The beginnings of Latin Catholic Church in Byelorussia

Christianity in the Latin Catholic tradition reached the area of present-day Byelorussia in an unorganized form in the 13th and 141h centuries. lt was somehow a side effect of the settlers, who came mainly from Poland, and German merchants, who had connections with a strong commercial center of Ryga. The situation of the Catholic Church in the area of present-day Byelorussia changed radically after the baptism of Jagiello and his court. As a consequence of the baptism, based on the foundation of Jagiello in 1387, a year later the canonical establishment of the Vilnius diocese took place. The jurisdiction of the bishops of Vilnius reached as far as the territory of the Historical Lithuania and -lithuanized already at that time- Black Russia, as well as the northeastern lands of the Lithuanian Russia. Thus, the territory of present day Byelorussia was almost entirely open to the missionary activity of the Latin Catholic Church. In the purely Lithuanian territories the Catholic Church had to face the problem of evangelizing the pagans. In the territories of Lithuanian Russia there had already been a strong structure of the Orthodox church, three or four centuries old. In this situation, the court at the time of Jagiello, and later of Witold, displaying much tolerance towards the Orthodox Church, wholeheartedly supported the organizational, cultural, and economic expansion of Catholicism, providing comprehensive help to the new organizational structures of the Western Church. The foundation of the bishopric of Vilnius was immediately followed by granting it administrative and economic charters, and thus shortly an administrative ecclesiastical unit of notable legal and political autonomy was created. This autonomy was also present in the economic sphere, which led to a quick development of the diocesan structure.Uniwersytet w Białymstoku89-10