Born in October 1914 into an ethnic Polish family at Valga in Estonia, Swiatek was exiled to Siberia, aged three, by Russia’s Tsarist regime, but allowed after the Bolshevik Revolution to return with his family to what was then eastern Poland, where he enrolled in the Catholic seminary at Pinsk and was ordained on the eve of the Second World War.
In April 1941, after just two years as a priest, he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD at his parish in Pruzany and condemned after two months’ brutal interrogation to be shot as a “reactionary cleric”. In June 1941, however, when an invading German army drove the Soviets back, Swiatek escaped and returned to his parish.
But the respite was short-lived. Fr Swiatek escaped another death sentence, this time from the Nazis, when the Soviet Army returned in 1944. But he was rearrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 10 years’ hard labor, serving them out in camps at Marvinsk and Vorkuta. He finally made it back to Belarus in June 1954, where he served discreetly for the next 35 years as rector of Pinsk’s Catholic cathedral until Pope John Paul II made him a prelate and vicar-general in 1989.
He wrote a brief personal account of his “long winter in Stalin’s gulag”, recalling the “endless enclosure of barbed wire where thousands of prisoners died” and his own isolation in the Siberian arctic, where he had used a ceramic cup as a chalice and hid consecrated Hosts in a matchbox for dispensing to fellow prisoners. He remembered the camp commandant’s surprise that a man on whom “there was no need to waste a bullet” had survived the fatigue and hardship.
Arriving back at Pinsk cathedral, he wept when he was told its priest had been condemned to 25 years imprisonment, leaving local Catholics to conduct their own Masses. He took over immediately, but was regularly detained and threatened by the KGB until they “finally gave up trying” and granted him permission to minister.
In April 1991, three months before Belarus became independent, John Paul II appointed him head of a refounded Archdiocese of Minsk-Mogilev, naming him three years later, in November 1994, the first ever cardinal from an eastern Slavic country. As head of the Catholic Church, which makes up 17 per cent of Belarus’s population of 10.3 million, Cardinal Swiatek steered a cautious course with the regime of President Lukashenko, himself a former KGB officer, who won power in 1994 and was re-elected three times amid claims of ballot-rigging and intimidation.
Where the Church’s interests were concerned, however, the cardinal could be tough. In 2001 he condemned plans for a highway through Kuropaty, outside Minsk, where up to 250,000 civilians, including many Catholics, were shot and buried by Stalin’s police in the 1930s, insisting it was right people were “speaking out and standing against the bulldozers”.
In the meantime, now well into his 80s and with failing eyesight, he travelled constantly, rebuilding churches and giving pastoral encouragement to anxious Catholics. He convened a national synod in 1996-8 to draw up a Church “action plan”, and became the first president of Belarus’s six-member bishops’ conference when it was constituted in 1999.
Cardinal Swiatek’s most poignant act of leadership came at the turn of the millennium a year later, when Belarus’s Catholic bishops pledged to forgive the Church’s Soviet-era persecutors—including those who had “sent innocent people to Siberia, imprisoned or deported them from their homeland”.
There were constant problems, including a shortage of vocations at Belarus’s only seminary in Harodnia, and a lack of goodwill from the country’s predominant Orthodox Church. But Cardinal Swiatek remained defiantly optimistic.
By the time he retired in June 2006, at 91 the world’s oldest diocesan bishop, the Catholic Church had expanded fourfold in 15 years, increasing its parishes to well over 400 and its native priests from 60 to 380. Belarus was witnessing mass Catholic pilgrimages, and building permits had been granted for eight new Catholic churches in Minsk alone.
In June 2008 President Lukashenko, an avowed atheist, opened negotiations for a concordat. In April 2009, he met the Pope, who accepted an invitation to visit Belarus, while in a message that October for the cardinal’s 95th birthday, Lukashenko paid tribute to Cardinal Swiatek’s “manliness, dignity and optimism”. He on his part, explained that “For most Catholics, it came as a surprise that a cardinal who still bears the marks of persecution on his own body could forgive so readily… As people, we must forgive, remembering Christ’s words: “Judge not, that you may not be judged.”
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