Atsisiųsti straipsnį pdf - Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademija

278 Ieva Šenavičienė
are: 1) the attitude toward patriotic religious manifestations (Masses of mourning,
grand Masses for patriotic intentions, patriotic sermons, singing of patriotic
hymns, patriotic religious processions); 2) the attitude toward the government‘s
regulations (laws of the imperial government, the investigations of manifestations,
holding of Masses or prayers for the tsar and his relatives, their omitting or
agitation against them, relations with the police); 3) the attitude toward agitational
writings (spreading or prohibiting); 4) the founding of illegal schools, teaching in
them; 5) preparations for the uprising (alleged conferences of clergy and nobility,
organization of the so-called pogroms against Jews loyal to the state, encouraging
peasants to revolt, the collection of funds, gathering of weapons).
The accounts show that it is impossible to assert affirmatively that the clergy
by their actions participated in or suppressed the patriotic movement. Only a few
of them openly supported or rejected it. In most cases, circumstances, including
also whether there was or was not a state of war in their locality, determined the
behavior of the clergy. The intentions of the priests of Vilnius and Gardinas, encouraging
the most important political incidents in the Vilnius diocese, illustrate
this claim. In Vilnius the political commitment of the clergy was manifest: the
priests of the churches of St. John, the Gate of Dawn on their own initiative joined
the patriotic movement and openly shaped the patriotic feelings of society. The
largest patriotic religious procession in the Gardinas Guberniya was not due to
patriotic encouragements, but to the compromises which the developing circumstances
pushed the clergy.