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Religion in Belarus (2011)

Before 1917 Belarus 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.

History

By the end of 12th century Europe was generally divided into two large areas: western area with dominance of Roman Catholicism and eastern with Orthodox and Byzantine influences. Border between them was roughly along the Bug River. This placed area, currently known as Belarus, into a unique position where these two influences mixed and interfered.

Before the 14th century Russian Orthodox church was dominant in Belarus. Union of Krewo in 1385 broke this monopoly and made Catholicism the religion of the ruling class. Jogaila, then ruler of Lithuania, part of which was Belarus, ordered to convert all population of Lithuania into Catholicism. 1.5 years after Union of Krewo Wilno episcopate was created which received a lot of land from the Lithuanian dukes. By the middle of 16th century Catholicism became strong in Lithuania and bordering with it north-west parts of Belarus. But Orthodox church was still dominant in Belarus.

In 16th century crisis began in Christianity: Protestant Reformation began in Catholicism and heresy period began in an Orthodox area. From the 50th years of 16th century Protestantism ideas began spreading in Lithuanian state, part of which was Belarus. The first Protestant Church in Belarus was created in Brest by Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwiłł.

Religion in post-Soviet Belarus

The revival of religion in Belarus in the post-communist 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 has been headed by an ethnic Pole, Cardinal Kazimir Sviontak, who had 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, 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 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 an 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.

Statistics

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. 80% of religious people in Belarus are Eastern Orthodox, other (including Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jewish, and Muslim) 20%.

Outline of religions in modern Belarus

Eastern Orthodoxy

Although the Russian 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 Belarus 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. The church had one seminary, three convents, and one monastery. A Belarusian theological academy was to be opened in 1995.

Roman Catholicism

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 Belarus 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.

Protestantism

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.

Judaism

The first Jewish communities appeared in Belarus at the end of the 14th 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 boundaries of Belarus changed from 1914 to 1922, a significant portion of the decrease was the result of the war. In late 1992, there were nearly seventy Jewish organizations active in Belarus, half of which were country-wide.

Islam

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 in Belarus, from the Volga Region, after the 11th century. In 1997 there were 23 Muslim communities, including 19 of those in the Western regions of Belarus.

Neopaganism

Paganism in Belarus is mostly represented by Rodnovery, a polytheistic religion.

See also

• Freedom of religion in Belarus
• Christianity in Belarus

References

1. Religion and denominations in the Republic of Belarus by the Commissioner on Religions and Nationalities of the Republic of Belarus from November 2011
2. http://web.archive.org/web/20070312091331/http://belarus.vneshintourist.net/?p=67&more=1&c=1
3. ^ Jan Zaprudnik and Helen Fedor. "Religion." Belarus (Country Study). Federal Research Division, Library of Congress; Helen Fedor, ed. June 1995. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
4. Belarusian Religion statistics, definitions and sources. NationMaster.com.
5. "World religions as represented in Belarus: Mohammedanism". Vneshintourist. Archived from the original on 12 March 2007. Retrieved 17 February 2013.

• Religion in Belarus