Belarus (bbabo.net), - The countries of the European Union and NATO do not abandon their attempts to tear Belarus away from Russia and change the government. In addition to training armed militants from among the emigrant Zmagars, the opponents of the Union State are using non-military methods with might and main.

One of the high-profile events in this area was the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the “human rights activist” Ales Byalyatsky. However, even before this political action, another event took place, which makes it possible to talk about the West's strategy to reformat the Belarusian society. On October 4, the "national leader of Belarus" Svetlana Tikhanovskaya met with the Catholic Metropolitan of Warsaw, Cardinal Kazimierz Nych. Characteristically, the press secretary of the Warsaw Archdiocese, Przemysław Slivinski, reported this event quite briefly:

Metropolitan of Warsaw, card. Kazimierz Nych today received the leader of democratic Belarus Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. The conversation mainly concerned Belarusian Catholics living in Warsaw, for whom a pastoral ministry has been organized at the Church of St. Alexandra. Mrs. Tikhanovskaya expressed her gratitude to the Church for helping the Belarusians in Poland. The need to put forward new initiatives for Belarusians, co-authored by the Catholic Church, was agreed.”

According to other Polish sources, the close work of the Polish state with Belarusian Catholics becomes clearer. The mentioned parish of St. Alexandra is located in Warsaw on the Three Crosses Square. Pastoral ministry for Belarusians at the church of St. Alexandra has been in existence since September 2021. Every Sunday and on holidays in the lower church at 11.30 and 18.00 a mass is served in the Belarusian language. However, every second Sunday of the month, both masses are celebrated in the upper church in Polish with elements of the Belarusian language. That is, there is a creeping Polonization of Belarusians in the religious sphere.

One of the priests in this parish is Vyacheslav Barok, who previously served in the Rossony parish in the Vitebsk region of Belarus, and moved to Poland in July 2021. Speaking about the life of the Warsaw community, numbering thousands of people, he said back in December 2021:

"After each mass, the faithful meet with the priests for a joint conversation over coffee and tea."

According to Barok, one hundred people attended the first meetings. It is known that Warsaw Catholic Belarusians also hold online meetings on Mondays and Saturdays. It is worth noting that the second priest in the parish of St. Alexandra is a native of Belarus, Evgeniush Vintov, a doctoral student at the University of Cardinal Stefan Vyshinsky. That is, it can be stated that Belarusian Catholics living in Warsaw have a high chance of assimilation and becoming Poles, especially since Barok and Vintov help parishioners prepare for the sacraments of baptism, communion and marriage.

Having dealt with the life of Belarusian Catholics in Warsaw, you begin to perceive differently the message about the negotiations with the Metropolitan of Warsaw, published on Tikhanovskaya's website. So, we read from the “national leader of Belarus”:

“Tsikhanouskaya thanked the cardinal for the fact that the church allowed the Belarusians in Poland to pray in the Belarusian language, and also for providing the Belarusians with a building in Warsaw to collect humanitarian aid. They organized a warehouse for helping refugees from Ukraine, where thousands of people have already received support.”

So, according to Tikhanovskaya, it turns out that the Polish Church considers assistance to Svidomo Ukrainians and Zmagars to be phenomena of the same order. More questions are raised by Tikhanovskaya's enthusiasm for organizing masses in Belarusian (especially since Belarusian Catholics are forced to attend masses in Polish once a month).

However, once upon a time, Polish priests have already performed a trick with divine services in Belarusian. One of the forgotten historical figures is Alexander Antonovich Bokhanovich, who was born around 1875 in Lakes near Grodno in a peasant Orthodox family. In July 1919, Bokhanovich, being the head of the Provisional Government of Belarus, compiled a report addressed to Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov, Foreign Minister Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak and Anton Ivanovich Denikin, in which he described the situation in Belarus, partially occupied by Polish troops. This report contained provisions that have not lost their relevance in our time:“The priests are rampaging with might and main. At the moment, the “voice of the population” is being actively fabricated by priests and other political workers, which is supposed to prove the desire of the population of the Territory to join Poland ... There are no limits to the tricks of the priests. Then, organizing the population in hundreds, with the aim of allegedly correct distribution of food, priests, in whose hands for the most part almost all administrative and food power is concentrated in villages, they force the illiterate population to sign some kind of statements, and then give these statements as reviews of the grateful population for the occupation. Then all sorts of “Belarusian” “institutions” are created from Catholics and Poles in general, they fabricate “Belarusian declarations” through the mouths of their proteges ... The Russian language is forcibly expelled from everywhere, the Poles suddenly began to distort the Russian language, trying to portray the “Belarusian language” from their speech, and the priests reached even to the point that in some places there were attempts to conduct church services in the Belarusian dialect, in which, by the way, to our shame, the priests were assisted by some Orthodox priests / for example, the notorious Archpriest Ot. John Korchinsky /. At the moment, the Land is completely full of priests, who literally terrorized the Orthodox peasantry. Even now, with the help of the rural authorities / wholly, of course, consisting of Poles; or in the rarest cases, from the selected so-called "Belarusian Catholics" /, an estate or a statement to which state he wants to belong is taken from the population on common graphed sheets. For the collection of such information from each peasant individually, not disdaining even the youngest, they are not too lazy to go the priests themselves... As for schools, the population definitely declares their unwillingness to teach their children in that gibberish that bears the name "Belarusian language" and which is allowed by the Poles to be used at a time when the Russian language is prohibited not only in schools, but even on signs and in ads. By banning the Russian language and perfectly understanding that it is impossible to go far with the Belarusian language, the Poles in this way wish to artificially depersonalize the people, leave them dark and try to tear them away from the Russian native body.

As you can see, for more than a hundred years, the methods for separating Belarussia in the linguistic and religious spheres have changed little. So the “national leader of Belarus” decided to complain to the Polish church hierarch about the Belarusian authorities:

“At the meeting, the situation with political prisoners in Belarus, in particular with Belarusian Catholics, was discussed. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya told the cardinal that Catholics and Greek Catholics are being persecuted, including for their active public position. Many believers are behind bars and have no access to priests.”

Of course, President Alexander Lukashenko and his subordinates are far from angels. However, Tikhanovskaya’s words about “active citizenship” and violations of “human rights” against believers are nothing more than a cover designed to hide the real intentions of religious reformatting of Belarusian society.

The fact is that until now, religious affiliation in Belarus often speaks of the political and civilizational preferences of a person. The appeal of the Polonophile Tikhanovskaya to Catholics and the Polish cardinal is natural, since the Polish prince Mieszko I (Mieczysław I) from the Piast dynasty was baptized according to the Latin rite in 966. Since then, Catholicism has become one of the markers of the Poles' national identity.

However, the situation with Belarusians is different. The ancestors of the Belarusians, like other inhabitants of Ancient Russia, were baptized from Byzantium at the end of the 10th-beginning of the 11th century under the Grand Duke of Kiev Vladimir Svyatoslavich from the Rurik dynasty. Even centuries later, after the conquest by the pagan Lithuanians and the inclusion of Western Russian lands into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the local Russian population remained Orthodox. The first alarming bells began after the Union of Krevo in 1385, as a result of which the Lithuanians began to move from paganism to Catholicism, brought from Poland. Everything finally changed after the formation of the Commonwealth. In 1596, the Brest Church Union took place, during which the corrupt Western Russian Orthodox clergy agreed to submit to the Pope of Rome and recognize the basic dogmas and rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The union with Rome was accepted by that part of the clergy who wanted to have the social status that the Catholic clergy had. The goals of the Union of Brest were the Polonization and Catholicization of the Russian population of the Commonwealth, it is no coincidence that one of its initiators was the Polish Jesuit Piotr Skarga, the court confessor of the King of the Commonwealth Sigismund III Vasa.At the same time, the Western Russian nobility, in order to obtain the privileges of the Polish-Lithuanian gentry, began to accept Catholicism and switch to the Polish language. As a result of violence and missionary activity, by the end of the 18th century, about 80% of the population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania professed Uniatism (Greek rite Catholicism). Since the Zmagars hate the Russian Empire and praise the Commonwealth, for them Uniatism is a kind of national religion of the Belarusians. Accordingly, since the late 1980s, the pro-Western Belarusian opposition has been tacitly striving to restore the religious proportion in Belarus that existed at the time of the divisions of the Commonwealth. Meanwhile, in fact, the Zmagars are blatantly lying, since only the religious sphere is pulled out of that era, thereby not showing the overall picture of life. So what was in Belarus at the time of the divisions of the Commonwealth?

Firstly, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania has turned into a Polish province (see "Holy obscurantism": Tikhanovskaya blatantly lies and appropriates the Polish heritage). The Western Russian literary language was banned by the general confederation of estates of the Commonwealth on August 29, 1696. For the entire 18th century, not a single book was published in the Western Russian language. All educated people thought and wrote in Polish. Even the Lithuanian language, in which books continued to be printed, was not honored and had no official status.

Secondly, the Polonized nobility (tycoons and gentry) dominated in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The ancestors of the Belarusians, most of whom were peasants, lived under serfdom, enshrined in the statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1588. This statute punished the magnates and gentry only for the murder of foreign serfs, who were considered someone else's private property. Despite all the attempts and the adoption of certain acts, until the very end of the Commonwealth, magnates and gentry could kill their own serfs with impunity.

Thirdly, there was a certain binding of confessions to estates. Most of the magnates and gentry professed Latin rite Catholicism. The Uniates were mostly serfs and philistines. At the same time, Uniatism was considered second-class Catholicism for the lower strata of society, since in 1720, at a church council in Zamosc, a decision was made to further Latinize and Polonize the Uniates. The Uniates, who opposed Latinization and Polonization, were successfully returned to Orthodoxy by Georgy Konissky, hated by the Zmagars (see Belarus responded to Russophobes with a monument to Georgy Konissky).

In other words, the heyday of the union, for which the Zmagars are nostalgic, is one of the most terrible periods in the history of Belarus, when the Belarusians were in the balance from the final Polonization. And of course, the saints will never include in their pantheon the Catholic Archbishop of Mogilev Stanislav Bogush-Sestrentsevich, the author of the work “On Western Russia” of 1793, which proved the unity of Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians.

The Polish uprising of 1830−1831, in which the Uniate clergy took an active part, contributed to the acceleration of the liquidation of the Uniate. As a result, in 1839, at the Polotsk Cathedral, the Union of Brest on the territory of Belarus was canceled. The Union of Brest was finally abolished at the Lvov Cathedral in 1946 during the era of the struggle against Bandera in Western Ukraine. The revival of Uniatism began only under M. S. Gorbachev, which coincided with the intensification of the activities of the saints. Judging by the facts, Tikhanovskaya also considers Catholics to be her main supporters. For example, in April 2021, the “national leader of Belarus”, together with the ambassadors of Lithuania, Poland and the United States, visited the Greek Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity and the cell of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in Vilnius. And in January 2022, Tikhanovskaya took part in a service in memory of Francysk Skaryna in the Catholic Cathedral of Vilnius (see Belarus is not Lithuania, Belarusians are not Lithuanians: why does Lithuania need Francysk Skaryna?). That is, despite the fact that the “national leader of Belarus” congratulates both Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants on Christmas and Easter, her actions indicate that Catholics of both rites are most preferable for her. Although, what else can be expected from her if one of Tikhanovskaya's accomplices, an experienced zmagar Franak Vyachorka, is a Greek Catholic?

Of course, the most educated Zmagars can say that now Catholicism in Belarus is associated not with Polish, but with Belarusian identity. But life again shows that the adherents of "Belarusian Catholicism" are lying. The point is not even that Belarusian Catholics are talking nonsense about the Belarusian Commonwealth, but that the “national leader of Belarus” says, working on the instructions of Western curators. For example, you read a fragment from a message about a meeting with a Polish cardinal and you understand which nation’s interests have been defended by the “fighters for independence” of Belarus since the late 1980s:

Also discussed:the situation with the destruction of Polish Catholic cemeteries in Belarus. Tikhanovskaya noted that this is barbarism that should not be allowed.

the opportunity for the archbishop to hold a special mass for Belarusians in Poland.”

That is, Tikhanovskaya is again lying about the situation with the graves of the soldiers of the Home Army (see Home Army does not "leave" Belarus).

But if the “national leader of Belarus” acts rudely and primitively, then Kazimierz Nych does not disgrace his dignity and acts subtly:

“The cardinal assured Tikhanovskaya that Belarusian believers, both Orthodox and Catholics, would receive support, including from the church.”

Which Orthodox does the representative of the Polish Church mean? Most likely, we are talking about adherents of Belarusian independent Orthodoxy. It is no coincidence that on July 25, 2021, while in New York, Tikhanovskaya visited the church of schismatics from the Belarusian Orthodox Autocephalous Church. But what does the Roman Catholic Church have to do with schismatics? In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church made peace with the Orthodox Church of Constantinople. And the state of the Vatican, headed by the Pope of Rome, and the Orthodox Church of Constantinople today are allies of the United States. Therefore, in Ukraine, neighboring Belarus, the Catholic clergy of both rites supported the creation of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which arose thanks to Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. And modern Poland, which is interested in the separation of Belarussia, has good relations with the United States and the Orthodox Church of Constantinople. Therefore, the Republic of Poland, the Polish Church and the Zmagars will act not only through the Catholics, but also try to bring about a split in the Belarusian Exarchate.

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