The withdrawal of the visas from Bishop Jerzy Mazur and the Italian priest Fr. Stefano Caprio, apart from a violation of the law on religious liberty in Russia, is an attack on Catholics in Russia, who have thus been deprived of the presence of their pastors”: Msgr. Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, archbishop of Moscow and president of the Conference of the Catholic bishops of Russia, repeated what he had told SIR in recent days. “Catholic citizens of Russia continued the archbishop, who recently attended the 10th Symposium of European bishops in Rome have the same rights as Orthodox citizens and that’s why light needs to be shed on facts that have not been explained”. Archbishop Kondrusiewicz therefore asks: “Can Russian Catholics consider that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience and the right to have their own pastors, including the right to invite them from abroad, hold good also for them, not forgetting that for 81 years the Catholic Church in Russia was deprived of the possibility of training and ordaining its own priests?”. A second question, according to the archbishop, is posed by the fact that the anti-Catholic demonstrations scheduled for the days ahead even if not directly in front of Catholic churches have not met with a clear and firm disapproval by representatives of the Patriarchate of Moscow. Msgr. Kondrusiewicz, lastly, recalled the appeal he issued in recent days to express again with regard to the withdrawal of the two visas his strong regret for the silence “of the Russian and international organizations for the defence of human rights, called to defend the rights of the religious minorities, and the lack of any reaction by the general Prosecutor’s Office, whose task it is to see to it that the laws are respected”. The one exception he noted “was the Russian section of the international Association for freedom of conscience”.
