For the past seven years the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania has recorded numerous instances of how Lithuania's faithful ire being oppressed and of how our own countrymen — officials, party members, teachers, sometimes even clergymen — are involved in a sinister plan to render our nation godless by acting as gravediggers to bury our Church and Country. There are some, however, who claim that the Chronicle's facts could mislead the reader, especially one living far away from our homeland, into thinking that the worst persecutors of the Lithuanian Catholics are Lithuanian officials, teachers, and others like them. Similarly, Soviet propaganda is trying to convince Lithuanian and world opinion that there is no religious persecution in Lithuania, only occasional and isolated cases of errors committed by individual teachers and officials!
The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania tries to be a camera which records the facts as accurately as is humanly possible under Soviet conditions and is convinced that an alert reader will come to the following conclusion: there would be no traitors if there were no one to reward the betrayors.
To find the beginning of the misfortunes which have befallen the Catholic Church of Lithuania, it is necessary to go back to August 23,1939, when Stalin and Hitler divided their spheres of influence and Lithuania was sold to Soviet Russia. As long as Lithuania remains occupied, as long as the faithful have no freedom, there will always be some, who, for a bowl of Essau's lentil soup, will aid the oppressor in persecuting their brothers. The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, therefore, is in full solidarity with the forty-five Baits who have petitioned the United Nations and the signatory nations of the Helsinki Final Act to condemn the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and demand that its ramifications be nullified.
