It is just past 9 o’clock on Easter Sunday and Rakovski’s town square is almost empty. The square would look like any other in Bulgaria were it not dominated by two 40-metre-high Lombard-style bell towers belonging to the church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is a large church by the standards of a small Bulgarian town and its style is unusual too. This is because it is a Catholic church, a spiritual home for the thousands of Catholics who have lived in the region near Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city, for about half a millennium.
There is little sign that, in less than an hour, the church will be brimming with worshippers celebrating Easter. But when the bells start ringing half-an-hour before Mass begins, people appear from all sides of the square, quickly filling the spacious interior of the church. Families greet each other as they enter, trying to squeeze into the benches so that more people can sit. Lone, elderly women in black headscarves help each other to climb the church stairs. Young altar servers sporting waggish combinations of white cassocks and Adidas trainers lead the procession.
As the service starts, everybody joins the young priest, Fr Mladen Plachkov, in his prayers. “I shall not die but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord,” Fr Plachkov chants in Bulgarian, reciting Psalm 118:17. Everybody responds: “Amen.” During the one-hour liturgy, a thousand voices sing in tune with the melodic choir, creating an intense atmosphere of piety. “I am happy to see the house so full. I see so many familiar faces, quite a few new ones, as well as some that have come back from abroad. This gives me enormous hope,” Fr Plachkov says. Even a newcomer can feel the sense of community.
At least 1,000 people flocked to the church for the Easter liturgy – but that is nothing compared to what will happen on Monday, when the church will host none other than Pope Francis himself. He is coming to Rakovski on 6 May as part of his apostolic visit to Bulgaria, to lead a service and give First Communion to Catholic children from across the country.
More than 50,000 people are expected to come to Rakovski to see Pope Francis, and there is hot competition about who will get a seat for the liturgy. The visit is a milestone event for Bulgarian Catholics, who number between 50,000 (the official figure) and 80,000 (according to informal estimates). Unlike the country’s large Turkish Muslim minority, the Catholics of Bulgaria are little known. But their close-knit communities, scattered across the north and the centre of the country, have been an integral part of the fabric of Bulgaria for centuries. “Despite being a small minority, Catholics have had a disproportionate importance on the development of the country,” Professor Svetlozar Eldarov, from the Institute of Balkan Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and a Bulgarian church history specialist, explains.
The connection between Bulgaria and the Catholic Church dates back to the conversion of the Bulgarian people in the ninth century, which was followed by a short-lived union between the Bulgarian and Roman Churches under King Kaloyan in the early thirteenth century. “Seventeenth-century Bulgarian history wouldn’t have been the same were it not for the work of the Bosnian Franciscans in Chiprovtsi, followed by the rebellion [against the Ottoman Empire] in the same region in 1688 that local Catholics led,” Professor Eldarov adds.
He maintains that Rome also influenced the struggle of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to achieve ecclesiastical independence from the Patriarchate of Constantinople under its own “Exarch”. “The pope’s recognition of a Bulgarian Uniate Church [a church loyal to Pope but using an Orthodox liturgy] in 1860 acted as a catalyst for the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate ten years later,” he tells me. “This is because the Patriarchate in Constantinople and Moscow suddenly realized that there was an alternative [a Catholic one] for the Bulgarian people,” Eldarov says.
Later, following the creation of the modern Bulgarian state, Catholic colleges delivered a high-class education to the Bulgarian middle class, and were well regarded. Bulgaria also played a role in the Second Vatican Council. Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, served as apostolic delegate to Bulgaria in the 1920s and 1930s. It was the decades he spent in Bulgaria that transformed Roncalli’s worldview towards the the Orthodox Churches.
Bulgarian Catholics suffered heavily under the purges of the post-Second World War communist government. The new regime was beholden to the Soviet Union, which took a hostile view of religion and of the Catholic Church in particular. “The history of Bulgarian Catholics has a page written with the blood of martyrs – the series of hidden and public court trials of the 1950s ended with four death sentences for senior priests, dozens of clerics dying in prisons, and tens of others getting long prison sentences,” Eldarov told me.
After the grim 1950s, things got back to relative normality. Eldarov, a native of Plovdiv, remembers how local Catholics still loyally attended church in the 1960s, despite the prevailing atheistic propaganda and the blacklisting of churchgoers. “People went to church early in the morning before going to work in the field or the factories,” he said.
This faithfulness to the Church seems to have endured. Fr Plachkov says it is down to the work of generations of priests before him who worked hard with the community. “It’s all about patience, persistence and community work,” he told me. “We try to align ourselves with the spirit of the times. People live in the present, not the past, so we adapt the Gospel to the problems and challenges of today,” he added. “The visit by the Pope to such a small community like ours is a sign that we are not forgotten.”
Martin Dimitrov is the Bulgarian correspondent for Balkan Insight, published by BIRN, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, established in 2004 as a network of non-governmental organisations promoting freedom of speech, human rights and democratic values in Southern and Eastern Europe. A longer version of this article appears on the Balkan Insight website.