By Gretchen Keiser

April 11, 1945 isn’t a familiar date to American Catholics. It’s the day when the entire hierarchy of the Ukrainian Catholic Church was arrested, along with hundreds of clergy and lay leaders, by the Soviet police force which proceeded today’s KGB.

The date climaxed persecution of the Church, which had numbered five million members. Today, from information gathered from dissidents within the Soviet Union and those who have been exiled, and from scholars and travelers, only a small underground Church exists.

“Why don’t we remember April 11, 1945, once in awhile?” asked Sister Ann Gillen during an interview last week. “There is a virtue to remembering, if it’s related to a thirst for justice. I think the Jewish people have taught us this.”

Sister Gillen, a Sister of the Holy Child, is executive director of the National Interreliguous Task Force on Soviet Jewry and visited Atlanta for a conference on the Helsinki Treaty and Eastern Europe. The Task Force was formed in 1972 and sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice. Over the eight years, its mission and scope have expanded, Sister Gillen said. “We have gradually broadened our whole focus to include not only Jews, but also Christians, not only the Soviet Union, but also Eastern Europe.”

The organization’s concern is for the basic rights of believers, individuals and groups, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Those rights, suppressed or completely denied, include the right to worship, the right to educate children in the faith, the right diversity of religious traditions, and the right to evangelize. Since the task force began, it has been committed to the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel.

When Sister Gillen talks about these rights, however, they tend to spill out in anecdotes about towns or people. Like the April 11 date, she begins the story of Klaipeda, a community in Lithuania, where people labored to build a church, using their own funds. “When they got to the point of having the altar installed, the state took it away and made it a concert hall,” she said.

On a 1978 trip to the Soviet Union, her second, Sister Gillen visited 30 families in five cities. One was a man attempting to teach something of the Jewish faith and heritage. His only material was a small book on Judaism printed more than 10 years ago by the American Jewish Committee.

Yet, when she talks, Sister Gillen, who had been a dean of students at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania before her task force work, exudes a kind of urgent hope. “The thing that has made me a confirmed optimist,” she says, “is I’ve learned we can change the course of history.”

The methods for change, which radiate from the task force’s Chicago office, are prayer and publicity and political pressure.

“We believe in the power of prayer,” she said. “The power of prayer can go through prison walls and sometimes break down prison walls.” She welcomes inquiries from prayer groups who would like names of individuals who may be imprisoned, seeking to leave the Soviet Union, or who simply have disappeared from public view. She sees the powers of prayer groups praying for these people as enormous.

Through publicity about their cause, which can be channeled back into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, “people are encouraged to know there are groups working for them,” she said.

Political pressure is exerted through letters written directly to individuals, or to Soviet leaders on behalf of those individuals.

Her faith in these efforts is best expressed through the words of a Soviet Jew, Vladimir Slepak. “He said, ‘It’s a miracle that anybody leaves the Soviet Union. And it’s a further miracle that 100,000 (by 1974) could leave…We owe it all to you in the West,’” she said. In the years since 1974, the number able to leave the Soviet Union is now 250,000, Sister Gillen said.

She envisions Catholic churches and other Christian churches embracing the methods pioneered in the Jewish community: for example, a church here adopting a couple, or an individual or a church there, as synagogues in the United States have done, and supporting those who aren’t free with the freedoms available here.

“We run the risk of losing our freedom if we don’t use them,” she said.