Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

A Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, June 20, 1965

With an 11 a.m. Mass celebrated at the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Cathedral, the “Lithuanian Committee for the Liberation of the Baltic Countries” held a public demonstration to express their sorrow and rejection of communist imperialism on the 25^th anniversary of the pact between Hitler and Stalin that caused the occupation of the Baltic countries. “We hope,” they state, “that the shameful treaties of Yalta and Potsdam be repudiated, as they caused nine European nations with 100 million inhabitants to be subjugated by communism.”

Lithuanian refugees have been holding many demonstrations to call the attention of free peoples to the urgency of resolving their situation. “The Lithuanian problem,” said one of their leaders, Msgr. Pio Ragazinskas, “is worldwide because it represents a disgrace that affects a part of the world and also threatens the other part.”

On the suggestion of Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the official speaker of the III Lithuanian Conference of Latin America, this assembly telegraphed the Pope, the UN, [President] Johnson and [Brazil’s] President Castelo Branco asking them to intervene in order to immediately liberate Lithuania from the “monstrous yoke of Soviet communism.”

Here is the full text of the telegram sent to His Holiness:

“The III Lithuanian Conference of Latin America, assembled at Sao Paulo and gathering Lithuanians from all free countries, heeding a suggestion by the illustrious Brazilian thinker, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, author of The Freedom of the Church in the Communist State, implore [the] compassion of the August Vicar of Christ on our fellow countrymen imprisoned [and] exiled in Siberia, [and] ask the very high-level intervention of Your Holiness with the UN to enable the immediate liberation of Lithuania from the monstrous Soviet communist yoke according to the principle of people’s self-determination.”

In a vehement appeal to the free world, Msgr. Jonas Balkunas, Funding President of the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania, states: “Today, after 25 years of occupation Lithuania has only 40,000 communists, that is, 1.4% of its population. Russia has exiled more than 600,000 Lithuanians to Siberia. The bloody persecution against the Church continues. The nation’s annihilation proceeds inexorably. Morally, however, Lithuania is not subjugated. Her resistance is active, through secret movements. And yet she is abandoned to her own fate. In a few more years she may have been forgotten. Time is of the essence. The Americas and the Free World must fly to her help.”

It seems incredible that the West hardly notices that nine countries of civilized Europe have thus been subjected to communist totalitarianism.  Even more incredible is the fact that many preachers of self-determination for African tribes remain completely silent about this issue. This is, however, the attitude that “leftist Catholics” have taken.