Lithuania, Orthodoxy in

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The history of Lithuanian Orthodoxy (a country first mentioned in 1009 in the German Annals of Quedlinburg recount­ing Catholic missionary efforts) is closely related to that of its southern neighbor Belarus, along with the latter’s neighboring countries of Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland. The religious history mirrors the fluid boundaries of these territories in the course of the last millennium. Lithua­nia, in the form of the Yatavag tribe, had Orthodox Christianity present (as a tiny minority) from the time of the 10th-century Kievan evangelization initi­ated by the Byzantines. Numbers of the Lithuanian Imuds also became Orthodox from the 15th century onwards. Belarus missionaries influenced some of the Lithu­anian nobility, but the Christianization process did not progress very far, the Lith­uanian state seeing Christianity chiefly in the form of the Teutonic Knights who wished to convert and annex it. The Lithu­anian court culturally turned towards the East at first, using a form of Slavonic in its official records, but westward contacts and inclinations became increasingly strong. Lithuania conquered Ukraine by the begin­ning of the 14th century, a time when the metropolitanate of Kiev was being devas­tated by Mongol invasions, its hierarch eventually moving to Moscow and assum­ing the title of Metropolitan of Kiev and All the Rus. In 1316 the rulers of Lithuania gained from the patriarch of Constantinople the establishment of a separate metropolitanate for Lithuania, at Novahradak. Orthodox Lithuanians commemorate as their particular patron saints three Orthodox leaders martyred by pagans in Vilnius in 1347, namely Sts. Antony, John, and Eustathy. Soon after­wards, in 1385, there occurred the union of Lithuania and Poland by terms of royal marriage: a time when the Lithuanian prince Jaigalo adopted Roman Catholicism. After the Union of Lyublin in 1569, Lithuania was progressively absorbed into Poland’s slipstream and increasingly Latinized. The westernization of Lithuania was symbolically manifested at the Union of Brest-Litovsk in 1596, which created the “Unia.” Immense pressure was, after this point, placed on the Orthodox Church’s daily life. By the 19th century the Russian Church became Lithuanian Orthodoxy’s dominant patron, abolishing in 1839 the terms and existence of the Unia, a deed which proved to be a dubious liberation for Orthodoxy in the country, since it was locally seen as an attempted suppression of Lithuania’s polit­ical existence as other than a Russian satellite.

The modern history of the nation (modern Lithuania is only a small portion of the ancient lands) has been one of many political and ecclesiastical vicissi­tudes. In 1923, when Poland again annexed Lithuania, the leading Orthodox hierarch, the Russian bishop of Vilnius, Eleutherius Bogoiavlenskii (1868–1940), was deported from the country. Between the two world wars he headed the Auton­omous Lithuanian Orthodox Church from exile, and briefly assumed headship of the Latvian and Estonian Orthodox Churches, too. The Russian Empire and the Polish state dominated the territories from the eastern and western sectors, respectively. The Orthodox Church in Poland, covering most of the lands that had once been part of the autonomous metropolias of Kiev and Lithuanian Navahradak, was granted autocephaly by the patriarch of Constantinople in 1924 in order to extricate it from Russian domi­nation. The tension of due canonical order between the two patriarchates (and inde­pendently proclaimed Belorussian Ortho­dox church bodies) continues to the present in Baltic church affairs, and espe­cially in the wide diaspora. In 1939 Poland itself disappeared between the parturition enforced by Germany and Russia. Soviet rule proved no kinder to Orthodoxy in Lithuania than anywhere else in the com­munist empire. In 1942 under German occupation Orthodox hierarchs in Lithua­nia voted for the establishment of the Belorussian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which was quickly destroyed by the returning Soviets, and its leaders were either killed or fled from the country to the West, where they organized synods in resistance. The Orthodox in Lithuania today are a very small minority of 114,000 faithful out of the national Christian population of 3,250,000, the majority of whom are Roman Catholics. The historical problems of the past have left abiding canonical divisions that require healing.

SEE ALSO: Eastern Catholic Churches; Latvia, Orthodoxy in; Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of; Ukraine, Orthodoxy in the

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Barrett, D., Kurian, G., and Johnson, T. (eds.) (2001) World Christian Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brady, D. (1999) “Lithuanian Orthodox Church,” in K. Parry et al. (eds.) The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 295.

Mankouski, P. (n.d.) One Thousand Years of Christianity in Byelorussia. Brooklyn, NY: St. Cyril’s Byelorussian Autocephalous Orthodox Cathedral.

Urban, W. (1987) “The Conversion of Lithuania: 1387,” Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 33, 4.