In a double blow to the tiny Protestant minority in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, arsonists on June 15 burned down a provincial Baptist church, and an angry mob picketed a Pentecostal church in the capital, Tbilisi.
“They blocked the streets with their cars and wouldn’t let anybody through. They yelled at us, ‘Take your sect and get out of Georgia!’” Nikolai Kalutsky, pastor of the 250 member Pentecostal church, said June 18 in a telephone interview from Tbilisi.
The crowd, who numbered 60 at its peak, succeeded in preventing believers from attending the 10 a.m. service and a charitable luncheon scheduled for afterward.
Kalutsky, 53, said about 20 policemen watched the daylong protestant but did nothing to stop it or help escort church members past the demonstrators.
In both the protest and the arson, Protestant leaders are pointing fingers at local priests from the country’s dominant Georgian Orthodox Church.
Kalutsky said he overheard a demonstrator conferring by mobile phone with a “Father David.”
Nearly one year ago, Kalutsky’s church was the scene of a two-day demonstration led by two orthodox priests who roughed up worshipers, sending Kalutsky’s wife to the hospital for three days with head injuries, he said.
A spokesman for the Georgian Orthodox Church said June 18 he had not heard of any priests from his church being involved.
“What happened is unacceptable. We are indignant,” said Zurab Tskhovrebadze, adding that he spoke out against the violence on the church’s national Radio Patriarchate program.
“This will come to an end sooner or later because most [orthodox] people do not have these feelings of hatred,” he said.
Georgian Baptist Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili reported in an e-mail, “The local people have already told me that they suspect the church was burned down by or with the help of the local orthodox priest.”
The Baptist church in the town of Akhalsopeli burned down at about 4 a.m. Sunday and will require an estimated $10,000 to reconstruct, Songulashvili wrote, noting that the congregation’s 30 families do not have such a sum.
In what some observers viewed as a positive sign that Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze was fulfilling a promise to uphold religious freedom, a Georgian court ordered the arrest earlier this month of a renegade orthodox priest accused of leading a mob to burn tons of Baptist religious literature. But police have yet to arrest the priest, despite his appearance several times on Georgian television.
(RNS)
Share with others: