The square would look like any other in Bulgaria were it not dominated by two 40-metre-high Lombard-style bell towers belonging to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church.
It is a large church for the standards of a small Bulgarian town and its style is unusual for Bulgaria as well.
That is because it is a Catholic church, a spiritual home for thousands of Catholics that have lived in the region near Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city, for about half a millennium.
There is little sign that, in less than an hour, the church will be brimming with worshippers celebrating Easter and that there will be almost no space left to seat all the members of the parish.
But once the bells start ringing half-an-hour before mass, small groups appear from all sides of the square, quickly filling the spacious interior of the church.
Families greet each other as they enter, trying to squeeze onto the benches so that more people can sit.
Lone elderly women in black headscarves help each other to climb the church stairs. Young altar servers sporting waggish combinations of white cassocks and Adidas trainers lead the procession.
As the service starts, everybody joins the young priest, Fr Mladen Plachkov, in his prayers.
“I shall not die but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord,” Fr Plachkov chants in Bulgarian, reciting Psalm 118:17. Everybody responds: “Amen.”
During the one-hour liturgy, a thousand voices sing in tune with the melodic choir, creating an intense atmosphere of piety that is less often felt in an Orthodox church.
“I am happy to see the house so full. I see so many familiar faces, quite a few new ones, as well as some that have come back from abroad. This gives me enormous hope,” the priest says. Even a newcomer can feel the sense of community.
Anticipating a very important guest:
At least 1,000 people flocked to the church for the Easter liturgy – but that is nothing compared to what will happen in a fortnight, when the church will host none other than Pope Francis himself.
He will come to Rakovski on May 6 as part of his apostolic visit to Bulgaria, lead a service and give First Communion to Catholic children from across the country.
Over 50,000 people are expected to come to Rakovski to see the Pontiff, and there is hot competition about who will get a seat for the liturgy.
The visit is a milestone event for Bulgarian Catholics, who number between 50,000, according to official statistics and 80,000, according to informal estimates.
Unlike the country’s large Turkish Muslim minority, the Catholics of Bulgaria are little known.
But their close-knit communities, scattered across the north and the centre of the country, have been an integral part of the fabric of Bulgaria for centuries.
Major influence on Bulgarian history:
“Despite being a small minority, they [the Catholics] have had a disproportionate importance on the development of the country,” says Professor Svetlozar Eldarov, from the Institute of Balkan Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and a Bulgarian church history specialist.
He says the connection between Bulgaria and the Catholic Church dates back to the baptism of the Bulgarian people in the 9th Century, which was followed by a short-lived union between the Bulgarian and Roman Churches under King Kaloyan in the early-13th century.
“Seventeenth-century Bulgarian history wouldn’t have been the same were it not for the work of the Bosnian Franciscans in Chiprovtsi, followed by the rebellion [against the Ottoman Empire] in the same region in 1688 that local Catholics led,” Professor Eldarov adds.
He maintains that Rome also influenced the struggle of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to achieve ecclesiastical independence from the Patriarchate of Constantinople under its own “Exarch”.
“The pope’s recognition of a Bulgarian Uniate Church [a church loyal to Pope but using an Orthodox liturgy] in 1860 acted as a catalyst for the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate ten years later,” he explained.
“This is because [the Patriarchate in] Constantinople and Moscow suddenly realized that there was an alternative [a Catholic one] for the Bulgarian people,” the historian says.
Later, following the creation of the modern Bulgarian state, Catholic colleges delivered a high-class education to the Bulgarian middle class, and were well regarded.
Bulgaria also played a role in the Second Vatican Council which radically reformed the Catholic Church.
Archbishop Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII from 1958 to 1963, served for a decade as Rome’s Apostolic Delegate to Bulgaria in the 1920s and 1930s.
Mihail Ivanov, an ethnic minorities and religious expert from New Bulgarian University, noted that as Pope, Roncalli would go on to call the Second Vatican Council in 1962, which opened the Roman Church up to ecumenism and to other Abrahamic religions.
“Historians claim that it was exactly the decades he spent in Bulgaria and Constantinople that transformed his worldview towards the East, [the Churches of the East],” Svetlozar Eldarov adds.
In the meantime, however, Bulgarian Catholics suffered heavily under the purges of the post-Second World War Communist government.
The new regime was beholden to the Soviet Union, which took a dim view of religion and the Catholic religion in particular.
“The history of Bulgarian Catholics has a page written with the blood of martyrs – namely the series of hidden and public court trials of the 1950s that ended up with four death sentences for senior priests, with dozens of clerics dying in prisons and tens of others getting long prison sentences,” Eldarov said.
After the grim 1950s, things got back to relative normality. Eldarov, a native of Plovdiv, remembers how local Catholics still loyally attended church in the 1960s, despite the prevailing atheistic propaganda and the blacklisting of churchgoers.
“People went to church early in the morning before going to work in the field or the factories. This is how Catholics diverged from the Orthodox in their piety,” he said.
This feeling of fidelity to religion seems to have endured.
Fr Plachkov says it is down to the work of generations of priests before him who worked hard with the community. “It’s all about patience, persistence and community work,” he told BIRN.
“We try to align ourselves with the spirit of the times. People live in the present, not the past, so we adapt the Gospel to the problems and challenges of today,” he added.
While locals are enthusiastic about the Pope’s visit, for Fr Plachkov it means first and foremost a lot of work.
“It’s a huge pressure on us as organizers. But the faithful require signs to keep their spirits up, and the visit by the Pope to such a small community like ours is a sign that we are not forgotten,” he added.
Chilly reaction from the Orthodox Church:
While Catholics anticipate the arrival of the Pope with enthusiasm, the same cannot be said for the leaders of the country’s main faith denomination, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.
“There is a feeling of coolness, even of unhidden animosity about this visit. It’s a step back compared to the past,” Mihail Ivanov says.
At the beginning of April, the Church’s Holy Synod underlined that the invitation to the Pope came from the state, not from the Orthodox Church.
Synod members said a representative might join the Pope in Sofia’s Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, but added that any form of joint prayer or liturgy “would be inappropriate”.
The synod has been careful to elaborate what Orthodox clerics are not allowed to do during the Pope’s visit, rather than say what they might do together.
This all attitude marks a change of tone compared to the previous papal visit in 2002.
“If you look at photos from the previous papal visit in 2002, you’d see the then Orthodox Church Patriarch Maxim in the welcoming delegation. This is not going to happen now,” Ivanov noted.
He attributes this coolness to internal bickering within the Holy Synod and to a rising conservative trend in all the Orthodox Churches.
Professor Eldarov agrees. “It’s really a surprise. In the 30 years I’ve devoted to studying Catholic and Orthodox history in Bulgaria, I can say that what happens with the attitude of the Holy Synod with regards to the Pope’s visit goes against its own traditions of seeking dialogue with the Catholic faith, which dates back to the Communist era,” he told BIRN.
He admits there are dogmatic reasons why joint worship between the two denominations cannot happen – but adds that nobody asked for that.
“The Bulgarian Synod should have asked for a joint event to take place in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral before the throne of Sts Cyril and Methodius.
“Regardless of whether the Patriarch and the Pope led a spoken or a silent prayer, they should have been there together to send a message about the importance of the two holy brothers’ deeds and the primary role of Bulgaria in the spread of their legacy,” Eldarov added.
This joint gesture of respect to the famous saints seems unlikely at this moment.
Ivanov fears the Bulgarian Church has closed itself off completely, and will not grasp the hand of the Latin American Pope who has consistently called for inter-religious and ethnic peace and social justice.
Ivanov says the current Pope’s keen interest in social justice and migrants leaves the Orthodox Church cold.
“The Bulgarian Orthodox faith is far less socially involved compared to Catholicism. It supplies some care and services to the poor and those in need, but this is incomparable to the work that the Catholic Church does through hospitals, schools and charity organizations,” he noted.
“This work has been further boosted by the social engagement of Pope Francis. Our clerics, by comparison, remain locked behind the gates of the Holy Synod, in their ivory tower,” he concluded.--Balkan Insight
Total Comments:0