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 on March 31 in Vilnius. 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 Sister Sadunaite in 2018 for her defense of democracy and human rights. She was the first woman to receive the award.
In 1975, Sister Sadunaite (pronounced sah-DOO-nay-teh) was arrested by K.G.B. 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, Sister 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 Hitler and 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, Sister 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 American embassy in Moscow, and she joined a table with President Reagan and the first lady, Nancy Reagan; Mr. Reagan had been attending summit meetings with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
Undaunted by persecution and imprisonment, Sister 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, a part of Vilnius.
Despite having been trained as a nurse, after her release from prison Sister Sadunaite could find work only as a charwoman under Soviet rule.
While some dissidents would become more conciliatory toward Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sister Sadunaite remained steadfastly opposed to the Russian government. But, remarkably, she never expressed bitterness toward her captors or her tormentors. Rather, she repeatedly said that the church’s role in bringing justice was not only to pray for the oppressed, but also to pray that the oppressors themselves would be courageous enough to ask for forgiveness.
“Even if an evil person were in trouble,” she wrote from prison, “I would share my last morsel of bread with him.”
After she was arrested in 1975, K.G.B. officers demanded that she divulge the names of the editors of her underground Catholic newspaper.
She refused. Instead, she told the authorities that they were culpable for any criticism of the government because the editorials were largely in response to the state’s official policy of persecution and anti-religious propaganda.
Sister Sadunaite often said that her activism was inspired in part by the experience of Pope John Paul II, a native of Poland whose resistance to atheism, she said, helped accelerate the collapse of European communism.
“The pope was someone who had escaped from the same system that was oppressing us,” she told The Atlantic.
“He said that people who fight and die for their country are not only martyrs but may be holy,” she said. “We took that to mean that the pope understood what we were doing, and that we should do whatever it took to free our land. He said it again and again. He made me want to be strong and courageous, too, even when I was afraid.”