Der Staat und die katholische Kirche in Litauen seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges (review)

This law dissertation at the University of Marburg deals with the relations between the Catholic Church and the State since the Soviet occupation of 1940. After a detailed introduction on church and state at the time of Lithuania's independence, the destruction of the church as an institution and the physical liquidation of the clergy through Stalin's religious policy are set forth in detail. The juridical aspects and the hostile Soviet church law take up much space.

From the Soviet point of view, it was a question of the fastest possible and unlimited extension of the atheistic policy of destruction to the states and territories occupied since 1939. For this reason the ideological basis, the principles of the Soviet religious policy in general, the laws and decrees, and their translation into reality are treated in detail. Unfortunately, the work of bringing out adequately the specific situation in Lithuania in comparison with other regions of the Soviet Union is missing. The reader gains the impression that the persecution and annihilation of the Church were exceptionally extensive in Lithuania; actually in few regions of the Soviet Union could the Church preserve as much strength and spirit of resistance as in Lithuania. The reasons for that await a detailed investigation.

From the time of "perestroika" the episcopate and clergy stood without reservation behind the independence movement, which had been prepared by a widespread movement of dissidents within the Church. The last part deals with the legal restoration of church-state relations, property rights, and educational policy since 1991, which tore open painful wounds in society. The Lithuanian religious law of 1995 could not manage to come to treat all religious denominations as equal before the law and was to make the further penetration of foreign religious communities more difficult.

This book is a compilation of the research and journalism in the German language without sufficiently evaluating it critically; Russian, English, and Lithuanian sources and accounts are not taken into consideration. The possibilities for a comparative examination are hardly exploited.