The head of the Catholic Church in Belarus has accused the government of President Oleksandr Lukashenka of using legal pretexts to bar foreign priests from his country, at a time when declining seminary admissions are limiting the Church's potential.
"Our priestly vocations are in a bad state, and we still need clergy from abroad", said Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Minsk-Mohilev. "But the government's confessions office won't permit their presence in Belarus, and its officials use various administrative infringements to justify this. We've lost many priests this way, and new ones haven't been allowed, so the number of priests and nuns is falling each year."
Speaking in Poland, the 74-year-old archbishop said the Church's principal seminary at Harodnia currently had only 17 ordinands, while another seminary at Pinsk had "practically closed down". He added that a sixth of the Church's 473 priests had come to help from neighbouring Poland and Lithuania, but said they were not well regarded by state officials, who he claimed used speeding offences and other legal encroachments as a pretext for deporting them. Minsk's landmark St Symon and Helen church, Kondrusieicz said, currently had just four priests to host 14,000 Catholics at nine Masses each Sunday.
With four dioceses and 500 parishes, the Catholic Church makes up around six percent of the 9.6 million inhabitants of Belarus, and is recognised as a "traditional faith" in the state constitution, which enshrines the "determining role" of Orthodoxy.
Complaints of discrimination have frequently surfaced under 65-year-old President Lukashenka, who has been elected five times since 1994 amid claims of ballot-rigging.
Visas and entry permits for visiting Catholic priests have frequently been refused or shortened, also on grounds of their alleged failure to speak Belarusan or Russian, the two official languages. In 2017, Archbishop Kondrusiewicz also accused Lukashenka's government of "artificially lowering the number of Catholics attending services", and said in a statement he hoped the Interior Ministry would "provide truthful information about Catholics in future".
In his interview with Poland's Catholic Information Agency, the archbishop said ties with Belarus's predominant Orthodox church were currently "very good", adding that leaders of both denominations had worked together to defend the right to wear religious emblems in public and to resist "gender ideology" in local schools. However, he added that hopes of a Papal visit to the country depended on agreement by the Orthodox church, whose metropolitan, Pavel Ponomaryov, had left a final decision to Russian Orthodox leaders in Moscow.
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