By Gretchen Keiser

Sister Kathleen Tomlin, C.S.J., returned from the Soviet Union with vivid memories of war monuments dedicated to 22 million people who died in the country in World War II.

A former social studies teacher at St. Pius X High School, she said she gained a new understanding of the impact of the war upon the Soviet Union after seeing the monuments and the continual reminders of the suffering of that war.

“I could understand their paranoia,” she said. “I can understand why they are so protective of their borders.”

Soviet relationships with Eastern European countries and the war in Afghanistan become more understandable, she said, since the location of these countries makes them “a buffer zone of states” around the Soviet Union which protects the country’s borders from direct attack.

Sister Tomlin visited the Soviet Union for two weeks in June under an exchange sponsored by the National Council of Churches, which also brought a Russian religious delegation to the United States.

Upon returning to the United States, the American delegation was criticized in the national press and accused of not speaking out adequately on the subject of human rights and religious rights while in the Soviet Union.

Sister Tomlin, who visited the cities of Moscow. Leningrad, Kiev and Odessa, and the village of Ustinov near Odessa, said that her ability to learn specifically about the status of religious rights in the Soviet Union was limited by the language barrier. Also, she said, her group had no direct contact with two communities considered most subject to religious repression – Catholics in Lithuania and Soviet Jews.

She did attend Mass at the only Catholic Church in Leningrad and services at Russian Orthodox and Baptist churches in other cities and said that whenever the small group she was travelling with dropped in at churches, they would find people there. A Pentecost Russian Orthodox service at a monastery and seminary outside Moscow was mobbed with thousands of pilgrims who had come to receive the blessing of the Patriarch, she said.

However, a conversation with the only Catholic pastor in Leningrad – a city of over three million people – revealed that the congregation was slowly dying off. Asked whether there was a need for more Catholic churches in Leningrad, the priest said that “there aren’t as many baptisms as funerals” within the community, Sister Tomlin said.

She also witnessed an incident at the First Baptist Church in Moscow when two protestors, aware of the visiting American delegation, stood up in the balcony and dropped banners which said, in English, “This is a persecuted church:” and said that there were prisoners of religious repression. Sister Tomlin said the demonstrators were silent and that they were not wrestled to the floor, as some press reports described, but asked to sit down. Apparently the demonstrators were members of an unregistered church, one which had refused to register with the Soviet government and, consequently, did not enjoy the privileges given to registered churches.

Asked if her viewpoint on Soviet society had changed as a result of her visit, Sister Tomlin said, “I came back saying, ‘Yes, it is definitely controlled (as a society) on every level – not just religion, but in terms of education, economic power.”

However, she said that she was also making a distinction between the Russian people, whom she described as “somber, kind of serious people” with a nationalistic loyalty to Mother Russia, and the people who are truly committed to the Communist Party.

Churches and believers do not experience the liberty of their counterparts in the United States, she acknowledged. There would be no public evangelizing or link between the churches and social ministry, for example. “They don’t experience political freedoms, what we call human liberties,” she said.

However, she also said, “I think they have human rights,” citing access to food, clothing, shelter and education as basic rights. The cities were clean, free of litter and graffiti, for example, and without people obviously living on the street. Perhaps, she said, the United States “could share its insight about liberties” with the Soviet Union and the U.S.S.R. could “share its insights about rights – economic rights,” she said.