Belarus Religion
Interior of modern Orthodox church, Brest
Courtesy John Mumford
Religious procession honoring the icon of the Holy Mother of God of
Zhyrovichy
Courtesy Anatol Klashchuk
Before 1917 Belorussia had 2,466 religious communities,
including 1,650 Orthodox, 127 Roman Catholic, 657 Jewish,
thirtytwo Protestant, and several Muslim communities. Under the
communists (who were officially atheists), the activities
of
these communities were severely restricted. Many religious
communities were destroyed and their leaders exiled or
executed;
the remaining communities were sometimes co-opted by the
government for its own ends, as in the effort to instill
patriotism during World War II.
In 1993 one Belarusian publication reported the numbers
of
religious communities as follows: Orthodox, 787; Roman
Catholic,
305; Pentecostal, 170; Baptist, 141;
Old Believer (an Orthodox sect--see Glossary),
twenty-six; Seventh-Day Adventist,
seventeen; Apostolic Christian, nine; Uniate, eight; New
Apostolic, eight; Muslim, eight; Jewish, seven; and other,
fifteen.
Although the Orthodox Church was devastated during
World War
II and continued to decline until the early 1980s because
of
government policies, it underwent a small revival with the
onset
of perestroika and the celebration in 1988 of the
1,000-
year anniversary of Christianity in Russia. In 1990
Belorussia
was designated an
exarchate (see Glossary) of the Russian
Orthodox Church, creating the Belarusian Orthodox Church.
In the
early 1990s, 60 percent of the population identified
themselves
as Orthodox. The church had one seminary, three convents,
and one
monastery. A Belarusian theological academy was to be
opened in
1995.
Soviet policies toward the Roman Catholic Church were
strongly influenced by the Catholics' recognition of an
outside
authority, the pope, as head of the church, as well as by
the
close historical ties of the church in Belorussia with
Poland. In
1989 the five official Roman Catholic dioceses, which had
existed
since World War II and had been without a bishop, were
reorganized into five dioceses (covering 455 parishes) and
the
archdiocese of Minsk and Mahilyow. In the early 1990s,
figures
for the Catholic population in Belarus ranged from 8
percent to
20 percent; one estimate identified 25 percent of the
Catholics
as ethnic Poles. The church had one seminary in Belarus.
The revival of religion in Belarus in the postcommunist
era
brought about a revival of the old historical conflict
between
Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. This religious complexity
is
compounded by the two denominations' links to institutions
outside the republic. The Belarusian Orthodox Church is
headed by
an ethnic Russian, Metropolitan Filaret, who heads an
exarchate
of the Moscow Patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The
Roman Catholic archdiocese of Belarus is headed by an
ethnic
Pole, Archbishop Kazimir Sviontak, who has close ties to
the
church in Poland. However, despite these ties, Archbishop
Sviontak, who had been a prisoner in the Soviet camps and
a
pastor in Pinsk for many years, has prohibited the display
of
Polish national symbols in Catholic churches in Belarus.
Fledgling Belarusian religious movements are having
difficulties asserting themselves within these two major
religious institutions because of the historical practice
of
preaching in Russian in the Orthodox churches and in
Polish in
the Catholic churches. Attempts to introduce the
Belarusian
language into religious life, including the liturgy, also
have
not met with wide success because of the cultural
predominance of
Russians and Poles in their respective churches, as well
as the
low usage of the Belarusian language in everyday life.
To a certain extent, the 1991 declaration of Belarus's
independence and the 1990 law making Belarusian the
official
language of the republic have generated a new attitude
toward the
Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. Some religiously
uncommitted young people have turned to the Uniate Church
in
reaction to the resistance of the Orthodox and Roman
Catholic
hierarchies to accepting the Belarusian language as a
medium of
communication with their flock. Overall, however, national
activists have had little success in trying to generate
new
interest in the Uniate Church.
The Uniate Church, a branch of which existed in Belarus
from
1596 to 1839 and had some three-quarters of the Belarusian
population as members when it was abolished, is reputed to
have
used Belorussian in its liturgy and pastoral work. When
the
church was reestablished in Belarus in the early 1990s,
its
adherents advertised it as a "national" church. The modest
growth
of the Uniate Church was accompanied by heated public
debates of
both a theological and a political character. Because the
original allegiance of the Uniate Church was clearly to
the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the reestablished church
is
viewed by some in the Orthodox Church in Belarus with
suspicion,
as being a vehicle of both Warsaw and the Vatican.
Before World War II, the number of Protestants in
Belarus was
quite low in comparison with other Christians, but they
have
shown remarkable growth since then. In 1990 there were
more than
350 Protestant communities in the country.
The first Jewish communities appeared in Belorussia at
the
end of the fourteenth century and continued to increase
until the
genocide of World War II. Mainly urban residents, the
country's
nearly 1.3 million Jews in 1914 accounted for 50 to 60
percent of
the population in cities and towns. The Soviet census of
1989
counted some 142,000 Jews, or 1.1 percent of the
population, many
of whom have since emigrated. Although Belorussia's
boundaries
changed from 1914 to 1922, a significant portion of the
decrease
was the result of the war. However, with the new religious
freedom, Jewish life in Belarus is experiencing a rebirth.
In
late 1992, there were nearly seventy Jewish organizations
active
in Belarus, half of which were republic-wide.
Muslims in Belarus are represented by small communities
of
ethnic Tatars. Some of these Tatars are descendants of
emigrants
and prisoners of war who settled here after the eleventh
century.
Data as of June 1995
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