Metric books of the Roman Catholic parishes on the territory of the BSSR in 1945–1991

Abstract

The article analyzes the changes that the metric books of the Roman Catholic parishes of the BSSR underwent in the conditions of the anti-religious campaigns in 1945–1991. With the establishment of the Soviet power on the territory of Belarus, active secularization processes began in all spheres of social life. One of the aspects of the secularization was the ban in 1917 on keeping metric books. They were replaced by the civil status acts registered by the Registry Office. After the accession of Western Belarus to the BSSR in 1939, All Catholic believers in Belarus started getting spiritual guidance from the Apostolic Administration of Vilnius and its branch in Bialystok. As a result, at an unofficial level, due to the demands of the bishops in those Roman Catholic parishes that were not liquidated, the practice of metrication continued. They lasted the whole phase of existence of the Soviet state. The key moment of the functioning of the metric books in the post-war period was the instruction of the Apostolic Administrator in 1948. It emphasized the primacy of the ecclesiastical law over the civil law in relation to the metrication materials. The metric books had lost the rigor of the form. The entries were often made in the school notebooks and on the scraps of paper using the non-literary forms of the language. The right to make an entry in the books on baptisms, marriages, burials was granted to the people who had not been ordained.