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Belarusian Catholics, Protestants celebrate Easter

Easter services were held in Roman Catholic, Uniate and Protestant churches across Belarus on April 8 to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In his Easter homily, Belarus’ top Roman Catholic cleric, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, lashed out at people for “seeking happiness in sexual pleasures and greedy collections of material wealth” and condemned abortions, divorces and assisted reproductive technologies, as well as denounced human arrogance.

“Thus, God is often interpreted as a sort of mascot. It is an addition to the warmth that we want to create around ourselves. This leads to sense being mixed with nonsense, truth with lies, life with death,” said the message.

Msgr. Kondrusiewicz also sounded an alarm over what he described as the fresh persecution of Christianity. “This is evidenced by the introduction in some countries of the world, which take pride in their developed democracy, of regulations that contradict divine and natural law, a ban on Christian symbols, an intention to make faith a person’s private affair. Today the manifestation of secular and liberalistic trends and the propaganda of material atheism are becoming increasingly visible,” he warned.

Alyaksandr Lukashenka also extended Easter greetings to the country’s faithful, describing the holiday as a symbol of hope and a source of “overpowering love.” “And in our turbulent time people draw strength from it in order not, under any circumstances, to renege on the vocation of the human being and Christian - making the world better step by step,” the presidential press office quoted him as saying.

“Let the Easter mood fill your homes, bringing along joy and peace of mind, and let the feelings evoked by the holiday inspire you to serve the Fatherland, engage in creative work and do acts of mercy. And let there always remain stability and concord in our native Belarus,” Mr. Lukashenka said.

Some 1.5 million Belarusians are said to consider themselves Roman Catholic Christians. The Roman Catholic Church in Belarus has 619 parishes.

There are 18 Uniate and more than a thousand Protestant communities in Belarus. //BelaPAN