The sarcophagus will be taken back to the Cathedral of Kaišiadorys, a town between Vilnius and Kaunas, after Sunday’s beatification ceremony, which is expected to draw up to 50,000 people to the capital’s Cathedral Square.
Matulionis was ordained in St. Petersburg in 1900 and served as a priest in Latvia and Lithuania. The priest faced continual persecution from Soviet authorities: he was repeatedly detained, sentenced to prison, sent to a labor camp and deported.
Matulionis was elevated to the rank of archbishop by Pope John XXIII in 1962, but died in August of that year after he was injected with an unknown medicine during a search of his apartment in Šeduva, a town in northern Lithuania.
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