A bishop in Belarus has defended a Catholic priest jailed after a closed trial for illegally “holding a mass assembly”, in a rare humanitarian church intervention in the authoritarian state.
“I ask all concerned people to pray for Fr Andrei Vashchuk, now behind bars”, Bishop Yuri Kasabutsky, a Minsk-Mogilev archdiocese auxiliary, said in a Facebook message. “This is a Priest (I consciously write this word with a capital) according to God's providence and a noble person, completely devoted to God, the Church and people, to serving everyone and giving himself without reserve”.
The bishop was reacting to the sentencing of Fr Vashchuk, rector of the Holy Spirit parish in Vitebsk, who was jailed for 15 days for “violating procedures by organising or holding a mass assembly”.
Unofficial Catholic media reported that the precise reason for the charge had not been given, but said it was believed the priest, a member of the Salvatorian order, had worn a face mask inscribed with the slogan, “A country for life”, associated with the exiled opposition presidential candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
Fr Vashchuk is the fourth Catholic priest sentenced for alleged political misdemeanours so far this year in Belarus, where mass protests against the rigged August 2020 re-election of President Alexander Lukashenka after 26 years in power were met with harsh regime repression.
In early July, a priest in Smorgon, Fr Yevhen Uchkuronis, was fined for reposting an “extremist text” on Facebook, while two others, Frs Andrzej Bulczak and Oleksandr Baran, were fined in April and May for posting apologies for Belarusian support for the war in Ukraine.
Up to 30 Catholic and Orthodox clergy have been similarly sentenced since summer 2020, according to the opposition-linked Christian Vision group in Belarus, where 1260 political prisoners are currently estimated to be languishing in jail.
Belarus’s Bishops Conference has not referred to the sentences on its website and has avoided any mention of human rights issues since January 2021, when its former president, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusewicz, was allowed back from a brief enforced exile after Vatican mediation.
Another priest from Vitebsk, Fr Vyacheslav Barok, who fled to neighbouring Poland after serving a prison term, told Christian Vision the Belarusian special services were “very closely monitoring” all statements and action by priests, adding that believed Fr Vashchuk could also have been a target of “personal scores” by local police.
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