Catholic World News News Feature
Dramatic account of Eastern Catholic martyrs March 23, 2004
The Vatican has released a comprehensive work on the Eastern Catholic martyrs of the 20th century.
The book carefully documents the efforts to suppress the Eastern-rite Catholic communities in Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, and Ruthenia. After suffering harrowing persecution through the 20th century, all of these Eastern churches have re-emerged with new vigor since the fall of the Communist empire. The new volume "gives a voice to those who suffered so much," remarked the prefect of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches. But he also observed that the witness of these martyrs certainly has given new life to their Catholic communities.
The prefect, Cardinal Igance Moussa Daoud, introduced the massive new volume at a press conference in Rome on March 23. The book, published by Librarie Editrice Vaticana, assembles the proceedings of a symposium held at the Vatican in October 1998, devoted to the martyrs of the Eastern Catholic churches who died under Nazi and Communist rule in central and eastern Europe.
While the book does not hesitate to place the blame for the 20th-century persecutions on totalitarian ideologies, Cardinal Moussa Daoud stressed that "there is no rancor." He repeated: "There is not rancor, because the memory of martyrs is always a purification."
The Catholic of the Byzantine churches, the cardinal continued, were special targets of persecution, and often suffered heroically with very little support from abroad. Quoting one of the book's contributors, he said that the Eastern Catholics "were considered by the Orthodox as false the the Byzantine tradition, and not considered by the Latins as completely Catholic." This situation left them particularly vulnerable.
The Eastern churches were also attacked by Communist rulers because they were not subject to the control of the totalitarian state. While the Orthodox churches, organized along national lines, could be brought under some measure of state control, the Eastern Catholic churches-- which also had a strong national identity-- retained their ties to the Holy See. Hundreds of thousands of Eastern Catholics were imprisoned when they refused to renounce those ties, and many of them were executed.
Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the St. Egidio community, told the March 23 news conference that the Byzantine Catholics constituted 'a group that Communist policy did not permit in any part of the Eastern empire," with rare exceptions. In most of the Communist countries the Eastern Catholic communities were forced underground, their parish properties confiscated and their clergy imprisoned.
Two prelates of the Eastern churches offered their own riveting personal testimony at the news conference announcing the new publication. Bishop Tertulian Ioan Langa, of the Romanian Catholic eparchy of Cluj-Gherla, recalled the torture, degrading treatment, and "diabolic rituals" he had undergone during 16 years in prison. Bishop Langa, who is now 82, said that the new volume would be a form of release for those who, like himself, had suffered and "never written much about these tragic experiences."
Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk, of the Ukrainian Catholic eparchy of Kolomyia-Chernivstsi, also served lengthy prison sentences. He was ordained as a deacon during his first long jail sentence, from 1947 to 1956, and pursued his ministry behind bars-- where, he said, "The Gospel kept us human" despite the "pitiless" treatment of religious prisoners. Ordained to the priesthood after his release, he was jailed again from 1959 to 1964, and sent into exile when his term ended. He continued to serve his pastoral functions, in defiance of the Russian secret police, until the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy emerged from the underground in 1987.
