RUSSIA: A Roman Catholic priest has been ordered to leave Russia, in the latest in a series of expulsions that has stoked animosity between the Vatican and the Orthodox Church and raised questions about religious freedom here.
Immigration authorities revoked the residency permit of Father Bronislaw Czaplicki and told him to quit the parish of Pushkin and leave Russia, where he has lived and worked for a decade, NTV television reported.
No reason was immediately given for the decision on the status of Father Bronislaw, an ethnic Pole who worked on a programme promoting the canonisation of Catholics persecuted during the Soviet era.
He is the sixth priest to be ordered to leave or refused entry to Russia in the last year, a period of deteriorating relations between Moscow and Rome that reached its nadir last April when Bishop Jerzy Mazur, who had been based in Siberia since 1998, was not allowed back into Russia from his native Poland.
The simmering, centuries-old feud between the faiths flared up last February when the Vatican established four fully fledged dioceses in Russia, a move denounced by the Orthodox Church as an attempt to convert its congregation.
Archbishop Antonio Mennini, the new papal envoy to Moscow, last week met the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexiy II, but news agencies cited sources in the patriarchate as saying the meeting did little to ease tensions.
Pope John Paul II, who has stated his deep wish to visit Russia, wrote in a letter last month that he was pained by "the plight of Catholic communities in the Russian Federation, which for months have seen some of their pastors prevented from returning to them ... The Holy See expects from the government authorities concrete decisions that will put an end to this crisis".
Russian authorities have said immigration rather than religious problems have caused the Catholic clergymen to be excluded.
The Orthodox Church and Russian courts have been accused of discrimination against less established faiths, after a 1997 law forced faiths without a long history of Russian activity to undergo a complex registration process, throwing many into legal limbo. The patriarchate rejects the accusations, saying the law helps prevent dangerous sects flooding the spiritual vacuum created by 70 years of Communist rule.
Last month, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom concluded a fact-finding mission to Russia by calling freedom of conscience "fragile".
The Vatican claims 1.3 million faithful among Russia's 143 million people, but the figure is thought to be nearer 500,000.