On Sunday, January 31, 2010, Sister M. John
Vianney Vranak, SS.C.M. presented a film to the society called “Interrupted
Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism” at St. Matthew Slovak
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wilkes-Barre. The people who attended said it was
a sobering experience and the film is a solemn
reminder that we should always appreciate and be thankful for the freedom we
have here in the United States; and hope our freedoms last forever.
This is a story which most Americans have never heard. The general population has frequently heard about the Holocaust, which of course, was an atrocity, but they have never been informed of what happened to more than one hundred MILLION Christians who lived under atheistic Communism.
We, the descendents of immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe, should be informed about what happened in our ancestral land. Had our parents and/or grandparents not risked their ocean voyage, poverty, and hardship, we might have been among those caught in the throes of an unreasonable government.
The documentary “Interrupted Lives,” which was recently released to the public by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is the result of several years of research by two Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, Kansas, Sister Margaret Nacke and Sister Mary Savoie. Both Sisters, former College Professors, spent ten summers after the fall of Communism, assisting the Sisters in Romania as they tried to restore their lives in community.
Although these American Sisters did not understand Romanian, they began to piece together some of the experiences the Romanian Sisters were sharing with each other. They realized that what the Sisters had experienced between 1950 and 1989 had to be made known.
Sisters Mary and Margaret came to understand that religious in other countries had had similar experiences during the Communist regime. In some cases, what had happened to religious in other countries was even worse.
They returned to the States with determination to do something about it. The result is an hour-long documentary which, hopefully, will reveal the faith, courage, and trust in Divine Providence which sustained thousands of religious women in the second half of the twentieth century.
From the cover of the documentary case we read:
They were Greek and Roman Catholic Sisters of Eastern and Central Europe. At the end of World War II, Stalin seized control of their countries, imposing a forty-year reign of atheistic rule, suppressing religious practice and disrupting the Sisters’ individual and community lives.
“Interrupted Lives” explores the experiences of these Sisters through interviews with survivors as well as with the “Secret Sisters” who joined religious life during this time. They lived out their vocations in the underground until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Many of these Sisters endured imprisonment, forced farm and factory labor, deportation, exile to Siberia, expulsion from their convents and seizure of their schools and hospitals.
Filmed on location in Slovakia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary, and the United States, “Interrupted Lives” is a powerful testimony to the faith, courage, and endurance of these women and all those who still today undergo persecution for political or religious beliefs.
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