Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 11 – Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka has again asked Poland and the Vatican not to dispatch Polish priests to his country because of his belief that they are behind or at least in support of groups opposed to his rule (kresy24.pl/lukaszenka-koscioly-maja-dzialac-jak-kolchozy-bez-ksiezy-z-polski/).
After Belarus became independent in 1991, Poland was one of the major sources of Catholic priests for the new and reopened Roman Catholic churches in that country. But Minsk has become ever less welcoming because of its fears that the Roman Catholics are working against Lukashenka.
Between 1989 and 2024, the number of Catholic congregations in Belarus rose from 282 to 500, but most of that growth occurred in the first decade of that period and little of it in the last five years when Minsk has adopted a more hostile attitude (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/04/orthodox-church-only-confession-in.html).
Lukashenka is also being pushed to oppose Catholic priests from Poland and the West by Moscow. There, both the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate are worried about Catholicism in Belarus, with the former fearful that the church’s rise will threaten Putin’s ally Alyaksandr Lukashenka and the latter that this trend will weaken the Moscow church in Belarus.
These fears have been growing over the last several years, following the prominent role Catholics played in the protests following the last “elections” in Belarus and the spread of autocephaly movements among Orthodox churches in the post-Soviet states (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/04/moscows-greatest-fear-about-orthodox.html).
And they have fed anti-Catholic attitudes both in Moscow and in Minsk (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/01/anti-catholicism-spreading-in-moscow.html) and have now led to direct attacks on the Vatican for what one Russian author says is its direct involvement in the rise of an anti-Russian and anti-Belarusian Catholic movement in Belarus.
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