George Matulaitis Journal

could not return to Switzerland and spent the war years in Poland. In March of 1918, he returned to Lithuania, to Marijampole, where he wanted to restore the Marian monastery. At this point he resumes his Journal . However, from this point on, the character of the Journal changes. It becomes more a chronicle of events than a spiritual diary. He comments upon events and prays about them. The latter part of the Journal contains an account of Matulaitis’s consecration and installation as Bishop of Vilnius. It also records his life and work as Bishop during the years of 1918 (the final month), 1919, and 1921. The record is fragmentary, but valuable as a firsthand account of significant personal and historical events. The final section, written in 1925 in Rome after his resignation from the Diocese of Vilnius, is very short. However, it gives the reader an inside view of the author’s thoughts and feelings after the seven years of a very difficult episcopate. This second part of the Journal complements the first. It reveals the actual life-situation in which Matulaitis attained sanctity. His heroic Christian virtues are evident in the actual circumstances in which he lived. Publishing History This present edition of the Journal is the first complete English edi- tion. Portions of the Journal have been published earlier: in 1953, the Marians in London published the first part in Lithuanian; in 1963, Msgr. Vincenzo Cusumano published the first part in Italian, along with a bio- graphical sketch, in Innamorato Della Chiesa (Ancora Milano, 1963); in 1974, the Marians in Chicago published an English translation of the diary’s first section along with Cusumano’s biographical sketch; in 1973, the Marians published a Polish edition, Dziennik Duchowy , that con- tained the first section of the diary and appended a section from the 1911visit to Rome; in 1991, a Lithuanian edition including the complete texts of the diary was published in Putnam, CT; in 1998, a second full Lithuanian edition was published by the Marians in Vilnius, Lithuania as volume 4 of the “Institutum Historicum Marianorum” series. The first Lithuanian edition relied on typewritten transcriptions of the diary in the Marian Archives in Rome; the second used Matulaitis’ handwritten notes for the Vilnius section of the diary. Notes on this Edition This present edition is a new English translation, based on the Lithuanian text. The extant Lithuanian manuscript is a typewritten tran- 20