The history of the Roman Catholic parish in Tomsk dates back to the missionary institution founded by Belarusian Jesuits in 1812. Their mission headquarters was in Irkutsk, they visited Tomsk, where they had a brick house with a chapel, several times a year. After the Jesuits were expelled from Russia in 1820, the parish was taken over by the Bemardines. The number of Catholics in the area increased as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and the suppression of the Polish November Uprising in 1831. A church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Rosary was built in 1833. In the years 1835-1862, the parish was taken care of by Father Hieronim Hrynciel, a Dominican, who took care of the appropriate equipment of the new church. . In 1862, the Tomsk parish was taken over by diocesan priests. In 1905, the Act of Tolerance of Tsar Nicholas II improved the situation for Catholics. The Tomsk parish was divided into several new parishes. Siberia was divided into deaneries and in 1911 Tomsk, together with 35,700 Catholics of various nationalities, became the seat of the deanery. The Catholic community was able to organize a Charitable Society, a Catholic school, an old people's home and an orphanage. Preparations to build another church were interrupted by the revolution of 1917. In the years 1917-1938, the Catholic Church was exposed to harassment and persecution. All forms of religious education in schools and beyond were banned for children and adolescents under 18 years of age. The clergy and members of the parish committee were arrested. The parish's property was confiscated. Finally, in 1938, the church itself was transformed into a public institution. Catholic demonstrators continued to meet privately within their ethnic groups. The situation of the Catholic community in Tomsk did not improve either after Stalin's death or after Nikita Khrushchev came to power. Despite their efforts, local Catholics failed to take over their church. The situation began to change only in the 1980s. In 1983, Fr. Józef Świdnicki registered the parish, and the following year he helped purchase the house, which has since been used as a chapel. In 1990, during Gorbachev's Periestroika, the Tomsk Catholic community finally regained its old church. While Fr. Antoni G. Sell revived parish life, Tomsk became the seat of two women's congregations. There has been a revival of the tradition of mercy, the parish supports a shelter for the homeless and a Catholic secondary school. In the post-war period, the Catholic community in Tomsk consisted mainly of Germans from the Volga and people from the Baltic republics. There were also a handful of Poles who survived the purges of the 1930s and their children. In the 1990s, when Germans, Lithuanians and Latvians returned to their ancestral homelands, the church gradually became a meeting place for people united in their search for God. Because their national and racial identities were inextricably mixed in the Soviet melting pot, they prefer to call themselves the "post-Soviet nation".
References
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