Adam Stankevich, a historian of the Belarusian national movement in the Catholic Church and a catholic priest

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20 th century in the Western provinces of the Russian Empire among the local Roman Catholics, the first convinced carriers of the Belarusian national idea appeared. Among the most active was the catholic priest Adam Stankevich (1891-1949), a graduate of the Catholic Seminary in Vilna and the Catholic Academy in Petrograd. In the future, he not only took a leading position in the Belarusian national movement, but also be- came an outstanding historiographer of this movement. In 1919, Stankevich settled in Vilna. In 1910-1930, he was active in social, political, scientific, literary and publicistic activities. Stankevich is the initiator of defending the rights of Belarusians to their own national participation in the life of the Catholic Church, to the official introduction of the Belarusian language. He considers the Belarusian people to be divided in political, state, and religious sense. Stankevich believes that the lands of Western Belarus were seized by the new Polish state, formed in 1918. Stankevich continues for many years the struggle for the revival of the Belarusian national identity among Belarusian Catholics. In the early twentieth century, he and the fu- ture Belarusian catholic priests were also helped by the actions of various Orthodox communities and Imperial authorities. In the middle of 1940, Stankevich tried to convince the Soviet leadership of the need to “create the independent Belarusian Catholic Church in the BSSR”. The four-year talks with the authorities have proved useless. Adam Stankevich was accused of anti-Soviet activities. In 1949, he was sent to a camp, where he soon died.