Tamkevicius, the Cardinal of Soviet dissent

Francis has included the archbishop emeritus of Kaunas Sigitas Tamkevicius among the new cardinals. Champion of religious freedom, he held out despite arrests and persecution. The group he led denounced the truth to the world from behind the iron curtain.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - On Sunday, announcing the new consistory, which will be held on 5 October, Pope Francis named a true legend of the "Church of silence" from Soviet times among the "symbolic" cardinals, Archbishop Emeritus of Kaunas Sigitas Tamkevicius. Ordained a priest in 1962 at the age of 24, he exercised his ministry as vicar in the parishes of Alytus, Lazdijai, Kudirkos Naumiestis, Prienai and Simnas.

In 1968 he entered the Society of Jesus, which at the time was illegal under Soviet law. Tamkevius was among the initiators of the petitions to protest the discriminatory restrictions of the Soviet regime against the priestly seminary of Kaunas. For this reason the Soviet authorities forbade Tamkevicius from exercising his priestly ministry and forced him to work in the factory and in a reclamation area for a year. He began the underground publication of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania in 1972 while he was vicar in the parish of Simnas.

The Chronicle recorded and made public in the West the facts of religious discrimination in Soviet Lithuania, in imitation of the Chronicle of current times which in the same years was spread by an uninterrupted relay of Soviet dissidents, who denounced human rights violations; the editors were systematically arrested and imprisoned, but someone was always ready to replace them. The reports appealed to the Declaration of Human Rights approved in Helsinki in 1975, also signed by the Soviet Union.

The Helsinki agreements were very much supported by the Holy See, and it was thanks to the Vatican mediation that the US accepted the joint signature of the Soviets. This is one of the key episodes of the so-called Vatican Ostpolitik in an attempt to build bridges beyond the Cold War wall. The dissidents focused on the principles enunciated in that Declaration, which included religious freedom, and were called "defenders of rights" (pravozaschitniki), of which Tamkevicius was the leading Catholic exponent.

The Lithuanian Catholic Church, which resisted the atheist persecutions more than others, was the true cornerstone for the community of believers in the Soviet republics, not only Catholics, but joining Orthodox religious dissidents and other confessions; it was "the ecumenism of the cross", of which the new cardinal also gave great testimony.

Tamkevius was pastor of the parish of Kybartai from 1975 to 1983, and remained chief editor of the Chronicle for 11 years until his arrest in 1983. Together with four other Lithuanian priests he founded the Catholic Committee for the defense of the rights of believers in 1978. Tamkevicius was arrested and tried, accused of alleged propaganda and anti-Soviet agitation in 1983. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and exile. He spent his prison sentence in the Perm and Mordovia labor camps. He was exiled to Siberia in 1988, and was released following the liberalization of Soviet policy brought about by Gorbachev's perestroika.

The Lithuanian Episcopal Conference appointed Tamkevicius as spiritual director at the Kaunas priestly seminary in 1989, and the following year he became rector of the seminary. He was later consecrated bishop and appointed auxiliary of the archbishop of Kaunas on 19 May 1991; he was appointed archbishop of Kaunas on 4 May 1996. Within the Lithuanian Bishops' Conference, he was both president (1999-2002, 2005-2008 and 2008–2014) and vice-president (2002–2005). On 11 July 2015, Pope Francis accepted his resignation as archbishop, for reasons of age. The new cardinal inspires true religious freedom even today, in times long past Soviet persecutions, but no less complex for the challenges that the Church faces in many countries of the world in the east and west.