Activities of the Dicastery

Starting Again from Popular Piety

Ad Limina Visit of the Bielorusian Bishops
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The Bishops of Belarus came to the Dicastery on their Ad Limina Visit and shared the testimony of a Church that is slowly rising up again after having been oppressed for 70 years by totalitarianism. The fact that the Belarussian Church is in full rebirth is clearly confirmed by the numbers. Just think, in 1991, when the Soviet Union was disintegrated and Belarus became an independent state, there were only 110 Catholic parishes and 60 priests in the country. Today, the Belarusian Church has an archdiocese and three suffragan dioceses, with a total number of over 500 parishes and the same number of priests.

The community is still a minority in the country (just 14%), but it is alive and dynamic. This is shown by the great flowering of local lay movements and associations that have sprung up over the past 20 years. The Bishops, reporting on the situation of the families in their country where one marriage out of two, unfortunately, ends in divorce, said that the percentages touch 70% of the young couples. On the subject of life, the Bishops did not limit themselves to indicating the alarming numbers of unborn children who are not brought into the world because of widespread abortion. To foster hope, they illustrated the work that the Catholic Church is doing, in coordination with other religious confessions, to obstruct the rampant culture of death. For example, the creation of family clinics, even if just small ones, for a discreet presence in some clinics of Belarus—where every woman can legally ask and get an abortion up to the 22nd week of pregnancy—, has given many women the opportunity to make the decision to welcome their children’s lives.

The Bishops assured that some of their families will come to the 2018 World Meeting of Families in Dublin and that there will be a representation of their young people at the WYD in Panama.

 

16 February 2018