Before 1917 Belorussia had 2,466 religious
communities, including 1,650 Orthodox, 127 Roman Catholic, 657 Jewish, 32
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, 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 of the Russian Orthodox Church, creating the
Belarusian Orthodox Church. In the early 1990s, 60 percent of the population
identified themselves as Orthodox (in 2006, however, 47.8% of citizens already
declared themselves as irreligious, so the former number has dropped). 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.
