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The modern Catholic problem in Russia, like the Jewish problem, begins with the Polish Partitions; and its history ends with its violent solution in 1923 by the Bolsheviks, who completed the task at which the tsars had so long and persistently worked. The human material of this story consisted of 1,693,549 Roman Catholics and 3,033,968 Greek Catholics in 1804, if we excluded those who had not received the sacraments. By the same year the Latin Catholics had been organized into the vast Archdiocese of Mohylew and seven suffragan sees of Wilno, Samogitia, Luck-Zytomir, Kamieniec, and Minsk. Except for the establishment of Tiraspol-Saratov and the government suppression of Minsk and Kamieniec, this remained the hierarchical organization of the Latin Catholic Church in Russia. The Greek Catholic Church consisted of the Archdiocese of Polock and the dioceses of Luck and Brest, all of which disappeared in the union of Polock (1839) that forcibly annexed the Uniate Church to the Russian Orthodox. |
