Catholic Sisters under European Communism lead ‘Interrupted Lives’

A scene from the documentary titled “Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism,” which was released to ABC-TV stations earlier this fall. CNS

Women religious through the ages have been undaunted by diversity and hardship. They’re no strangers to applying faith to overcome obstacles.

But those who endured more than 40 years of communist oppression in Eastern Europe from 1948 through the breakup of the Soviet empire in 1989-91 have a particularly touching story to tell – a story that in many cases includes imprisonment, torture, exile to Siberia and being forced to live an underground existence because public expressions of faith were forbidden.

Sister Margaret Nacke, CSJ, and Sister Mary Savoie, CSJ, members of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, Kans., spent 16 years collecting testimonies, photographs and other data from women of numerous religious congregations about the conditions they endured because of their devotion to their faith and religious life.

The stories are archived at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago in the Nacke and Savoie Collection. The two sisters were executive producers of an hour-long documentary film, “Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism.”

They presented the film Oct. 14 at Oblate School of Theology Oct. 14 as part of a national promotional tour. The film is funded in part by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop’s Catholic Communication Campaign and the Collection for the Church in Central and Eastern Europe. To order a CD, call 1-800-235-8722.

“Imagine if nobody had written down the stories of the Gospel and the Lives of the Saints; we wouldn’t have them today,” Savoie said.

She and Nacke first became interested in the stories when they were among some 200 American women religious helping religious congregations in Central and Eastern Europe to get back on their feet starting in 1993.

When the Soviet Union assumed control over the governments of Eastern Europe in 1948, Catholic schools were quickly nationalized. Sisters were allowed to teach, but they were required to teach Marxism. When they refused, their teaching certificates were revoked. In August 1950, all religious orders in Czechoslovakia were liquidated.

Sister Paschalis Palos, SSND, from Sziget, Hungary, recalled, “We were forced to sign our own deportation orders -- 93 sisters, 11 novice and 16 candidates. We didn’t cry when we were ordered out; we sang, because we thought we were going to Siberia to be martyred. Martyrdom might have been easier than 40 years of exile,” she said.

The sisters were taken to a vacant Cistercian monastery in Zirc, Hungary, where 500 nuns from many different congregations were housed in overcrowded conditions.

Savoie recalled that recently, when the film was presented at the University of Dallas, Father Benedict Monostori, O.Cist., recalled witnessing the sister’s arrival at Zirc 60 years ago
“The Carmelites, who came with absolutely nothing, immediately asked, ‘How can we help?’ They began working, some in the kitchen and others preparing beds for other sisters. Many of the arriving sisters were elderly and ill, and the young monks carried some of them into the monastery,” the priest said.

“The communists had closed the gates so the townspeople couldn’t bring food to them. So the monks sneaked out and brought back food. You can imagine how much food was needed. Later, when everything got quiet, some of the monks went out to see the Carmelites. They had gotten everyone else settled, but they hadn’t done anything for themselves, so the young monks went out to the barn and got hay, which they spread for the Carmelites to have something to sleep on.”

Sister Paschalis said communist authorities had calculated that putting so many of them together in such substandard conditions would cause dissension and strife among the sisters and prompt many to leave religious life; instead, harmony prevailed.

Catholic hospitals were secularized at the same time as Catholic schools. Sister Zdenka Schelingova, a Sister of Mercy of the Holy Cross and a nurse in Bratislava, Slovakia, had a priest as a patient. He was constantly guarded, but when he was about to be sentenced, she slipped a sleeping pill into the guard’s tea and helped the priest escape across the border.

In prison, she was immersed in cold water and then left to languish in her cell in her wet clothes during cold weather. She contracted tuberculosis and later cancer. Released in April 1955, she died three months later. Sister Zdenka was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003.
Deported nuns could no longer work as nurses. One group of 200 from eight congregations was driven to a medieval castle, badly overcrowded, with no hot water and no bathroom. An old school building became their dormitory, with 14 sisters in each classroom.

An unidentified sister told of working daily on farms. They were taken to work daily at 8 a.m. and chose to wear their religious habits, even though they were hard to maintain and to wear. One sister recalled working with flax, harvesting potatoes and working on a poultry farm with thousands of chickens and hens for six years.

“We made time for recreation. We had picnics and made up poems and song. We put all our experiences into our songs. We created an air of joy in our community,” she said.

Other sisters were assigned to cottage industries with sympathetic lay co-workers, with whom the sister shared mutual respect. In some places, nuns were allowed to work only with the sick and the elderly -- “people they thought we could not transmit our faith to.” Sister John Vianney Vranak, SSCM, director of the Jankola Library in Danville, Pa., who went to Slovakia and took many sisters’ testimonies of their experiences.

In Romania, Lithuania and Ukraine, sisters were not allowed to live, worship or work openly, so they lived an underground existence.

“We couldn’t meet openly. Some lived with families in apartment buildings, and the people we lived with never knew that we were sisters in the same congregation,” one of the sisters recalled.” Meanwhile, their vacated convent had been turned into a military academy.

Perhaps the worst oppression suffered by women religious was in the Greek Catholic Church in Romania and Lithuania. The Soviet government considered the Greek Catholic Church “a foothold of the Vatican.”

In 1945-56, Joseph Stalin’s government began systematically arresting bishops and priests who refused to convert to the Orthodox Church. “There were 3,000 priests in Romania in 1945; by 1953, about 1,400 either had been jailed or killed. It was a near annihilation of the Catholic Church in Romania,” said Mikolaj Kunicki, assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

“Sisters were completely suppressed unless they joined the Orthodox groups, which were cloistered,” said Msgr. George Sarauskas, former director of the U.S. bishops’ Collection for the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, who added:
“Stalin thought the similarity of the Greek Catholic Church with the Russian Orthodox Church in liturgy and custom would make it easy to assimilate Greek Catholics], but they didn’t count on the sisters’ fierce loyalty to the pope.”

At least one group of sisters was taken to an Orthodox monastery. “We were brainwashed, scolded and threatened if we didn’t convert. But we would never convert. [One of the guards] said we were the most stubborn women in the world,” an unidentified sister said.

Sister Maria Olga Pop, CMD, a Romanian, recalled that all signs of public religious life were forbidden. “We cared about wearing our habits. There was a price, but it wasn’t as high as the price of giving up our faith, so we gave up our habits. Stalin expelled religion and thought eventually it would just disappear.

“In the early days of communism, religious resistance was dealt with severely and forcibly. Bishops and priests were murdered or exiled. In Lithuania, people were deported to Siberia.”

One sister said she arrived in Romania in 1954 and was convicted of participating in a resistance movement with 13 priests. They recited Stations of the Cross, read religious books and discussed them.

A Lithuanian, Sister Remigija Sereikaite, SSC, said she spent seven months in jail and later five years in Siberia. Sister Clare Laslau, CJ, worked for the bishop of Bucharest. She was forced to spend three months in solitary confinement because she would not reveal the names of men he ordained. She was accused of knowing classified information. Aged 38, she was sentenced to 14 years in prison, where guards beat her hands with metal until they were swollen, and also struck her repeatedly on the chest until she began to bleed.

“When I was released, the other sisters cried when they saw me. They suggested I go and take a shower, but the first thing I wanted was to receive the Eucharist,” Sister Remigija recalled.
Sister Joseph Erdes, OA, a Romanian, was arrested for allowing a priest to celebrate Mass in her office. She was imprisoned in a cell designed to hold 10 people.

“We were 40 to a cell. They would wake us at 5 a.m., and we weren’t allowed to sit or lie down until 10 p.m. There was no heat in the cells, even though it was freezing outside. They had such an evil power over us. We refused to implicate others. We were harassed and threatened with solitary confinement in a dark cell. They used psychological torture,” she said.

“Because I was a woman, they thought they could make me sing, implicate others. They thought men were tougher than women. I told them I didn’t know who was there. They said I was withholding important information.”

An unidentified sister said she made her confession to a priest in a neighboring cell by using Morse code. She came out of prison with great joy, only to be sentenced to a new prison term without any trial.

Some sisters risked death crossing borders. In one crossing from Hungary to Czechoslovakia by three sisters in 1952, one of the sisters was shot. A second stayed to assist her, while the third kept running and eventually crossed the border through a hole in a chain-link fence.

“I confessed to a priest in Vienna. I had no courage to go back to them. He told me that at that moment I had to think only of myself. I needed to forgive myself for leaving the other sisters. I trust God’s mercy.”

Even more than 50 years later, she said, “I still get tears in my eyes” remembering her escape.

Forty years of communist rule was not consistently violent across the decades. Nikita Khrushchev assumed power in 1956 and publicly denounced Stalin’s excesses for his own political purposes. Under his regime, the extensive gulag [concentration camp] system was largely dismantled, but religious orders were still suppressed.

“Sisters attempted to live together without attracting attention. They pretended to be relatives, and they’d meet in parks for days of retreat. Formation was one-to-one, a candidate meeting with a superior or novice director.

Because gatherings had to be sporadic, it often took six to 12 years to complete formation. One sister said it took her 13 years. Sisters spoke of making their vows “silently, in their hearts,” without the usual documents.” One said she took her first vows in a confessional “because the seal of the confessional protected my community – and me,” while another did so in a prison.

“I was able to wear my habit during the vows,” another sister said, “but I had to take it off immediately afterward. Everything had to be done in secret.

In Romania, Lithuania and Ukraine, local officials searched houses frequently for religious literature. Sisters knew that if forbidden literature was discovered, it could mean years in jail or exile to Siberia.

But a daring newspaper, Chronicles of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, managed to tell the West about systematic violations of human rights there, creating massive international pressure on the communist government. Tourists, diplomats and sometimes sisters smuggled the stories out of the country on microfilm.

Finally, the communist system in Eastern Europe crumbled, symbolized in the demolition of the infamous Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989.

“We were so happy when Lithuania declared its independence. It meant we could finally wear our habits and live as we truly are,” one sister said. But after more than 40 years of living underground singly or in pairs or threes, the return to life in large communities proved an enormous challenge for some sisters, said Lithuanian Sister Elena Simkunaite, OSB.

Still, religious congregations faced a major need to build convents to provide a place for community life and to care for elderly, sick sisters. While many churches had been returned, many religious institutions, including schools, convents and monasteries, had not been.

The Catholic sisters of Eastern Europe never disappeared as Stalin had predicted; they survived on faith, enduring violence, threats, prison and exile, waiting for their liberation more than 40 years, persevering against all odds.

In a voiceover at the end of the film, an unidentified sister said sometimes she wonders, “Why us?”, but then stops and remembers, “This is the cross God asked us to carry. What we remember is not the pain but the glory -- the glory of saying ‘yes.’”

Savoie said that the sisters she interviewed almost invariably attributed their ability to survive and keep hope alive to their sense of community -- a sense that other sisters were thinking of them and praying for them -- and their constant longing for the Eucharist, sometimes for years.

Some sisters said their longing for the Eucharist and their shared conviction that God was with them wherever they were, even in solitary confinement, kept their hope alive throughout those 40 years.

It would have been easy for sisters who were allowed to wear religious habits to take them off to make their labor easier, but many sisters told Savoie and Nacke that communist guards would have interpreted the act as an abdication of religious life.

The opposite is also true. In 1993, Savoie asked a newly liberated nun why she had resumed wearing the habit after being forbidden to wear it for more than 40 years.

The answer was, “It’s a sign of my freedom. Two years ago, I would have been immediately taken to the police station and interrogated. Now I can just walk out.”