POINTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE

 

“IT WAS A BIT of a surprise to read all that stuff about Belarus as I have just been there.  At the road sides in the forests on the outskirts of Minsk there are hundreds of Orthodox Crosses erected in the last 10 years or so to mark the places where Stalin’s victims of 1937-8 were taken out and shot.  There are also long lists of names of the New Martyrs of Minsk added to the “O Lord save Thy people…’ at the vigil.  Fr Andrei, the convent priest, knew the list off by heart and it consisted of well over 40 names.  In Mogilev, the abbess of the Convent gave me an icon of St Paul of Mogilev who was shot in 1937 and whose icon towers over the interior of the Convent and over the interior of the Cathedral.  She told me that her whole Convent was a grave of the new martyrs as many priests and pious lay people were shot against the inside wall of the altar in 1937.  Their relics were not discovered until 1993 when the building was returned to the Church.  Everywhere I went people stopped to ask for a blessing, guards raised their military caps and showed respect and friendliness towards me (if a little amused / bemused that a man dressed as I was did not speak any Russian!)  Even the border guards, notorious in Belarus for being rather difficult, were absolutely charming to me.  In Mogilev, which is much poorer and more polluted than Minsk and which also suffered terribly under both Lenin and Stalin as well as the S.S., the children ran through the streets after me shouting Batiouska, batiouska, blagoslove.  That is when I realized why my hosts had filled my pockets with sweets which the priests there seem to give when they give children blessings.  Actually, father, perhaps others would not have had the reception I had, but I was treated with the utmost Christian kindness wherever I went even discovering that both Belarussian men and women open doors for priests and expect them to go through first!  So, your writer may have experienced some obstruction from the authorities but I found totally the opposite.…”  Fr P. E.,  Birkenhead. 

 

… THANKS for the description of your experiences in Belarus - I do not think that they necessarily conflict with the report that we put in “The Shepherd,” though.  That report was from the Forum 18 News Service, and in essence dealt with a very specific case in Kuropaty.  It was one in which if anything the Church there came off with credit.  The Bishop Artemi refused to remove the icons even under pressure, and said he could not rewrite history.  In other words he confessed the Soviet persecution of the Church.  I do not know if you went to Kuropaty, but I suspect that the activities of the KGB might well vary from one area to another.  Maybe, where you went, they are less militant, and less inclined to try and cover the Soviet persecution of the Orthodox.  Also what you write is about the piety, devotion, hospitality and love of the people themselves, which seems exemplary, but I do not think that the extract that we printed from the Forum 18 news release in any way suggested that it was otherwise.  It was critical only of the pressure that the KGB is evidently putting on the Orthodox.   I cannot quite understand why you would take exception to that.  I think that by pointing these things out we support the Christians there, and that is something which we want to do.

 

Note:  We have printed an unusually large portion of our correspondent’s letter, both to give balance to our earlier report, and because it manifests a life of piety and practice among the faithful in Belarus which is often sadly lacking in the rather cerebral world of convert Orthodoxy in the West - an example to us.

 

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