A Polish priest has been told he must leave Belarus after 25 years of parish ministry in the western city of Grodno, in the latest anti-Church gesture by the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko.
“My visits to Grodno have been classified as business trips, so I have often had to travel across the border,” Fr Jozef Geza, rector of the Most Holy Redeemer parish, explained to the ecumenical Christian Vision association.
“In reality, the authorities knew perfectly well I was a parish pastor. But they somehow turned a blind eye to my frequent and lengthy service.”
The elderly priest, ordained in 1970, spoke after a farewell Mass at the western parish, where he also acted over a quarter-century as chaplain for the Redemptorist order and Nazarethan nuns.
Christian Vision said he held a permit since 1999 to work in the parish, one of the largest in Belarus, but had faced “pressure since the beginning” from the country’s rulers, who have previously ordered other visiting Polish clergy to leave.
Christian Vision added that the move would further impede the work of the Catholic Church, which makes up around 15 per cent of Belarus’s population of 9.4 million, but has not publicly reacted over the past two years to the beating and jailing of citizens for protesting the rigged August 2020 re-election of President Lukashenko after 26 years in power.
At least ten priests and many lay Catholics have been arrested since the 2020 protests in Minsk.
A Catholic primary school in the capital was forcibly closed last summer without official explanation and a landmark church of SS Simon and Helena, popularly dubbed the Red Church, was locked after a small fire in September. Officials later ordered the indefinite removal of all religious objects and broke up protests.
Although the Red Church was visited in late December by the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Ante Jozic, a generator used to light and heat the adjoining presbytery during makeshift Masses was disconnected at the end of the month.
Belarus opposition groups have argued against a current Vatican policy of appeasing the Lukashenko regime, which barred the Church’s leader, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, from re-entering the country in autumn 2020 and has also imposed restrictions on the Catholic Caritas network.
In December, Christian Vision published a 60-page book in London, reproducing a lengthy letter to Pope Francis by Belarus’s exiled opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, whose husband Siarhei was jailed for 18 years while attempting to run against Lukashenko, requesting prayers and a “genuine word of truth and justice”.
The book also includes an August 2021 prison-cell plea to the pontiff by a Catholic political prisoner, Ihar Losik and another from the jailed human rights campaigner, Ales Bialiatski, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
“The voices of theologians, politicians, priests, political prisoners and their wives and mothers, voices from behind bars and from exile are present here,” Christian Vision explained in its preface, describing them as “voices of despair and hope, intimate and public, full of pain and dignity”.
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