The History of religion in Lithuania since the nineteenth century

ENThe turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century coincided with major changes in the field of religious life in Lithuania. Most of all they affected the country's dominant confession, the Roman Catholic Church, which until the middle of the nineteenth century had held mass mostly in Latin or Polish. Later, a process of "Lithuanization" began as a result of religious education in the native language that was organized on a broad scale in order to prevent attempts of the Tsarist government to replace the Polish-Catholic influence by Russian Orthodoxy. This programme nursed both Catholicism and a Lithuanian, as distinguished from Polish, ethnicity. Under Tsarist pressure, these two forces intertwined gradually in the second half of the nineteenth century into the phenomenon of the "Catholic Lithuanian nation". This convergence of emerging Lithuanian nationalism and Catholicism, in a manner somewhat similar to what was occurring in Poland, became especially visible at the beginning of the twentieth century. Three factors helped to foster this process. First, there was a significant change in the socio-ethnic composition of the priests. The considerable growth in the number of priests from emancipated peasant families was determined not only by the above-mentioned programme of religious education but also by the restrictions imposed by the Tsarist government on the secular intelligentsia. In 1894 it was prohibited to employ secular Lithuanian Catholics in the territory of Lithuania. Paradoxically, this discriminatory legislation had a beneficial effect on the clergy. The priesthood now attracted talented nationally conscious youth who did not want a career somewhere in Russia after completing their education. The generation of Catholic priests who matured in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century was probably the most talented in the recent history of Lithuania. [Extract, p. 37]

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