Without an announcement of the charges against Fr Anatol Parakhnevich, locals concluded that they may be linked to his commemoration of Polish citizens who died in the first half of the twentieth century in the territory of modern Belarus.
A court in Belarus began the trial of a Catholic priest on criminal charges after more than six months in detention.
Fr Anatol Parakhnevich was arrested in mid-March and held in a remand centre run by the Belarusian state security agency, the KGB. The Katolik.Life news site reported on 6 October that his trial for “high treason” hand begun behind closed doors.
The 66-year-old was the parish priest of Olkovichi, in the Vileyka district of the Minsk region.
Since there was no official information regarding the charges, locals assessing available evidence concluded that the grounds for their priest’s arrest may have been his efforts to preserve the memory of Polish citizens who died during the first half of the twentieth century in the territory of present-day Belarus.
Christian Vision, a platform that monitors religious persecution in Belarus, notes that “in 2022, state propaganda had already mentioned [Parakhnevich] in a negative context after he took part in a reception marking Poland’s Constitution Day at the Ukrainian Embassy in Minsk, attempting to portray this as something suspicious”.
Based on information from local Catholics, Katolik.Life also reported that Fr Parakhnevich openly opposed Russia’s attack on Ukraine, condemned the war and called for peace and repentance.
As of mid-September, 17 Polish-born priests had their residence permits revoked. According to Christian Vision, the number of priests that were ordered to leave could be even higher than official statistics, but some had requested Belarussian citizenship in order to remain in their parishes.
“Obviously, it is a general state-wide policy based on the view that Polish clergy are agents of Polish influence, just as in the old Stalinist days when clergy were tried for espionage,” said an observer familiar with the Church in Belarus, who asked to speak anonymously.
“Of course, I feel very sorry for the parishioners who will be left without spiritual guidance, as there are still not enough clergy of Belarusian origin to fill all the parishes, and with a current crisis of vocations the church in Belarus finds itself in quite a dire situation,” he told The Tablet.
He also suggested the recent appointment of a new state Commissioner for Religious Affairs, Oleg Dyachenko, might reflect negatively on the churches’ relationship with the state: “This is a man who is completely unfamiliar with the Belarusian context, a man who hails from Siberia, while in Belarus there are certain subtleties to the interreligious relations.”