“I wish to express my infinite thanks to God for granting me the grace to survive the long years of persecution and be a witness of and participant in the liberation, rebirth and development of the Church in Belarus. This is an immense joy: that of seeing churches packed with faithful, seeing the Church grow, and recognizing that love is stronger than death”, said Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek, archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev, in Belarus, in addressing the 9th International Colloquium of the “Paul VI” Institute, held in Italy in recent days on the theme of the conciliar declaration “Dignitatis humanae”. The Institute decided to pay tribute to a witness of the faith in difficult years, by introducing a special award ‘fidei testis’, and assigning it to Cardinal Swiatek. The cardinal was imprisoned in the Soviet gulags (Marijnsk, Workuta, Inta) for ten years, after being sentenced to two consecutive death sentences, neither executed: one by the Nazi occupiers, the second by the Soviets. “The long years under Soviet rule he recounted meant resistance against the forces of evil, with the continuous threat of stripping me of permission to exercise my ministry as priest. Each day was a battle for souls”. In welcoming him during the audience of 27 September, John Paul II recognised the witness borne by Cardinal Swiatek: “Only with faith could you survive, so you had trust. And the Lord granted you a strong and courageous faith to overcome this long and bitter ordeal”. Today the Catholic community in Belarus (both Latin and Byzantine rite), out of a total population of some 10 million, represents roughly 12-13%. Some sixty priests in four dioceses assist the faithful: the metropolitan see of Minsk-Mohilev, and the suffragan dioceses of Grodno, Pinsk and Vitebsk. There’s also a Greek-Catholic community assisted by an apostolic visitator. Some 40% of the population is Orthodox, while the rest of the population has no real contact with religious life, the result of decades of scientific atheism imposed by the Soviet regime.
