Lithuanian bishop beatified as first Soviet-era martyr

[Roseeurekacross]

au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/36153574/lithuanian-bishop-beatified-as-first-soviet-era-martyr/

 

[CaptFun]

au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/36153574/lithuanian-bishop-beatified-as-first-soviet-era-martyr/

Lithuania’s Soviet-era rulers repeatedly sent him to prisons and labour camps for standing up to the atheist regime.

Addressing the crowd, Vatican representative Cardinal Angelo Amato hailed Matulionis’s “heroism” under “ruthless dictatorships which strove to annihilate the Church.”

“Torture did not bend his will. He did not give in to hatred,” Amato said.

St. Teofilius Matulioni pray for us.

I hope the NEXT one is Bishop Cuthbert O’Gara whom Blessed Fulton Sheen called “a dry martyr” for his years of imprisonment by Red China in the early 1950s.

cpprovince.org/archives/heritage/fall94/fall94-3-1.php

During the Sino-Japanese War he became known as the “Stretcher-bearer Bishop” because he would frequently be seen carrying stretchers bearing victims of Japanese bombings. Bishop O’Gara established 13 refugee camps, two hospitals, and housed, clothed, and fed some 100,000 refugees.

In 1941 he was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese. Yuanling became a diocese in 1947, and O’Gara was installed as the first bishop of the diocese on 15 May 1947. In 1950, O’Gara was confined to Mission; and by 1951, he was put under “house arrest” by the Communists.

After a brutal imprisonment on 23 April 1953, he was released from prison; expelled from China he returned to the United States where he preached and lectured until his death on 13 May 1968.

Bishop O’Gara’s book “Surrender to Secularism” may be a quick, brief read – but borders on the prophetic per “our time”.

catholicism.org/in-china-darwinism-preceded-marxism.html

Bishop Cuthbert O’Gara … from "Surrender to Secularism"

“Now what, I ask,” wrote the bishop, “was the first lesson given to the indoctrinees? One might have supposed that this would have been some pearl of wisdom let drop by Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Such however was not the case. The very first, the fundamental, lesson given was man’s descent from the ape – Darwinism! . . . Darwinism negates God, the human soul, the after-life.

Into this vacuum Communism enters as the be-all and the end-all of the intellectual slavery it has created. In the Red prison in which I was held, the slogan, ‘Bring your mind over to us and all your troubles will end,’ was hammered into the minds of the prisoners with brutal and numbing monotony. Nothing but a groveling holocaust of the human person can satiate the lust for dominance of Peking’s Red regime.”

On May 13, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, 1968, the valiant Bishop Cuthbert O’Gara died of a heart attack in his monastery of Saint Michael, Union City, New Jersey.

 

[Roseeurekacross]

And news from the Phillipines today, the Catholic Priest was seen alive.

au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/36162436/abducted-priest-seen-alive-as-islamists-hold-out-in-philippines/

 

[GEddie]

In the 75 years that the CCCP held sway and the 25 years since then, I’m surprised it has been so long to recognize martyrdom from that time.

ICXC NIKA

 

[AnastasiaRomano]

In the 75 years that the CCCP held sway and the 25 years since then, I’m surprised it has been so long to recognize martyrdom from that time.

ICXC NIKA

This, exactly. There were so many martyrs – both priests and bishops along with ordinary believers.

 

[cthulhubryan]

In the 75 years that the CCCP held sway and the 25 years since then, I’m surprised it has been so long to recognize martyrdom from that time.

ICXC NIKA

True, it was a very long time for evil to flourish over half a continent.