Abp. Kondrusiewicz: I am not a politician. I preach the Gospel and practice the social doctrine of the Church
The Archbishop of Minsk breaks his silence from exile in Poland in a wide-ranging interview. The Church immediately proposed dialogue between President Lukashenko and the opposition. “We never incited to violence. We are against lies, violence and injustice ". Thanks to the Churches of Eastern Europe for their help in rebuilding the Church in Russia and Belarus. A natural optimism: Only Christ changes hearts.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - A few days after turning 75, the age of "canonical retirement" (next January 3), the Archbishop of Minsk and Catholic Metropolitan of Belarus Msgr. Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz gave an extensive interview to journalists in Poland, a country where he is forced to remain in exile, due to the ban on his return to his homeland imposed by the disputed President Aleksandr Lukashenko. The interview is available on the Catholic information portal eKai.pl.
The archbishop explains that "neither I nor any of our Church has ever incited violence, but we have always adhered to the social doctrine of the Church, and we turn to everyone for a peaceful resolution of conflicts. We are against lies, violence and injustice, as the Church teaches."
Kondrusiewicz currently resides in Sokolka, a country in Poland on the border with Belarus. Talking about his condition as a "bishop in exile", he says that he maintains daily contacts via telephone and internet, and that ecclesiastical affairs are handled by his auxiliary bishops, one in Minsk and one in Mogilev: "I am following the developments in Belarus, in particular the coronavirus crisis, in these days when the number of sick people has greatly increased ".
The metropolitan maintains his natural optimism: "Everything is in God’s hands, this is my optimism ... what we are experiencing today is the experience of carrying the cross, which has always accompanied Christian life, and therefore we must carry it with conviction."
Kondrusiewicz repeats that he immediately insisted on the need to start negotiations between the protagonists of the conflict, sitting around a table, "even if it should have many edges", without being heard: "We must believe that a solution can be found, even if each person remain sin their position; the fact that we are very different and have different ideas does not mean that we must be enemies.”
On Sunday 20 December the archbishop celebrated mass in the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, with the intention of thanking the Church in Eastern Europe for the material help, particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
The Polish Church was among the first to reach out to its confreres after the collapse of communism, and Kondrusiewicz benefited from this support both in Belarus and in Russia, "where religious life was reduced to a desert".
One of the first bishops to visit Belarus was the then primate of Poland, Cardinal Josef Glemp, who arrived in Minsk in 1988 (when the USSR was still there) at the invitation of the Orthodox Metropolitan Filaret (Vakhromeev), a great protagonist of the recent history of the Moscow Patriarchate.
The aid made it possible to renew ecclesiastical life and rebuild churches, because "as our rector at the seminary of Kaunas in Lithuania recalled, as God is eternal, so the reconstruction of the Church is an eternal task".
Even today, Kondrusiewicz recalls, Catholics feel the need to open churches in important Belarusian cities such as Minsk, Grodno, Brest, Mogilev, Gomel ', Vitebsk, where there are large new neighbourhoods with many Catholics, who do not have the opportunity to attend the celebrations: "If there is no church, the faithful often become anonymous Christians".
The main need indicated by the leader of Belarusian Catholics is the formation of the laity, "the Achilles heel of the Church in the East ... everything always falls on the shoulders of priests, even when it comes to administrative or architectural issues".
Together with the laity, even the priests themselves, along with the men and women religious, need a more in-depth formation: "We have no Catholic universities and theological faculties, and we have to send candidates to study abroad, usually to Poland because the proximity of language and culture ".
In the interview, the archbishop touches on many other issues related to the current life of the Church in Belarus, and regarding his return to his homeland, he says: "I hope that everything ends well; I have never been involved in politics, I have always preached the Gospel and tried to realize the social doctrine of the Church ... I really like a thought of the Holy Father Francis, when he remembers that in human history there there have been many revolutionaries who have changed political and economic systems, but none of them has been able to change the heart of man: only the revolution of Christ has done this, and I want to be part of it".
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