Mark R. Elliott
This past year I published a chapter on persecution of Christians in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union in Sorrow & Blood; Christian Mission in Contexts of Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom, ed. by William D. Taylor et al. (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2012): 193-206, that paid tribute by name to three paragons of faith under fire: Metropolitan Nikolai (Orthodox), Lydia Vins (Evangelical), and Nijole Sadunaite (Catholic). Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek, who died 21 July 2011, and who is now belatedly recognized here for his faith, could easily have served as representative of his long suffering church in that chapter.
Of Polish descent, Swiatek was born 21 October 1914 in Estonia, then part of tsarist Russia. After his father died in Polish ranks fighting the Soviet Red Army, mother and son fled to Pinsk, then part of interwar Poland. 1939 witnessed both Swiatek’s ordination and the Nazi-Soviet Pact which doomed Poland to another partition and which landed the young priest in the Red Army zone of occupation. Soviet secret police (NKVD) arrested him in April 1941, and, without trial, he was sentenced to death. Following the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, which spared Swiatek execution, he was released from prison in Brest and served for three of the war years in a Catholic parish in nearby Pruzhany. He was rearrested by the NKVD in December 1944, following the reoccupation of Poland by the Red Army. In July 1945, a Soviet court sentenced him to ten years’ hard labor in the Vorkuta region of northern Siberia. Unlike many, Swiatek survived the grueling work of felling timber in temperatures as low as 40 below zero. Often kept in isolation to curtail his celebration of mass with other prisoners, he managed to outlast Stalin. This Gulag priest was amnestied in 1954 following the Soviet dictator’s death the year before.
Returning to Pinsk in Soviet Belarussia, he endured five months of interrogation and intimidation before receiving permission to serve as a parish priest in one of the few remaining Catholic churches in the Soviet Union outside Lithuania. Faithful traveled thousands of miles to attend his masses, and, in turn, he traveled far and wide to lead secret worship in private flats. In 1991, following the emergence of an independent Belarus, Pope John Paul II named Father Swiatek archbishop of the Minsk-Mohilev Diocese and apostolic administrator of Pinsk, followed in 1994 by his appointment as cardinal. The British branch of Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) answered Archbishop Swiatek’s request for assistance in restoring the Catholic seminary in Pinsk and the cathedral in Minsk. Neville Kyrke-Smith, U.K. national director of ACN, recalled, “People asked him if he was worried about Chernobyl [with its winds carrying radioactive fallout across Belarus], but he said he was more concerned with the Chernobyl of the soul, the post-communist spiritual vacuum in the country.” Kyrke-Smith continued, Cardinal Swiatek’s “pastoral touch and fortitude of faith sustained the Church…and sustained his priests as Belarus emerged from communism…. He led with strength and faith.” Keston Institute’s Canon Michael Bourdeaux ended his tribute to this stalwart prelate as follows: “Stalin once asked, in scorn, ‘How many legions has the Pope?’ The ministry of Cardinal Swiatek provides the answer.”
Sources: John Newton, “Tribute Paid to Cardinal Who Survived the Gulags,” Religious Information Service of Ukraine (RISU), 21 July 2011; http://risu.org.ua/en/ index/monitoring/kaleido_digest/43504/; and Michael Bourdeaux, “Indomitable Soul Braved Stalin’s Worst,” Manchester Guardian, 4 August 2011.
Mark R. Elliott is editor of the East-West Church and Ministry Report, Asbury University, Wilmore, Kentucky.