In today’s On the Square , George Weigel is still making the rounds in Eastern Europe. He considers a memorial to the fallen in Lithuania, the Hill of Crosses, and the greater battle for freedom (and faith) that memorial has come to symbolize:
That struggle was led by some remarkable men and women, including two priests who did time in the Gulag labor camps, Father Sigitas Tamkevicius, S.J., and Father Alfonsas Svarinskas, and a clandestine nun, Nijole Sadunaite, whose small book, A Radiance in the Gulag , remains a moving testament to courage forged by Catholic devotion. The resistance Church in Lithuania produced the longest-running, unbroken underground publication in the history of the USSR, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania , which was typed, copy by copy, on manual typewriters, secretly distributed in Lithuania, and then smuggled abroad, where it was translated into English by Brooklyn-based Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid.
Read the rest here . There’s some video of this Hill of Crosses here .
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