gregorianka.belynichi@gmail.comThe Shrine of Our Lady of Białynicze
Białynicze (Byalynichy) on the River Drut, near Mogilev, was for centuries one of the most important Marian shrines of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was called the “Częstochowa of Belarus”. Today the parish is rebuilding the destroyed shrine.
The image of Our Lady of Białynicze
The image shows Mary with the Child in the Hodegetria type – “She who shows the way”. Its origins are lost in legend. According to the Eastern tradition, the icon was brought to the Drut by monks fleeing Kyiv from the Tatar invasion of 1240. The Catholic tradition tells of a mysterious wandering painter who, in the 1630s, gave the Carmelites an image painted on a window shutter – the faithful saw in him an angel.
The image was venerated by Catholics and Orthodox alike.
The Carmelites and the “Jasna Góra of Lithuania”
In the 17th century Lew Sapieha, Grand Chancellor of Lithuania, founded a Carmelite monastery in Białynicze, whose friars cared for the miraculous image. The shrine was the easternmost place of pilgrimage in the Commonwealth. On 20 September 1761 – with the consent of Pope Benedict XIV – the Bishop of Smolensk, Jerzy Mikołaj Hylzen, crowned the image. At the end of the 19th century as many as ten thousand pilgrims a year came to Białynicze.
A time of trial
In 1876 the tsarist authorities seized the church and handed it over to the Orthodox Church. The fate of the original image is unknown: according to one account it was hidden, according to another it was lost during the evacuation of the museum in Mogilev in 1941. After the revolution the Bolsheviks closed the church, and in the 1960s the Soviet authorities blew up the church and the monastery buildings.
The rebirth of the parish and the rebuilding
The Catholic parish in Białynicze was revived in the early 1990s. Today the community is preparing to rebuild the shrine – a design for a new church has been drawn up, and we show its visualisations on the home page.
By requesting Holy Masses through gregorianka.com, you become part of this work: the offerings support the priests and the rebuilding of the Shrine of Our Lady of Białynicze.
Sources (in Polish)
The Shrine of Our Lady of Białynicze
For centuries Białynicze on the Druts river was one of the most important Marian shrines of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, known as the “Częstochowa of Belarus”. The Carmelite church with the miraculous image of Our Lady, crowned in 1761, was destroyed in Soviet times.
Today the parish is rebuilding the shrine, and every Mass requested here supports this work.
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