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Nijol Sadunaite, a fearless however forgiving Roman Catholic nun and anti-Soviet Lithuanian nationalist who was impressed by Pope John Paul II and publicly welcomed by President Ronald Reagan, died on March 31 in Vilnius. She was 85 years outdated.
His dying was confirmed by Sister Gerarda Elena Suliuskaite, winner of the Freedom Prize of the Republic of Lithuania, which was additionally given to Sister Sadunaite in 2018 for defending democracy and human rights. She was the primary girl to obtain this award.
In 1975, Sister Sadunite (pronounced sah-doo-nee-teh) was arrested by KGB brokers, who stormed an condominium the place she was writing an underground newspaper, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. , which documented abuses in opposition to Christians within the Baltic. State.
“I had typed six pages once I received caught, so I successfully received a 12 months for each web page,” she instructed The Atlantic in 1994.
He was imprisoned for six years, most of which he spent in jail and a few in a psychological establishment and in exile in a Siberian penal colony.
For a lot of the Eighties, Sister Sadunite remained largely out of the general public eye, however she performed a key position in organizing a rally in 1987 that impressed the motion for Lithuanian independence. Lots of of Lithuanians sang the patriotic anthem of nationwide independence, which had been banned by the 1940 non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, which, in impact, condoned the Soviet seizure of Lithuania.
Years of Rally, the manuscript of a memoir that she had secretly taken to Moscow six years earlier and smuggled out of the Soviet Union, was revealed in america. Titled “A Radiance within the Gulag”, it was reviewed within the Los Angeles Occasions as “a richly textured story of religion in motion in opposition to overwhelming odds.”
That very same 12 months, Sister Sadunite emerged from hiding to steer an illustration that enlivened the motion for independence. In 1988, she and different dissidents had been invited to lunch on the US Embassy in Moscow, and she or he joined President Reagan and the First Girl, Nancy Reagan, at a desk; Mr. Reagan met Soviet chief Mikhail S. Attending summit conferences with Gorbachev.
Undaunted by persecution and imprisonment, Sister Sadunite remained a passionate voice for spiritual freedom and nationwide independence from the formally atheist Soviet Union. Lithuania unilaterally declared independence in 1990.
Felicija Nijole Sadunayte was born on July 22, 1938 in Kaunas, a metropolis in central Lithuania, to Veronika Rimkute-Sadunyen and Jonas Sadunais, an agronomist and instructor.
His extraordinarily spiritual Roman Catholic household lived in fixed worry of being deported to a Siberian labor camp for practising their faith. In his memoir, he wrote: “Each time we heard the rumble of car motors early within the morning, we’d all run into the grain fields to cover, lest they take us to Siberia. “Most Lithuanians lived like this, as if on the sting of a volcano.”
In 1956, she was so impressed by her good friend's affirmation (she was confirmed when she was 7 years outdated) that she joined a secret convent and served within the monastery of the Congregation of the Maids of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, till her dying. of. In Pavilni, part of Vilnius.
Regardless of being educated as a nurse, Sister Sadunite may solely discover work as a shepherd below Soviet rule after her launch from jail.
Whereas some dissidents turned extra cordial towards Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sister Sadunite remained strongly against the Russian authorities. However, remarkably, he by no means expressed bitterness towards his captors or his tormentors. Fairly, he repeatedly stated that the Church's position in bringing about justice isn’t solely to wish for the oppressed, but additionally to wish that the oppressors themselves could be brave sufficient to express regret.
“Even when an evil man is in bother,” she wrote from jail, “I’ll share my final morsel of bread with him.”
After his arrest in 1975, KGB officers demanded that he reveal the names of the editors of his underground Catholic newspaper.
she refused. As an alternative, they instructed officers that they had been responsible of 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 Sadunite usually 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 hasten the autumn of European communism.
“The Pope was a person who had fled the identical system that was oppressing us,” he instructed The Atlantic.
“He stated that those that battle and die for his or her nation usually are not solely martyrs however can be holy,” he stated. “We took this to imply that the Pope understands what we’re doing, and that we should always do no matter it takes to liberate our land. He stated this many times. He impressed me to be robust and brave, even once I was afraid.”