lithuania, being Catholic and being Lithuanian were almost synonymous. Pounding the faith was hitting the national identity. And hitting national identity was the first step in making Lithuania become, as the ideologists of Moscow had planned, a Soviet republic that eventually forgot that it had been something else.

The deportations to Siberia: three hundred thousand lives uprooted

Between 1941 and 1953, in two major waves of deportations and in multiple minor operations, more than three hundred thousand Lithuanians were deported to Siberia. It is a devastating figure for a small country: almost 10 per cent of the total population.

Deportations always followed the same pattern. In the early morning - because the Soviets knew that the darkness amplified terror - NKVD agents reached the people with lists. They were calling the doors. They gave 15 minutes to pick up the belongings. And they took the families in cattle wagons to the east, to a Siberia that in winter could reach 50 degrees below zero.

Many did not arrive. Those who arrived found fields where forced labour, hunger and cold combined into an equation that for many had only one result. Young children died of diseases in devastating proportions. The deportees tried to gather the faithful in secret to pray the rosary, to celebrate the mass when they could get the necessary elements, to keep a flame on that the Soviet regime was sure to be able to shut down.

He couldn't turn it off.

"In Siberia, we prayed the rosary every night. It was the only thing that kept us together. It was the only thing that made us stay Lithuanian when everything else was taken from us."
- Testimony of a Lithuanian deportee, collected after independence in 1990

The Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania: the voice they could not silence

In 1972, at the time of Soviet oppression, a clandestine document that would change the country's history began to circulate in Lithuania. His name was Chronicle of Catholic Church in Lithuania - The Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania - and it was a typed and hand-copied bulletin that accurately documented the violations of religious freedom in the country: the priests arrested, the faithful questioned, the closed seminars, the children prohibited from receiving catechesis, the churches converted into museums of atheism.

The Chronicle was one of the most important dissidence documents in all Soviet history. It was translated into English, German, French and circulated in the West. The Vatican knew her. Lithuanian migrants spread it. Vatican Radio read it in Lithuanian so that the Lithuanians within the USSR knew that the world knew what was happening to them.

The Soviets dedicated enormous resources to finding the editors of the Chronicle. They arrested suspects, interrogated them, tortured them psychologically. But the Chronicle kept coming out. For seventeen years - from 1972 to 1989 - he did not lose a single number. It was a miracle of clandestine organization, of personal courage, of faith that what was being done was worth it.

Father Sigitas Tankevičius and the rosary in prison

One of the main drafters of the Chronicle was Father Sigitas Tankevičius, a Jesuit priest who had decided that obedience to the Gospel was more important than obedience to the Soviet authorities. Tankevičius wrote, organized the distribution, and also held a secret mass and organized spiritual retreats in the clandestine.

In 1983, he was arrested and sentenced to six years of work camp and four years of internal exile. During those years in the Gulag, Tankevičius prayed the rosary. It was not a symbolic gesture: it was his way of keeping his sanity, of still being a priest in a place where being a priest was forbidden, of continuing to tell the Virgin Mary that she was still there, that she had not given up.

When he left prison and Lithuania regained independence, Tankevičius became Archbishop of Kaunas. The man who had prayed the rosary in the Gulag now presided over the Church of the free country. In 2019, Pope Francis created him a cardinal. He is one of the men who best incarnate what was the Marian resistance of Lithuania in the 20th century.

The Hill of the Cruces: the battle the Soviets lost three times

About 12 kilometres north of Šiauliai, in northern Lithuania, there is a small hill that has been the scene of one of the most symbolic and extraordinary episodes of the religious history of the 20th century: the battle between the Soviet State and the Lithuanian people for the right to plant crosses.

The tradition of putting crosses on that hill is centuries old. No one knows exactly when it started - perhaps in the 14th or 15th century - but the practice was growing over the centuries. When Lithuania lived the insurrections against the Russian Empire in the 19th century, the relatives of the dead in those insurrections began to carry crosses to the hill. When the Soviet deportations arrived in 1941, the relatives of the deportees carried more crosses. The hill became a symbolic cemetery, a place where those who had no grave where to cry their dead could go to pray.

In 1961, the Soviet authorities ordered the destruction of the Hill of the Cruces. They sent bulldozers. They knocked down all the crosses, carried the rubble, flattened the hill. It was an unequivocal message: there is nothing sacred here, there is nothing to veneration here, there is only land that belongs to the State.

The Lithuanians replanted crosses.

In 1973, the Soviets again destroyed the hill. Again the bulldozers, again the rubble, again the torn hill.

The Lithuanians replanted crosses.

In 1975, third destruction. The Soviets even spilled diesel on the hill and burned the wooden crosses so that there was nothing left to rebuild.

The Lithuanians are back. And this time, the hill of the crosses was never destroyed again. Because even the most rigid regime has limits: the spectacle of a world power destroying crosses on a Baltic hill generated too much international pressure, too much outrage among Lithuanian migrants in the West, too much negative publicity.

Today, the Hill of the Cross has more than a hundred thousand crosses, crucifixes, rosaries and images of the Virgin. It is one of the most visited pilgrimage places in the Baltic. And it is also one of the most eloquent monuments of human resistance to totalitarianism in the world.

• 1940The Soviet Union occupies Lithuania. The systematic persecution of the Catholic Church begins.
• 1941, 1949Mass deportations to Siberia. More than 300,000 Lithuanians are sent to work camps. The deportees pray the rosary in the fields.
• 1961–1975The Soviets destroy the Šiauliai Hill three times. The Lithuanians reconstruct it three times.
• 1972The clandestine publication of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania begins. It goes on for 17 years.
• 1983Father Sigitas Tankevičius is arrested and sent to the Gulag. Pray the rosary for six years of captivity.
• 1990Lithuania declares the restoration of its independence, the first Soviet republic to do so.
• 1993John Paul II visits Lithuania and celebrates Mass in the Hill of the Cruces. It's one of the most exciting moments of his pontificate.

The Virgin of Šiluva: the only approved Marian apparition of the Baltic

In 1608, in a meadow near the people of Šiluva, in the centre of Lithuania, there were apparitions of the Virgin Mary that the Catholic Church would formally approve in 1634, making them the only Marian apparitions officially recognized in the Baltic countries.

History is extraordinary for its historical context. In 1608, Lithuania was in the middle of an offensive of Calvinist Protestantism: the most powerful nobles in the country had become Calvinism and were confiscating Catholic churches and giving them to Protestants. The church of Šiluva had been confiscated by a noble Calvinist decades earlier. The Catholics of the village, without a church, prayed in the field where the parish cemetery had been.

It was there, in that meadow where the ruins of Catholic devotion remained, where they saw a young woman crying, with a child in her arms. The Calvinist shepherds who came near asked him why he was crying. And she said: "In this place my children used to praise me, and now they will and sow it."

The apparition pointed to the place where, under the ground, a box of lead was buried with an image of the Virgin and the documents owned by the church - buried decades earlier by Catholics to protect them from Calvinist confiscation. When they excavated and found exactly what the apparition had indicated, several of the Protestant witnesses turned to Catholicism.

The Šiluva shrine, a few kilometres from Šiauliai, is now one of the most important pilgrimage places in Lithuania. The image of the Virgin of Šiluva - dressed in black, with the Child in arms, in an attitude of suffering - was for the Lithuanians of the twentieth century a powerful symbol: the Mother who cries because her children have been taken away, the Mother who points out where faith is hidden when everything seems lost.

"We pray the rosary not to lose faith and tongue"

There is a phrase that the Lithuanians who lived under communism often repeat when asked how they survived spiritually. They don't always say it exactly the same, but the meaning is the same: We pray the rosary not to lose faith and tongue.

The tongue. The Lithuanian language - one of the oldest and most conservative Indo-European languages in existence, which shares features with the Sanskrit that are no longer in any other living language - was for decades the vehicle of the prohibited identity. The Soviets did not formally prohibit it, but they systematically marginalized it: Russian was the language of power, of administration, of social ascent. Lithuanian was the language of the backward, of the peasants, of those who clung to the past.

And in that context, praying the rosary in Lithuanian was an act of cultural and religious resistance. Each Hail Mary was an affirmation: This tongue is not gonna die. This town is not going to disappear. Our Lady listens to us in our language, and we will continue to speak it.

There are testimonies from families that taught children to pray the rosary in secret, in whispers, because the neighbors could report them. There are testimonies of elders who in the last moments of their life asked for the rosary and prayed it aloud for the first time in years, as a last affirmation of what they had always believed. There are testimonies of young people in the 1980s who rediscovered the rosary not as a practice of their grandparents but as an act of rebellion against the system.

John Paul II in Lithuania: September 1993

Pope John Paul II visited Lithuania in September 1993, two years after the restoration of independence. It was his first visit to a former Soviet republic in the Baltic, and for the Lithuanians it had a historical dimension difficult to exaggerate.

The most exciting moment of the visit was the Mass he celebrated at the Hill of the Cruces. The Pope who had survived an attack, the Polish Pope who had prayed for the countries on the other side of the Steel Curtain throughout his life, came to the hill that the Soviets had destroyed three times and that the Lithuanians had rebuilt three times. He knelt. He kissed the land. And he celebrated the Mass before hundreds of thousands of faithful who had been waiting for that moment for decades.

"Here, on this hill of the crosses, which no human force could destroy, I feel in a special way the presence of God. This place is the living witness of the Lithuanian faith."
- John Paul II, Hill of the Cruces, Šiauliai, September 7, 1993

It was one of the great moments of the pontificate of John Paul II, who always had a special relationship with the countries of the Soviet bloc. The Polish Pope who had seen communism destroy his own country, which he had prayed for decades for the liberation of the peoples of Eastern Europe, was on the Hill of the Cruises of Lithuania, in the face of the testimony of stone and wood that faith can survive any human power.

The heritage of the Lithuanian Marian faith

Today, Lithuania is a free country. The Catholic Church - which for fifty years was persecuted, reduced, pushed into hiding - again has its open churches, its full seminars, its priests in the streets. Cardinal Tankevičius, who prayed the rosary in the Gulag, presided over the Church of the free country for years.

And the Hill of the Cruces is still growing. Every year new crosses, new rosaries, new images of the Virgin come. The Lithuanians of the diaspora - from Chicago, Toronto, Sydney, Buenos Aires - who for decades kept the Lithuanian culture and faith alive in exile and now return to tie their history to that hill that no one could completely destroy.

There is an amazing continuity between the Lithuanian of the 19th century that placed the first cross on the hill to weep his dead in the insurrections against the Tsar, and the Lithuanian of the 21st century that comes by coach from Vilna with his family to plant another cross. The hill unites them all: those who suffered, those who resisted, those who survived, those who were born free and want to understand where they came from.

Other Marian Apparitions Approved