May Mary's intercession save our great nation too

Adele Dirsyte was born in Lithuania, the youngest of six children in a farming family. She completed college with a philosophy major, worked for Caritas and other youth organizations, and then taught and led retreats at an all-girls school.

Beginning in 1940, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union, then the Germans, and finally the Soviets again. Adele joined a resistance movement against the Soviets. In 1946, she was arrested for harboring a woman who had fled Soviet custody, put on trial, and sentenced to 10 years in a concentration camp. She would spend time at several camps within the Gulag doing hard labor in bitterly cold Siberia under the harshest and most oppressive living conditions.

Yet Adele’s faith and spirit remained strong. She would comfort and inspire the other prisoners at the women’s camps of her incarceration. The brutal guards observed this and singled her out for special abuse. They would take her to an underground cell and beat her mercilessly, eventually knocking out all her teeth. She was often kept in isolation cells and starved. Her hair was torn out. Her response was to forgive the guards and pray for them. She finally was placed in a ward for the “mentally ill,” where she refused food so the other prisoners could have more. She died there in September 1955 at the age of 46.

But while she lived, Adele wrote a prayer book on scraps of paper, and three of her fellow Lithuanian prisoners bound the book in cloth. The book was passed among the prisoners, and the women were invited to add their own prayers to the book. Titled Prayer Book for Girls Exiled in Siberia, the book eventually was smuggled out of the camp. It was first published in English in 1960 under the title Mary, Save Us.

Can Mary “save”? Jesus, of course, is our one Savior, but those who intercede for us before Christ also have a role in “saving” us — and Mary is a mighty intercessor indeed.

“With this booklet, we can all pray together with those four young girls and other prisoners of captive nations who are suffering for freedom and the faith,” wrote Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston in a preface to the English edition.

The prayer that bears the English title of Dirsyte’s book is a powerful plea on behalf of her Lithuanian homeland. But it also adaptable and appropriate for other oppressed countries, such as Ukraine, or nations where moral values and religious freedoms are increasingly being challenged, as in our own United States:

Mary, save the land woven with blood and tears, with self-sacrifice, resolutions, and love.

Mary, awaken in our breasts the power of mighty giants. Preserve our nation’s pure spirit, fostered through ages by our forefathers.

Mary, enlighten those who have wandered astray; save the heroes who have passed away.

Raise up our holy Lithuania, that it may radiate and shine like a splendid star to glorify you and your Son’s boundless mercy and love. Amen.

GERALD KORSON is an editorial consultant and staff writer for Legatus magazine. He is serving temporarily as acting editor.