Sister Ona Mikaila and George P. Matysek, Jr.
Remembering Father Casimir Pugevicius: A Champion for Lithuanias Cause
Sr. Ona Mikaila is a writer and editor of Bendradarbis and belongs to the order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a Lithuanian order in Putnam, Connecticut. George P. Matysek, Jr. is review staff correspondent with The Catholic Review, Baltimore, Maryland. The article appeared in the Volume 64, No. 37, Thursday, December 23, 1999 issue. Thank you to Edward Baranauskas, who submitted it to BRIDGES.
|
On March 4, 2000, the feast of his patron St. Casimir, Father Pugevičius' funeral Mass was celebrated at St. Alphonsus Church in Baltimore, Maryland. He had been baptized in this church nearly 72 years ago, soon after his birthday on April 29, 1928. His parents had belonged to this parish after they immigrated to the United States from Lithuania before World War I. Proud of being a Lithuanian-American, Casimir Pugevičius took pains to learn Lithuanian so that he could speak it as fluently as English.
Many friends came to pay their last respects to a man and a priest they knew as "Father Cas". Four bishops concelebrated the funeral Mass, with the Archbishop of Baltimore, William Cardinal Keeler as main celebrant. Nearly 100 priests and seminarians were present. After Mass, the Lithuanians in the congregation sang a traditional Easter song, Linksma diena mums nušvito /A joyful day has dawned/: this was at Father Casimir's own request to express his faith and hope in the Resurrection.
|
His life had been an interesting and active one. After completing his studies at Catholic University and St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, he was ordained a priest in 1953. He then served as assistant pastor in several Baltimore parishes. In the early sixties, he became interested in communications: his goal was to give new life to Catholic broadcasting. He studied radio, television and filmmaking at the Baltimore Community College and the University of New York. He served as director of radio and television broadcasting for the archdiocese of Baltimore from 1965-74; directed the archdiocesan Bureau of [Media] Information from 1967-70; and was president of the Catholic Broadcasters Association in 1970-72. He also founded the Maryland Citizens' Coalition for Cable Communications.
|
In 1973, he was persuaded by a group of Lithuanian-American leaders to head the newly formed Lithuanian-American Catholic Services to help Lithuanian parishes in their struggle to survive.
After making an information-gathering tour of the Lithuanian Parishes in the U.S., Father Pugevičius left his native Baltimore and settled in Brooklyn, New York. On March 1, 1976 he set up his headquarters in a renovated garage at the back of the Lithuanian Franciscan Monastery and Center in Brooklyn. He also took on the duties of leadership of the relief organization Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid.
To these projects Father Pugevičius brought his enthusiasm for all things Lithuanian and his experience in communications. Along with helping Lithuanian parishes, he saw a need to inform the American hierarchy and the general public about the Soviet repression of religious freedom in Lithuania.
|
At the Brooklyn Center, with the help of his assistants Marion and Andrew Skabeikis, Gintė Damušytė and others and using newly installed computers, he translated the underground publication, Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania into English (from 1972 to 81) issue by issue, as it was smuggled out of the country to the West. Fr. Pugevičius published 81 issues in booklet form and distributed them widely to the American Bishops, to members of Congress, delegates to the United Nations, and other leaders. Eventually, the Lithuanian Information Center was formed and used as a liaison with various news distribution agencies and human rights organizations.
The Services Center produced over 1,000 radio and TV programs about the plight of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. Among his works were film documentaries about the Chapel of Our Lady of Šiluva at the National Shrine in Washington; a docudrama of the Soviet trial of Fr. Šeškevicius in Lithuania; and several programs on Lithuanian religious dissidents and martyrs, especially those sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. The best known of these dissidents was Nijolė Sadūnaitė, who was tried and sentenced to Siberia in 1975. Fr. Pugevičius had a booklet about her published in English and distributed thousands of copies to the American public. He also had her memoirs translated and published in book form as A Radiance in the Gulag (Manassas, VA: Trinity Communications, 1987).
|
After 1989, Fr. Pugevičius and his Center invited several famous dissidents who had served time in Siberia. These were Fr. Alfonsas Svarinskas, Nijolė Sadūnaitė, and the editor of the Chronicle, Fr. Sigitas Tamkevičius (now Archbishop of Kaunas), to come to the United States and make a speaking tour of Lithuanian parishes and organizations. These people were warmly welcomed by all the Lithuanian-American communities they visited and also received extensive coverage by both the Lithuanian and the American news media.
By 1990, Religious Aid had gathered and distributed over one million dollars in aid for the Catholic Church in Lithuania. After twenty years of untiring and very productive labors, Father Pugevičius retired from his duties at the Brooklyn Center and returned to Baltimore. He felt that he might still be useful and decided to go to Lithuania after the grateful Lithuanian hierarchy had invited him. Fr. Pugevičius went to help out at a new parish in Vilnius named after Blessed George Matulaitis. He was overjoyed to come back to pastoral work. His failing health, however, prompted a return to Baltimore. In the summer of 1998, walking on crutches, he attended the Lithuanian priests' retreat in Putnam, CT, which he had helped organize in 1976.
His steadily deteriorating condition did not stop him from, officiating at his own brother's funeral in 1999. This brother was disabled and Father Casimir always spoke of him with great warmth and affection.
As we remember Father Casimir Pugevičius for his unfailing optimism, his infectious enthusiasm, his generosity and love of people that made him an unforgettable friend, we also call to mind his faithfulness as a priest who proclaimed the Word at all times.
Sr. Ona Mikaila
Lithuania Honors Father Casimir Pugevičius
They may have looked like innocent tourists visiting their Lithuanian families back in the dominated that small, central European nation. In reality, they were "secret agents" from the Catholic Church in America who risked imprisonment by smuggling religious books, catechisms and religious articles to a people starved for spiritual nourishment.
And [who were] those 1,000 Lithuanian women who appeared to be little more than teachers and other workers to their neighbors and the ever present KGB? They were underground nuns who smuggled bits of paper out of Lithuania with a Jesuit priest in pieces of candy or tubes of toothpaste, outlining human rights abuses and church persecution for publication in the west.
Father Casimir Pugevičius, a Baltimore priest who grew up in the Lithuanian parish of St Alphonsus in Baltimore, was the man who helped coordinate both of the high-risk cloak and dagger operations when he headed the New York-based Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid for 17 years beginning in 1976.
In honor of his efforts to defend human rights and restore Lithuanian independence, Father Pugevičius was-awarded the Order of the Grand Duke Gediminas one of the highest honors of the Lithuanian nation during a Dec. 17 ceremony at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Ambassador Stasys Sakalauskas, acting on behalf of President Valdas Adamkus, draped the medal around Father Pugevičius neck
"Our job was to process the information smuggled out about the church and human rights," remembered Father Pugevičius, now in residence at St Vincent de Paul in Baltimore. "They would take the papers to Moscow and get them to foreign correspondents who would send them to us. Then we published what they wrote for the Vatican."
Out of those tiny slips of paper and photographs of Lithuanian resistance documents, Father Pugevičius was able to publish more than 70 volumes of the "Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania". The booklets outlined how the Communists persecuted citizens who attended Mass ridiculing their children in school or taking away their jobs. They were often read over the radio airwaves on Voice of America.
"It was a subtle kind of oppression, but it was very real oppression," said Father Pugevičius. "The Communists wanted to fool the west that they weren't persecuting the church. We showed what was really going on."
Although he was not involved in actually going to Lithuania to smuggle information in and out of the country, Father Pugevičius himself was very much at risk for his involvement in the movement. When fanatically committed Communists were quietly assassinating opponents, Father Pugevičius was one of those most in danger. In fact, the priest decided not to visit the Holy Land out of fear that he would be tracked down and "stuck with a poisoned needle on the end of an umbrella".
"I was on their list of bad guys," Father Pugevičius said.
After Communism finally crumbled and Lithuania won its independence in 1991, Father Pugevičius served as a parish priest for several years at St. George Matulaitis in Vilnius.
There, he helped compile and publish a hymnal of traditional and contemporary Lithuanian hymns that is now used all over the country.
"One of the biggest problems now is that they just got out from under Communism and theyre suddenly smacked in the face with western values that arent all the greatest in the world," Father Pugevičius said, noting that materialism, drug use, and sexual permissiveness seem on the rise in Lithuania. "The church does good work fighting that."
The 71 year-old priest, who returned to Baltimore to battle a malignant brain tumor, said he was honored to be recognized by Lithuania for his work.
"Its a humbling experience to meet people who had been through an era of persecution," he said. "It felt like working with people who came out of the catacombs. They were people who were willing to pay the price for their faith."
George P. Matysek, Jr.
Illustrations above are from the Chronicle. They were used in the 1972-1973 volume, which contained Nrs. 1 to 7. Paulius Jurkus was the illustrator.