#428 "When The Sickle Swings" A New Book By Kristen Theriault; Stories Of Faith and Survival In The Face Of Communist Oppression

My father still alive . He's a . He's an old World War II vet . My grandmother escaped Poland between World War I and World War II . It's amazing John Paul II grew up and the Nazis and then the Communists came in . It's amazing the darkness that could come into the world if we don't remember our stories , if we don't remember our history .

Well , this book tells stories of Catholics who went underground , who survived communist oppression in all different ways . Bishop Athanasius Schneider writes . This book highlights stories of Catholics like my parents , who resisted the false promises of Marxism and held onto their ancestral faith despite the dangers in doing so .

Author Philip Campbell adds the experiences chronicled in when the sickle swings are a stark reminder of the darkness men are capable of when society rejects God . Well , buckle up and get ready for today's episode . I'm excited and grateful to be with editor and author Kristin Therialt . Is it Therialt now ?

Kristin began this project as an undergraduate at St Anselm College , where she earned a BA in history and Russian area studies . She trained in oral history and began researching the experience of Catholics who survived , escaped or resisted communist regimes .

She currently works at Sophia Institute Press as a media spokesman and has been featured on a wide variety of media platforms , and she is also the editor of the Catholic Exchange , kristin , welcome .

We , as part of our honeymoon , went to Rome , so it was really amazing to see all of the Catholic sites there . Did the seven churches pilgrimage all in one day the Santa Scala and all of these just incredible relics . So still processing all of that into the end of the year .

I was so beautiful to see Kristin when I saw those fathers , the way they doted after their children , the way they respected their wives . You could just see this beautiful flow between them and this comes from this beautiful faith background of ours and it's so important .

And when I looked at them I realized this battle that we're fighting today , which your book is going to address , is so important and it gives me that hope and it gives me the reason .

I have seven grandchildren now and six of them are girls and I think you know what you know they're not going to steal those children's innocence on my watch , if I can do anything about it . So I'm excited to be with you . The other reason is my father is still alive today . So he's a .

He's an old World War two vet and he fought against this Marxist communists right the Nazis are . My grandmother is from pole and his mother . She fled between World War one and World War two and and she used to tell stories of the tyrants and the dictators right and what they do to people .

She lived right outside of Krakow , where John Paul II was from , and , and because of the John Paul to renewal center that I'm part of , I've studied John Paul's background and and of course he . He was born when Poland was free for a little window , but then the Nazis window . Yes , right , yeah , and .

And then the communists came in , and so you know it's amazing , he lost a lot of friends , a lot of Jewish friends there , catholic friends there , seminarians there and and , and I and I think about All those Huxley that said you know that the greatest lesson that history has to teach us is that mankind does not learn much from the lessons of history .

And it seems like here we go again , so I'm gonna throw this out to you . But I'm gonna just say you know , what did you learn in the process of of writing this book ? And I'm sure there's some crossover to you know what's got you interested , and was it anything to do with what's going on today , or is this just something that you know you ?

You began studying this already as an undergrad .

So maybe a sequel is down the line , but this is essentially a collection of Narrativized oral histories . So , like I mentioned , I took down the stories of people who were eye witnesses to these atrocities and survived and came out on the other side to tell the tale . And I've always been drawn to individual stories .

You know I'm a historian by training and you can get lost in the statistics and the dates and the trends and all of these more macro level categories of studying the past .

But Biography and personal stories , memoir diaries , those are the things that always resonated the most with me , and this is kind of the principle behind saints as well , that these individual stories of saints are people that we can relate to as human beings and as Normal , ordinary people who just answered God's call in this extraordinary way .

So I wanted to take down these stories , especially because someone who studies the 20th century . Much of the primary sources actually Consist in these memories . So Memory studies is a really interesting field because oftentimes the way people remember something is different than how they would have Narrativized it when it actually happened .

But there is an absence of a lot of documentary evidence for some of these periods . Of course there will always be some , but when you are fleeing Hungary as a child and you know crawling under barbed wire in through swamps , you don't exactly have time to write that down .

So these memory banks are just this untapped source of incredible stories that I'm really grateful that the people that I spoke to shared with me . I Focus on four countries , and again that's due to the availability of these interviews .

So those are Cuba , czechoslovakia and then Hungary and Romania , and despite their geographic and temporal disparities , the stories that emerge from these countries are very similar in very Kind of moving ways , as the faith is universal we know the word Catholic means universal so too was their response and resilience under these regimes , and Also we can get into this

in a bit more detail later but the way the communist regimes and all of these locations targeted Catholics took different forms but had this central sort of demonic attitude towards the church that I thought was very interesting and powerful , and , as you've related this to the current era that we are now in , I think is an attitude that has continued .

Obviously there are still communist governments and Catholics here in the West . We can certainly relate to Suffering some somewhat of a white murderdom on a day-to-day basis , where you lose opportunities and are sort of ostracized for your faith .

I mean , you know , these people knew right away that in order to really gain control of apop because she had to do two things right , in essence , you had to , you know , as the oppressor , oppressed model , but you had to get rid of the church , you had to get rid of God and then break down marriage in the family , and and if you could do that , if you

can do those two things , it's much easier to control the population . And , and there's no doubt that we're seeing those things happen today . So , yeah , so those stories that you're gonna tell us about right now are at least a couple of them .

I , you know these are the same stories that we're gonna be living through right now , and we are living through right now , we see this right now . So so this is important . I'm excited because I want to . I want to take your stories and I want to bring those out and use them for examples to people in presentations , because this just happened , kristen .

This isn't , like you know , again , my father's alive today you know , it's not like . You know , this is a lost history is amazing , isn't it how these history ? You know what do they say . You know it doesn't repeat itself , but it certainly rhymes , oh .

So this , these are events that are in the living consciousness , they're in living memory and People have just sort of swept it under the rug , and this is why I was drawn to this field to begin with , because these are not martyrs or Catholics that you hear about often .

You , oh , I think we know sometimes more about Catholics in the Middle Ages than we do about those With just within just the last century .

So these testimonies , I mean the Soviet Union itself only fell 30 years ago , and I was born into a post-communist world , but most people and most listeners and readers can probably remember a few years at least when this was still one of the predominant Ideologies on the face of the earth , and I'm glad that you brought up that it's not primarily an economic or

a political problem , because that's a point that I make again and again in the book that Oftentimes people will dismiss the threats of a Marxist or communist or even socialist society as Something that is purely a materialistic , oposturiori problem that can be worked out in the political or economic fields .

But many of the stories in the book really illustrate quite the contrary .

That this Religious element to it , this sort of pseudo religious element that Communism had where the state subsumed the place of God , and Really it was replete with an entire just the surgical calendar of its own sorts , rituals of its own holidays , and taking that place of religion in the public sphere . And there's- .

This was happening and basically what would happen is the Communist teachers because in order to have any sort of position in society , you had to join the Communist Party , be loyal to a certain degree they would line up all the kids and tell them close your eyes , stick out your hand and ask God for a piece of candy .

And so , confused by this , they would do what they were told and of course , nothing would happen and the minutes would tick by and then the teachers would say , okay , now ask Fidel for a piece of candy .

And , lo and behold , they went around and gave everybody a piece of candy , cementing early on , with this onslaught of propaganda , that God is just a fantasy , god is dead in this cosmology of communism , and Fidel Castro is the one to provide for your needs and to provide hope for the future .

So if they were purely materialistic , why would they go to these lengths to basically thank God in the minds of their people .

There's a presentation that I do called Stolen Innocence , and it really talks about the age of reason for children , and so they look up to authority , they look up to their teachers , they look up to those right .

It's natural within most of us , and for them to do something like you just described that's really can undermine those belief in God and then start to separate parents from the children right Now . I know your parents probably told you this , but let me show you this right you can see how they can come in and undermine things .

So this was really playing the long game , trying to develop the next generation to be compliant and true believers in the communist state . And communism , interestingly , does not really work . It's not very tenable without a certain degree of buy-in from the populace . So it was selling something that was very attractive and seductive .

If you took them at their word , you know they were going to form utopia here on earth , which as Catholics we know is impossible because we can't have heaven on earth . They were going to just create this wonderland of progress and equality and democracy , and so even adults .

You know this propaganda was something that really took a lot of mental alacrity and strength to and really sometimes , and perhaps more importantly , a founding in a religion or an objective set of truths to resist .

Because when you hear something day after day , we all like to think that we would have easily resisted , but it becomes kind of just like the water torture that you're worn down over time .

So it reminds me of one story from a family from Romania that I spoke with , where Ceausescu , who was the dictator there up until the end of communism in that country , would have his three to four hour rants on TV and monopolize the airwaves every day and citizens were expected to listen to this and to tune in and they would just make this small but powerful

act of resistance by not listening to him , either praying the rosary or doing something else during that time , and kind of just making fun of him and taking his power away and that way .

And so when compared to some of the larger events , such as the huge protests in Czechoslovakia that I also cover , it can seem like a small act of resistance , but ultimately , when you think about it , the first victory in the first frontier is in your own mind and your own soul .

You'd not succumb to this propaganda , to these lies , to the threat and kind of temptation to collaborate . So this was a multi front war that really required a lot of effort on a daily basis just to keep a baseline of faith and freedom .

They never tell you that , well , we're all going to look like you know , we're all going to dress in drab , gray or green , we're all going to have small apartments and we're all going to eat kind of the same bland food . They can't be telling us this stuff , right , and because that's what always happens and that's who it is right .

So the hope and change becomes a lack of hope with this change . So yeah , so I would love to hear a story or two about that . I mean , you know , after people go through this , did you talk to anybody that was hoodwinked over this that said I kind of fell for it and then I came out ? Or were these people that hung on to their faith during this ?

But he writes of an experience that he had very early on in life when he was a child , where his family was quite involved with their local parish , and so when the monks and priests who were stationed there had to go into hiding because go into that later they were being rounded up by the communist government they there was this idea that they would be hiding

the treasures of the church within the families in order to keep them from being stolen by the communists . They did not have any at their house , but the secret police believed that this is what would have happened .

So they raided the houses of many prominent families at the parish , and he as a child has a memory of the Czechoslovak secret police raiding the family house , ripping books off the shelves and just going through all of their belongings , yelling and accusing them of all these things and just this hatred of the church that came through , he was too little to really

know what was going on , and so his family laughed that he actually went up to one of the soldiers and tried to offer him a book , and of course that was kind of a scare tactic and they would come to the neighborhoods to intimidate families . So in Russia these were called the Black Marias and in . Czechoslovakia .

The cars were these very specific cars called the Tatraplanes , and that was like the angel of death visiting the neighborhood . So from a very early age he associated the state and their goons with hatred of the church , false ideology , fear and intimidation , and so he never trusted them .

Based on that experience , similar story from Cuba , a gentleman named Arturo that I interviewed . He remembers that he was in the military during the time of Castro's coup and he pretty quickly caught on and he credits that to when he was a child he used to read a lot of Western media .

So his neighbor received copies of Reader's Digest and he would read that and first of all he would read factual accounts of what was going on in communist countries in Eastern Europe , so like Cardinal Mincente in his 50s , and the starvation and privation of the people , and so he pretty much had the number of communism .

He understood what it was all about and that it was a false promise from his reading . And also he said he really just learned critical thinking skills from that reading . So by the time Castro's revolution came about he figured it out pretty quickly .

And so , yeah , it's a combination of keeping the faith and just having this sort of sense of speed , the sense of the faith that you can sense when a bad actor is coming in with false promises , and just praying to the Holy Spirit for that discernment .

is what's coming to the United States . People that I know from Cuba , that had escaped communism and that are here . They have more of a sense that this could be coming again . Did you run into people like that ?

There are other books that delve into that and its application is a lot more deeply .

But one analysis that I came away with was actually the development of a thesis that was forwarded in a really good book called Ordinary Men , which is about the Nazi regime , so not about communism , but kind of gets at the core of human nature when acting under these extreme circumstances .

And the author's thesis is that basically , when you were given the opportunity to turn into an animal and commit murder , and because he profiled Nazis , then you will take it in sort of this dark evaluation of human nature .

He studied men who had been in sort of boring jobs either accountants , teachers , very run-of-the-mill things like that and then they joined the SS and they were placed on the Eastern Front and ended up within the space of several months committing these atrocities where they shot Jews face to face and committed mass murder in a very personal , immediate way , not in

the sort of distance of the death camps , and I sort of I took his findings and just thought of that from the Catholic perspective , in that this is what happens when you don't have an objective morality . This isn't necessarily human nature .

It is the logical conclusion of fallen human nature that succumbs to the devil's traps , but this without a solid grounding in objective truths , as taught by the faith , it's easy to become the enemy , so to speak , or to do unspeakable things that you wouldn't have ever done in any other circumstance .

So it's very important to cultivate the faith , and the people I interviewed went to great lengths to keep up a sacramental life as well during these persecutions , knowing the importance again of winning the victory within one's own soul first and foremost .

Right , we all have to stand up and do this , you know , because if we don't , we lose our own hearts . You know , this is not . We don't just lose our country to a system , we lose our own heart to eternal life . Right , are most of these people that you're interviewing ?

are they living in these specific countries or are they from those countries of origin and they're here in the States now and then ? And then how are they regardless ? How are they passing this faith down to the next generation ? And you know , have you got into that ? I mean , you know , because there's got to be a frustration there .

I know there's a frustration for me and I didn't fight , you know , physically , against the communists , but I mean I can imagine growing up in a communist country and trying to get this down to my grandchildren and then they're rejecting me . You know , I just go all right ?

So just as the communists were taking over her family kind of saw the writing on the wall and got out , and she has really a harrowing story of escape . But she has settled in Miami and has .

Interestingly , I met her while I was down there to meet with Cuban expats , and a big cultural center in Miami is the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity , or also known as the Virgen del Cobre , which is one of the patron saints of Cuba and the Cuban people , and that was a very vibrant center of continued resistance to communism , because of course Cuba remains a

communist country even though the Castro brothers are dead . This is not something that's over , unfortunately , and the people who live there still suffer under this yoke , and so there is a great awareness in a very immediate sense among the Cuban diaspora .

And then one individual who is a bit different in that he did not emigrate is Mr Miklosko , who I mentioned earlier , who is from Czechoslovakia . He stayed and he is now a figure in Slovak politics . But I did ask him if he had ever considered coming to the West during , and defecting during , the communist period .

He said he never did and he considered it his duty to stay with his people and to advocate for the underground church and to see it through to the end .

And his efforts were rewarded because he was actually one of the people who spearheaded their what's called velvet revolution there , which is otherwise known as the gentle revolution , which , similarly to Poland , was the peaceful protest that turned into a collapse of communism . So there's no right or wrong response , either to escape or to stay .

They provide different blueprints for us , depending on our situations , and they each followed God's will , I truly believe , and are able to inspire the next generation from wherever they ended up . But it's really interesting to walk through that decision making process and to see the different types of courage that it took to do both .

In other words , do I feel compelled to action in one way or the other , coming from these people because they're pouring their hearts out to you ?

Number one is the ability of Catholics to get involved in political action can always be somewhat of a hair topic and sometimes , under communism especially , it was difficult to parse whether someone was persecuted for solely religious or also political reasons .

So this charge of counter-revolutionary would often be leveraged against Catholics or Vatican spy , considering that the Vatican is a sovereign state . But of course that has been near of political sort of definition but is ultimately religious at its core when you dig a little deeper .

So the power of these protests was pretty inspiring and also the Catholic action movements in Cuba and how those had begun before they engaged in guerrilla warfare against the communist state . They had really begun as these groups within high schools actually of people who were following pious the 10th invocation to restore all things in Christ in the public sphere .

So just kind of this encouragement that Catholics should be bold in the public sphere and not hide their faith . They're not kind of downplay it when they're out and about .

And then the other thing was not to take the sacraments for granted , because , as I mentioned in the book I recount so many just great lengths that people had to go to to just basic receive the basic life of the church . So in Czechoslovakia , one example is a family that would go to mass with their eyes down cast .

The parents would say don't look around , don't look the people in the eyes , because if you are taken in front of state security , you can then with a clear conscience say I don't know who else was there , I can't inform on them or I can't turn the priest in because I don't know who he was .

So just these very these , a lot of responsibilities were placed on the laity . That was really beyond anything that we have any conception of here and the , the ability to go to mass in the open for as long as we have it is something we should just keep in mind to be grateful for .

So the economic model never worked . Here , you know , I mean , too many of us were middle class in essence , right . In general , you know , the middle class was too strong and and we still had a faith in God , in the , in the , in the , in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s , right , and marriage and the family was very important to us .

And so they understood that for this to work , this model to work , because most of us wanted the American dream I , you know , I might have been a proletariat , but I wanted to be part of the bourgeois right . I wanted , I wanted to be part of that and that was the American dream . So they went .

They went , of course , to the , you know , to the , the long march you mentioned earlier , and went into the education systems , right , and now they seem to be in everything , right , they're certainly in the , in the critical theories right . So the critical race theory , the critical gender theories and all these different things Do .

Do we have to be cognizant of all of that too , as we're going along here ?

In other words , and I'm thinking people can be overwhelmed by all this , and I think it's important to get kind of get back to what we're speaking about in the beginning , without getting in the weeds here that this is an atheist model , that at the end of the day , we're throwing God out and we're breaking marriage and the family up , which people some people

will , you know , not care about today . It's amazing how it's going . But what I see , kristen and here's my final point what I see is the mental illness we're causing kids . I speak in a lot of high schools and now my team is being asked to go to grade schools .

Now we started at the university campuses and then we realized that we have to get into the high schools and then it's even too late .

There I was , I was giving a presentation about love , about John Paul's the ozzy , the body , to a group of 15 and 16 year olds and I said okay , before we come back for the next session , is there anything you want to talk about ? And they want to talk about mental illness .

And I said you know , do you realize I'm not a psychiatrist , you know it's like , but they know that I talk about prayer as one approach to anxiety and depression , right ? I'm not saying don't go to a doctor or anything , right ?

I'm just saying there's a way to approach this and they wanted to talk about that , and you know that they , the human heart , has this desire for this right , and so that's what we're attacking . We're attacking it the very root . When we're talking about Marxism , aren't we the very root of who we are ?

But it really wasn't and for the majority of human history that's not true . It's a newer movement conceived within the last two centuries .

That sort of eschews metaphysics as something made up is really a modern phenomenon and many of these figures that Father Michelli studied included Nietzsche , marx and Engels themselves , who are relevant to our studies . Darwin you know many of these people who seek to place humans or materialistic pursuits or science .

When you hear people say , trust the science , it's just ridiculous because science is a process , it's not a thing not a God .

And one point that came through and this comes from his title is that atheism is really not the absence of worship , as they claim , but rather it's the worship of idols , because , as you alluded to , the human soul has built into it this urge to worship God and to be one with God , and when God is taken out of his proper place that that orientation will be

focused on something else and will be falsely attached to some sort of idol . So this can happen in very metaphoric ways , like with money is the idol and all these warnings we hear about from our priests .

But it can also be in ideological systems , and communism and also the Nazi regime provided this all consuming identity , where the soul felt that it was wrapped up in something bigger than itself , with a look towards the future of hope and promise and participation .

And that is again why it was able to do so much damage is because there were a certain degree of true believers who who were willing to throw God out of his proper place and to place these false promises there .

So ultimately , this is why I argue , and many others do , that this is a demonic ideology and one that is just one of the many different manifestations of the devil trying to take the place of God and usurp his throne on earth .

And so I think that is the biggest takeaway going into whatever the West is going to look like in 10 years , is that you must properly orient the human desire for religion and for objective truth and not allow any sort of airsoughts , counterfeits , to come in and take its place .

As we kind of go out , you know , when I pick up this book , is there something there that you say you know , this is kind of the theme of the people that speak to me and that spoke to me and spoke to my heart or are going to speak to you through this book .

So sometimes there would be priests interned with the other political prisoners and if that was possible , they would do everything within their power to say mass on Sundays , to actually infect the Eucharist when proper matter could be obtained .

But even when there were no priests , the prisoners , the Catholic prisoners , would themselves come together and pray the prayers of the mass and just make a spiritual communion or pause at the moment where transubstantiation would occur and continue on . And this could bring reprisals from the guards and it could bring all sorts of actions taken against them .

And this was such a powerful witness in really the lion's den to just say we are not giving up and we will not give up the faith . And this , no matter what you do to us or , conversely , no matter how you try to incentivize our apostasy , it's not going to happen .

So if they can keep the faith in that situation , I think it's proof positive that we can , no matter what the situation looks like out here in America today .

So God bless you , Christian . Thank you so much . Thanks for sharing this .