Cultural versus Political Christian Democrats: debating the idea of (Christian) democracy in Lithuanian exile

ENTo talk about Lithuanian Christian Democracy in exile is to talk about the history of Lithuanian Christian Democracy writ large. The two are inseparable, because more than a century’s worth of history of the Lithuanian Christian Democratic movement was marked by close links with the Lithuanian diaspora. At the beginning of the twentieth century, due to vast economic emigration to the USA and studies of Lithuanians in Western European and Russian universities, a vivid Lithuanian culture was forming outside the area of ethnic Lithuanian lands. As a result, many important events took place, and seminal political works were written by intellectuals treated as Lithuanians in exile. This holds true when one speaks about the first political programme of Lithuanian Christian Democrats written in 1905 by the priests Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis and Pranciškus Būčys, both lecturers at the Imperial Roman Catholic Theological Academy in Saint Petersburg, prior to the so-called All-Lithuanian assembly, the first meeting of national political leaders, on the eve of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Even though it did not lead to the formation of a party due to resistance from the Church hierarchy, it was remembered in 1917 when the Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party (LCDP) was established in German-occupied Lithuania. In the same year, a party of the same name was formed among war refugees in Russia. This émigré branch of the party played an important role in developing a more socially radical party programme. The most prominent Lithuanian Catholic intellectuals and future members of the LCDP were studying at universities in Western Europe (most of them in Louvain, Belgium, or Fribourg, Switzerland) before and after the establishment of the Lithuanian Republic in 1918, and played an important role in casting the nascent Lithuania for an international audience to see as a democratic and independent state. [p. 191-192].