Postscript.

The following extract from the Ecclesiastical Gazette of Vienna has been reproduced in an Extraordinary Supplement of the Allgemeine Zeitung, of Augsburg, for the 11th May 1854. I subjoin a translation of it in a postscript, as an additional evidence of the persecution to which the Greek Church united with Rome has been subjected in Russia, and which I mentioned on page 161 of this work:—

Spies appointed for this especial purpose transmitted, in their reports to the Government, lists of such individuals as were suspected to be Catholics at heart; and if all the exaggerated accounts which had been made of the Spanish Inquisition were true, they would be thrown into the shade by the proceedings that were adopted against the above-mentioned individuals. And indeed it is an averred fact, that many of them fell a victim to starvation, blows, and other cruel treatment. The Catholic inhabitants of Worodzkow were forced with stripes, by the Governor 283 and his satellites, to sign a voluntary petition, expressing their ardent wish to be received into the pale of the orthodox Russian Church. The names of those who could not write were signed by others, and whoever showed the slightest manifestation of his desire to remain a Catholic, after having performed this voluntary act, was treated as one guilty of high treason. The same proceedings as at Worodzkow were adopted in a hundred other places, whose voluntary petitions were obtained with bloody stripes of the knout. The unfortunate petitioners were, in order to perform this operation, dragged from their homes, sometimes to a distance of 18 or 20 versts (1-½ verst to an English mile), and those who steadfastly refused to sign were treated by the Russian papas with the utmost cruelty and indignity. They were put into irons, barred up in cold prisons without any fire, starved, thrown into large tubs filled with an icy and stinking water, and most mercilessly beaten, so that many, in order to escape from such torments, signed the voluntary petition, with hearts as bleeding as their bodies. Many succumbed under these fearful persecutions, which were not much inferior to that which the Christians had suffered under the reign of Diocletian. The Papa Stratanovich extorted the signatures made by the feverishly agitated hands of the clerical victims, whilst his lay associate, Waimainich Zokalinski, performed the same 284 charitable office to other unfortunate individuals. Some of these miserable persons were reduced by starvation and every kind of ill-treatment to such a condition, that they were almost unconscious of what they did in signing the voluntary petitions for the reception into the pale of the Russian Church, all of which were obtained by more or less similar means.

It appears from a great mass of documentary evidence, containing the names of localities and persons, that the proselytism of 1841 was carried out in the following manner:—Military authorities, and Russian papas or priests, visited Catholic villages, and having called together the Catholic peasantry and landowners of the neighbourhood, declared that they must join the Russian Church, throwing into prison those who resisted the summons. In the most part of cases, a petition for this object was signed by some hired wretches in the name of all the community, of whom many often knew nothing about this business, but when they behaved as Catholics, they were punished, as guilty of high treason.

The Allgemeine Zeitung states, in giving this extract from the Ecclesiastical Gazette of Vienna, that this periodical contains many well-authenticated cases of religious persecution against the Roman Catholics of Russia; and I have little doubt that if the Protestants of Western Europe had taken as much pains to ascertain and denounce the persecution of their 285 brethren in the Baltic provinces of Russia, which I have mentioned on p. 162, as is done, be it said to their great honour, by the Roman Catholics, they would find many acts of persecution directed against the above-mentioned Protestants, as flagrant as those which have just been described.