Lithuanian National Catholic Church
The Lithuanian National Catholic Church or LNCC was a small American denomination organized in 1914 by dissident Catholic Lithuanian Americans mainly in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Massachusetts. It was also known as the independent Lithuanian church as it rejected the papal authority. It was closely affiliated with the Polish National Catholic Church. The Church established several parishes, but most of them were short lived. The most successful parishes were in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. John Gritenas was consecrated on August 17, 1924, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as this church's only bishop. Due to lack of archival sources, available information about the church and its parishes is fragmentary, incomplete, and often contradictory.
History
In United States
The Old Catholic Church separated from the Catholic Church due to disagreements over the resolutions adopted by the First Vatican Council in 1869–1870. The Old Catholic Church was attractive to European immigrants to the United States due to disagreements with the Catholic hierarchy. Immigrants wanted to establish their own parishes where priests would speak their language, but received little support from American bishops who were mainly of Irish and German descent. In 1884, a meeting of American bishops in Baltimore decided that property of parishes belonged not to the community that financed it but to the diocese. Lawsuits between pastors and parishioners over the property were quite common. In protest of such policies, the Polish National Catholic Church was established in 1897.Due to the historic union between Poland and Lithuania, the Lithuanian National Catholic Church first operated as a section of PNCC. The first Lithuanian priests to joint the Old Catholic Church were, Vincas R. Dilionis, and Stasys Mickevičius who was ordained to priesthood by Bishop Stephen Kaminski in 1901. The first Lithuanian National Catholic parishes were established by Dilionis in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1902 and Baltimore, Maryland in 1903, but they – as well as many other similar Lithuanian parishes – were short-lived. Mickevičius established several parishes with the most successful ones in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. The parishes were established under the jurisdiction of Archbishop Carmel Henry Carfora. When disagreements arose between Mickevičius and Polish bishop Franciszek Hodur, Mickevičius called a synod on July 17, 1917, and separated from PNCC. He was consecrated as bishop by Rudolph de Landas Berghes in 1917. However, Berghes rescinded the consecration in December 1918 once he became better acquainted with Mickevičius. While Mickevičius was a vocal advocates of separation from PNCC, other Lithuanian priests, including John Gritenas and Mykolas Valadka, were more ambivalent. Gritenas was consecrated as bishop by Franciszek Hodur in 1924. Valandka published a Lithuanian missal of LNCC in 1931.
Another attempt at separating LNCC from PNCC came in 1925 when Steponas A. Geniotis, a student of Mickevičius, called the first synod independent of PNCC in Chicago on May 25, 1925. The second synod took place in Newark in 1932. Geniotis claimed that he was consecrated in 1924 or 1925, but his claims are doubtful. This group of priests worked with the Catholic Church of America and the St. John's Missionary Fathers of the Catholic Church of America. They published several periodicals, including Naujoji era, Jonistų balsas, and bilingual Voice.
LNCC never became popular among Lithuanian Americans as it lacked motivated and energetic priests. It also suffered due to lack of more centralized and organized leadership as well as due to various opportunists who swindled money by claiming to be priests. When Lithuanians migrated to the United States to escape the Soviet occupation in the aftermath of World War II, the new generation of immigrants did not support LNCC.
In Lithuania
There were some limited attempts at establishing LNCC in Lithuania. Gritenas visited Lithuania in 1922 and 1927. He established contacts with some liberal and patriotic activists who wanted to lessen the influence of the Catholic Church in Lithuania and investigated opportunities of establishing LNCC in Lithuania. During the second visit he met with President Antanas Smetona. These efforts were interrupted by Gritenas' death in 1928, though there is fragmentary evidence that a community of LNCC was active in Rokiškis since 1925. In 1937, Geniotis visited Lithuania and claimed to have established a parish of LNCC in his native village of near Mažeikiai. He also held meeting with the Lithuanian press and government ministers and reached out to the leaders of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Mariavite Church in Lithuania. LNCC received sporadic attention from the Lithuanian press. It received mainly positive coverage from Lietuvos žinios published by the Lithuanian Popular Peasants' Union and more neutral coverage from Trimitas published by the Lithuanian Riflemen's Union. The Catholic periodicals attacked and criticized LNCC due to its ties to PNCC and due to behavioral issues of LNCC priests. For example, they referred to Gritenas as a con artist and claimed that he was fined for disorderly conduct while intoxicated.Any contacts between LNCC and Lithuania were severed during World War II and the subsequent Soviet rule in Lithuania. While the Soviet Union adopted Marxist–Leninist atheism as its official ideology, Soviet officials viewed an autocephalous "national church" as a tool to weaken the Catholic Church. KGB sought to recruit priests for a "national church" in Lithuania as early as 1946. They managed to recruit Juozas Pilypaitis, a priest from Sudargas, but his open letter published in a regional newspaper remained unnoticed by the Lithuanian society. When Pope Pius XII issued a decree excommunicating collaborators with communists in July 1949, Soviet officials attempted to force Lithuanian priests sign a protest letter and use it as the basis for establishing the national church. The effort did not gain a momentum – only 108 priests out of 933 signed the letter – and the idea of the national church was abandoned in favor of other methods of persecution of Christians.