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Nijole Sadunaite, a fearless however forgiving Roman Catholic nun and anti-Soviet Lithuanian nationalist who was impressed by Pope John Paul II and publicly hailed by President Ronald Reagan, died on March 31 in Vilnius. She was 85.
Her dying was confirmed by Sister Gerarda Elena Suliauskaite, laureate of the Freedom Prize of the Republic of Lithuania, which was additionally given to Sister Sadunaite in 2018 for her protection of democracy and human rights. She was the primary lady to obtain the award.
In 1975, Sister Sadunaite (pronounced sah-DOO-nay-teh) was arrested by Ok.G.B. brokers who had stormed an residence the place she was writing an underground newspaper, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, which documented abuses towards Christians within the Baltic state.
“I had typed six pages once I was caught, so I successfully obtained one 12 months for each web page,” she informed The Atlantic in 1994.
She was incarcerated for six years, most of which she spent in jail and a few of which she spent in a psychological establishment and in exile in a Siberian penal colony.
For many of the Eighties, Sister Sadunaite largely remained out of public view, however she was instrumental in organizing a rally in 1987 that galvanized the motion for Lithuanian independence. Hundreds of Lithuanians thundered the patriotic anthem of nationwide independence, which had been banned by the 1940 nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, a deal that, in impact, condoned the Soviet seizure of Lithuania.
The 12 months of the rally, the manuscript of a memoir she had secretly taken to Moscow six years earlier and smuggled out of the Soviet Union was revealed within the United States. Titled “A Radiance within the Gulag,” it was reviewed in The Los Angeles Times as “a richly textured narrative of religion in motion towards overwhelming odds.”
That similar 12 months, Sister Sadunaite emerged from hiding to steer an indication that vitalized the motion for independence. In 1988, she and different dissidents had been invited to lunch on the American embassy in Moscow, and he or she joined a desk with President Reagan and the primary girl, Nancy Reagan; Mr. Reagan had been attending summit conferences with the Soviet chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
Undaunted by persecution and imprisonment, Sister Sadunaite remained a spirited voice for non secular freedom and for nationwide independence from the formally atheistic Soviet Union. Lithuania unilaterally declared independence in 1990.
Felicija Nijole Sadunaite was born on July 22, 1938, in Kaunas, a metropolis in central Lithuania, to Veronika Rimkute-Saduniene and Jonas Sadunas, who was an agronomist and teacher.
Her very non secular Roman Catholic household lived in fixed concern of being deported to a Siberian labor camp for practising their faith. In her memoir, she wrote: “Whenever we heard vehicle motors roaring early within the morning, we’d all run out into the grain fields to cover, lest they take us off to Siberia. This is how most Lithuanians lived, as if on the rim of a volcano.”
In 1956, she was so moved by her good friend’s affirmation (she had been confirmed when she was 7) that she joined a clandestine convent and, till her dying, served within the monastery of the Congregation of the Maids of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, in Pavilny, part of Vilnius.
Despite having been educated as a nurse, after her launch from jail Sister Sadunaite might discover work solely as a charwoman underneath Soviet rule.
While some dissidents would grow to be extra conciliatory towards Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sister Sadunaite remained steadfastly against the Russian authorities. But, remarkably, she by no means expressed bitterness towards her captors or her tormentors. Rather, she repeatedly stated that the church’s position in bringing justice was not solely to hope for the oppressed, but additionally to hope that the oppressors themselves can be brave sufficient to say sorry.
“Even if an evil particular person had been in bother,” she wrote from jail, “I might share my final morsel of bread with him.”
After she was arrested in 1975, Ok.G.B. officers demanded that she reveal the names of the editors of her underground Catholic newspaper.
She refused. Instead, she informed the authorities that they had been culpable for any criticism of the federal government as a result of the editorials had been largely in response to the state’s official coverage of persecution and anti-religious propaganda.
Sister Sadunaite typically stated that her activism was impressed partially by the expertise of Pope John Paul II, a local of Poland whose resistance to atheism, she stated, helped speed up the collapse of European communism.
“The pope was somebody who had escaped from the identical system that was oppressing us,” she informed The Atlantic.
“He stated that individuals who struggle and die for his or her nation are usually not solely martyrs however could also be holy,” she stated. “We took that to imply that the pope understood what we had been doing, and that we must always do no matter it took to free our land. He stated it repeatedly. He made me wish to be robust and brave, too, even once I was afraid.”
