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The government of Lithuania has allocated 2.875 million litas ( c.0.8 million euros) to the country’s 12 traditional Churches and religious communities and centres in recent weeks. One million litas was allocated to the construction of a spiritual centre at Siluva, in the Catholic archdiocese of Kaunas, and 144,000 litas to the Lithuanian Orthodox archdiocese. The rest of the appropriation was distributed between the Consistory of the Lutheran Church, the “Mufti Centre” of the Sunnite Moslem Community in the country, the reformed evangelical communities, the Basilian monastery of St. Jehoshaphat of Byzantine rite, the Jewish communities and the Supreme Old Orthodox Council. The state funds, established on the basis of the data furnished by the national Department of Statistics and the religious communities themselves, are annually allocated with the aim of supporting the said religious communities and restoring or reconstructing the religious buildings destroyed or ruined during the Soviet occupation. The funds are “a recognition by the State says a statement put out by the Catholic information service (KIT) of the significant contribution that the religious communities make to the nation with their own spiritual, cultural and historical values”.
