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Belarusian Christians celebrating Easter

Easter services were held in Christian churches across Belarus on April 4 to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This year the Eastern Orthodox Easter coincides with the Western Protestant Catholic Easter, with all Christian denominations in Belarus marking the religious feast on the same day.

In his Easter message, Minsk and Slutsk Metropolitan Filaret, head of the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, used a quote from the Bible’s Second Book of Esdras. “Do right to the widow, judge for the fatherless, give to the poor, defend the orphan, clothe the naked, heal the broken and the weak, laugh not a lame man to scorn, defend the maimed, and let the blind man come into the sight of my clearness, keep the old and young within thy walls. Wheresoever thou findest the dead, take them and bury them, and I will give thee the first place in my resurrection.”

He said that the words “contain the basics of public morals and justice.” “In modern parlance, these words from the Scriptures lay down the Bible’s social program topical not only for the church and the state but also for the entire world community.”

Belarus’ top Roman Catholic cleric, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, said in his Easter address to the clergy and laity that “today God frees people from the darkness of sin and death” and warned against “hiding one’s head like the ostrich hides his in the sand in the face of difficulties.”

On the opposite, commending himself to God, he [the Christian] must aspire to the triumph of the moral law, life, truth and justice. A crisis happens when there is a change of values, when true Christian values set by God are replaced by others, which are in fact anti-values,” Msgr. Kondrusiewicz said.

As Maryna Tsvilik, a departmental head at the office of the government’s commissioner on religious and ethnic affairs, told BelaPAN, the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church controls 11 eparchies. There are 1,315 Orthodox temples in the country and 152 more are under construction. The number of Orthodox communities has reached 1,509, with as many as 1,564 priests conducting worship.

The Exarchate runs five theological schools, including the Zhyrovichy Theological Academy and Zhyrovichy Theological Seminary, 31 monasteries, 14 brotherhoods and nine sisterhoods.

The Roman Catholic Church in Belarus consists of 470 parishes and four eparchies.

There are 466 Roman Catholic churches and 414 priests, including 164 foreigners, in Belarus at present. Twenty-eight more churches are under construction.

Fourteen Protestant denominations are represented by a total of 997 communities in Belarus.