Travels with Weigel

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 .

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Greetings on a Morning Walk 

Paul Willis

Blackberry vines,  you hold this ground in the shade of a willow: all thorns, no fruit. *…

An Outline of Trees 

James Matthew Wilson

They rise above us, arching, spreading, thin Where trunk and bough give way to veining twig. We…

Fallacy 

J.C. Scharl

A shadow cast by something invisible  falls on the white cover of a book  lying on my…