The Situation of the Roman-Catholic Church in Belarus at the Turn of the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries

Abstract

The origins of the organisational structures of the Roman-Catholic Church in Belarus reach back to the end of the fourteenth century. During several-centuries old history the Church in those territories experienced various events. The period of repression and persecutions of religion and the Church in the Soviet state had brought about enormous destruction. The number of open churches and Catholic priests in Belarus was constantly dwindling until the 1980s. The political changes that followed together with perestroika and the final fall of the communist totalitarian system initiated the period of religious revival in the Catholic Church in Belarus. As a result of these changes in 1989, the Catholics in Belarus received their own bishop, Father Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. In 1991 the diocesan structures were reorganised. It was then that the following dioceses were established: the Mińsk-Mohylew diocese, the Pińsk diocese, and the Grodno diocese. From that time onwards the Latin Church in the Republic of Belarus was conducted for many years by the parish priest of the cathedral in Pińsk, Archbishop and Metropolitan Bishop of the Mińsk-Mohylew diocese, Rev. Kazimierz Świątek, who in 1994 was made cardinal. Another reorganisation took place in 1999, when a new diocese was established with its capital in Witebsk. In that year the Conference of Catholic Bishops in Belarus was established.

In the beginning of the 1990s the Church in Belarus numbered 150 churches (the remaining 87 were under reconstruction, and 9 under construction), 130 priests, out of whom 68 from Poland, 55 alumni in the theological seminary in Grodno, and over one million faithful. The decisive majority of the Catholics in this country (ca. 90 per cent), especially in the northern areas, are of Polish origin. At the moment, ca. 15 per cent of population in Belarus belong to the faithful of the Catholic Church. After more than ten years the Latin Church in Belarus numbered as many as 400 parishes, 360 priests, including 160 local, 160 religious priests (most of them from Poland), 350 nuns (140 local), 150 alumni, and 1.200 faithful. The number of parochial communities of the Catholic Church of the Latin rite in Belarus has been constantly increasing since the end of the 1980s.