ვატიკანის არქივის რამდენიმე უცნობი მასალა ქართველ კათოლიკეთა შესახებ (XIX-XX სს. მიჯნა)

ანოტაცია

In June 2019, within the confidential archives of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches at the Vatican, Sergo Parulva, an employee of the State Agency for Religious Affairs and a PhD candidate at the Gregorian University in Rome, and I, discovered previously unknown documents, concerning Georgian Catholics from the 19th and early 20th centuries, during
a research expedition funded by the Gelati Academy of Sciences. In this report, we present three documents from our research that shed light on the religious challenges faced by Georgian Catholics in Samtskhe-Javakheti during the early 19th and 20th centuries.
The first document is a letter, dated on 1896, addressed to Pope Leo XIII and signed by 222 individuals, in which the Georgian Catholics of Samtskhe-Javakheti requested the Vatican’s approval to conduct liturgies according to Latin rites, as opposed to the Armenian-language liturgy mandated by the Tsar, which they did not comprehend. The authors of the letter, identifying themselves as ethnic Georgians, expressed their inability to understand Armenian and their prohibition from conducting liturgies in Georgian. However, their plea was disregarded by the Vatican due to apprehensions about challenging Russian imperial policies. Since
1893, as per government decree, Georgian Catholics in southern Georgia had been prohibited from conducting services in the Georgian language. In November 1904, the Georgian Catholics renewed their plea on the same issue, this time directing it to the newly appointed Catholic Bishop of Tiraspol, Joseph Kessler. Additionally, during the onset of the 1905 revolution, one of the articles in the government’s manifesto on religious freedom, issued on April 17 and October 17 of the same year, raised hopes among Georgian Catholics that their demands would be met. Building on this manifesto, they sought assistance from the Viceroy of the Caucasus, “so that, with the authorization of the civil government, we may adopt the Latin liturgical order, as he generously permitted.” Despite this, their plea to the Catholic bishop was disregarded once again. In 1913, Georgian Catholics from Samtskhe-Javakheti reiterated their demands to the Pope. A commission was dispatched to Georgia in response to this appeal, acknowledging the necessity of granting the requested permission to the Georgian Catholics, and yet, the situation remained unchanged.
In a paradoxical turn of events, the Georgian Catholics of SamtskheJavakheti eventually adopted Roman Catholic practices after Georgia was Sovietized. Evidence of this is found in a letter dated 1925, authored by Emanuel Vardidze, identified as “the head of the Catholic Diocese of Georgia and the Vicariate of Armenia-Azerbaijan,” which we also discovered in the Vatican archives. The letter indicates that the villages of Akhaltsikhe and Akhalkalaki adhered to the Latin liturgical order, but under the atheistic Soviet regime in Georgia, divine services were discontinued in Catholic churches. Only the Tbilisi Cathedral of the Dormition remained
active for the Catholic parish of Samtskhe-Javakheti to conduct liturgies in, according to the Roman Latin Rite.