Kelionė į Šventąją Žemę. I: Iš Romos į Jeruzalę

Tarpukaris

Interwar Republic · 1920–1940

Published in 1938 during the Interwar Republic period.

What It Is

This publication is a testament to the remarkable institutional infrastructure of Catholic Lithuania in the late interwar period. The Marijonai press at Marijampolė was not merely a devotional publisher but a fully realized literary-intellectual operation capable of producing polished, book-length travelogues written by doctorally-trained clergy. Padolskis's six years of Roman study, referenced in the text, represent a pipeline of Lithuanian intellectual formation through Catholic Rome that connected provincial Lithuania to the universal Church and to European high culture simultaneously — a mechanism that would be violently severed by 1940. The choice to publish a pilgrimage travelogue rather than a prayer book or catechism reveals the ambition of interwar Lithuanian Catholic culture: it sought not merely to preserve faith but to cultivate a literate, cosmopolitan Catholic identity for Lithuanian readers. The narrative moves through Hungary, Croatia, Italy, and Palestine with an assured geographic and historical literacy, naming specific towns, monasteries, and landmarks while weaving in Catholic devotional meaning. This is identity formation through the fusion of Catholic universalism and Lithuanian particularity — the Lithuanian priest as educated European pilgrim. The timing — 1938, two years before occupation — makes this document historically poignant. The Marijonai press would be shut down, Padolskis's intellectual world would be destroyed, and Lithuanian Catholic publishing would migrate to the diaspora. This volume thus stands as one of the last expressions of a mature, self-confident Lithuanian Catholic literary culture operating on its own soil, in its own institutions, for its own reading public — a culture whose continuation in exile would require enormous effort to reconstruct from scattered fragments exactly like this one.

Why It Matters

Culturally and historically, this book is a window into a world that was permanently destroyed. The Marijonai press, the interwar Lithuanian Catholic intellectual class, the freedom to publish polished literary travelogues in standard Lithuanian — all of this ceased to exist in 1940 and never fully recovered in the same form. Padolskis's journey from Marijampolė to Rome to Jerusalem encapsulates the extraordinary ambitions of Lithuanian Catholic culture in its brief period of national independence: to be simultaneously Lithuanian, Catholic, European, and universal. This is the Lithuania that the diaspora attempted to preserve in its parishes, schools, and publishing houses — and this book is one of the artifacts they carried with them or sought to remember.