Thousands bid farewell to Cardinal Swiatek

Thousands of people visited Cathedral of Saint Virgin Mary in Minsk on Saturday to pay their last respects to Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek who died at the age of 96 in a Pinsk hospital on July 21. 

Msgr. Swiatek was Belarus` first Roman Catholic cardinal since 1798 and top Roman Catholic cleric in the country between 1991 and 2006.

Belarusian, Lithuanian and Polish Catholic clergy people, as well as representatives of the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church visited the cathedral.

Among officials who also showed up to pay their last respects to Msgr. Swiatek were Alyaksandr Radzkow, first deputy head of the Presidential Administration; Mikalay Ladutska; chairman of the Minsk City Executive Committee; and Leanid Hulyaka, the government`s commissioner on religious and ethnic affairs.

While talking to reporters, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Belarus, described the cardinal as a landmark figure for the country’s history.

“He did much for the cause of our society unification and was an example for all Belarusians,” he said.

He had a very difficult life and had to survive Stalin-era purges and the further persecution of priests, said Msgr. Kondrusiewicz.

“Today we are praying that God will accept him into his Kingdom,” he said.

Msgr. Kondrusiewicz began the main requiem mass at the cathedral at 1 p.m. He conducted a prayer service and read out a message sent by the current Roman pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, on the occasion of the cardinal`s death.

He was entombed at Pinsk Cathedral on July 25, with his funeral conducted by Archbishop of Krakow Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was a longtime and influential aide to the deceased Pope John Paul II and a friend of Msgr. Swiatek.

Born in Valga, Estonia, on October 21, 1914, Kazimierz Swiatek studied at the Saint Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Pinsk, now in the Brest region of Belarus, before being appointed to head the Pruzhany parish.

The priest was arrested by the NKVD in April 1941, and put on the death row in Brest. He escaped from prison, taking advantage of the confusion caused by the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22.

In December 1944, the NKVD arrested the priest for the second time. In the following year he was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in a gulag. He spent nine years in Siberia and the north of the Soviet Union, working in the taiga and mines. After his release in June 1954, he returned to Pinsk.

In 1988, Msgr. Swiatek was named a chaplain of Pope John Paul II.

In 1991, he was appointed archbishop of the Minsk-Mahilyow Archdiocese and served as head of the Catholic Church in Belarus until 2006. Between April 13, 1991 and June 30, 2011, he was apostolic administrator for the Pinsk Diocese.

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