Nun who opposed Soviet rule, dies at 85
Nijole Sadunaite, a fearless but forgiving Roman Catholic nun and anti-Soviet Lithuanian nationalist who was inspired by Pope John Paul II and publicly hailed by President Ronald Reagan, died March 31 in Vilnius, Lithuania. She was 85.
Her death was confirmed by Sister Gerarda Elena Suliauskaite, laureate of the Freedom Prize of the Republic of Lithuania, which was also given to Sadunaite in 2018 for her defense of democracy and human rights. She was the first woman to receive the award.
In 1975, Sadunaite (pronounced sah-DOO-nay-teh) was arrested by KGB agents who had stormed an apartment where she was writing an underground newspaper, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, which documented abuses against Christians in the Baltic state.
“I had typed six pages when I was caught, so I effectively got one year for every page,” she told The Atlantic in 1994.
She was incarcerated for six years, most of which she spent in prison and some of which she spent in a mental institution and in exile in a Siberian penal colony.
For most of the 1980s, Sadunaite largely remained out of public view, but she was instrumental in organizing a rally in 1987 that galvanized the movement for Lithuanian independence. Hundreds of Lithuanians thundered the patriotic anthem of national independence, which had been banned by the 1940 nonaggression pact between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, a deal that, in effect, condoned the Soviet seizure of Lithuania.
The year of the rally, the manuscript of a memoir she had secretly taken to Moscow six years earlier and smuggled out of the Soviet Union was published in the United States. Titled “A Radiance in the Gulag,” it was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times as “a richly textured narrative of faith in action against overwhelming odds.”
That same year, Sadunaite emerged from hiding to lead a demonstration that vitalized the movement for independence. In 1988, she and other dissidents were invited to lunch at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and she joined a table with Reagan and the first lady, Nancy Reagan; the president had been attending summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Undaunted by persecution and imprisonment, Sadunaite remained a spirited voice for religious freedom and for national independence from the officially atheistic Soviet Union. Lithuania unilaterally declared independence in 1990.
Felicija Nijole Sadunaite was born on July 22, 1938, in Kaunas, a city in central Lithuania, to Veronika Rimkute-Saduniene and Jonas Sadunas, who was an agronomist and teacher.
Her very religious Roman Catholic family lived in constant fear of being deported to a Siberian labor camp for practicing their religion. In her memoir, she wrote: “Whenever we heard automobile motors roaring early in the morning, we would all run out into the grain fields to hide, lest they take us off to Siberia. This is how most Lithuanians lived, as if on the rim of a volcano.”
In 1956, she was so moved by her friend’s confirmation (she had been confirmed when she was 7) that she joined a clandestine convent and, until her death, served in the monastery of the Congregation of the Maids of the Most Holy Virgin Mary, in Pavilny, part of Vilnius.
Despite having been trained as a nurse, after her release from prison, Sadunaite could find work only as a cleaning woman under Soviet rule.
While some dissidents would become more conciliatory toward Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sadunaite remained steadfastly opposed to the Russian government. But, remarkably, she never expressed bitterness toward her captors or her tormentors. Rather, she repeatedly said the church’s role in bringing justice was not only to pray for the oppressed but also to pray that the oppressors would be courageous enough to ask for forgiveness.