FSIPD
The situation in Latvia in the early 1990s is as follows: Soviet atheistic ideology has brought up several generations of people who have no Christian tradition and who see value exclusively in the material around them. Those who remain Christians are often very faithful and willing to suffer for their faith in Christ, but because of the almost complete absence of religious literature and education, they were seldom capable of theological definitions and philosophical subtleties. During the complete isolation, the "Iron Curtain" separated the Catholic Church in the USSR from the positive modern processes, but also protected it from the destructive processes taking place in the West. The reforms that began after the Second Vatican Council penetrated extremely slowly into the church environment in the USSR.
After the collapse of the Soviet system, the freedmen experienced, on the one hand, an unprecedented religious awakening and, on the other, a great hope for a "better life." The wide-open eyes of the West, the inexperienced minds of believers, especially those who went to study in the West, were confronted with an avalanche of philosophical and theological ideas that announced that the time had come for change, that existing religious forms were obsolete, "petrified." ”Did not correspond to modernity, therefore theology needed to be changed.
Thanks to the priests of the Brotherhood of St. Pius X, who visited Eastern Europe on missionary trips, and especially thanks to Fr. Jean-Marc Rullot, then a professor at the FSSPX International Seminary in Econ, Switzerland, had the opportunity to understand the true nature of the contemporary processes taking place in the Church. It has become clear that the course of modernization of the Church, widely accepted in the West, is not an inevitable obligation, but, on the contrary, a terrible force, a destructive process that we must oppose. Undoubtedly, two paths were opened to the believers in the Latvian Greek Catholic communities:
the first - full of compromises, replacing the church tradition with innovations; leading to the desecration of the Holy Liturgy and the secularization of the priesthood; denial of Christ's very right to a social reign; striving to turn the Church, which is the Body of Christ, into "another world", reconciling Catholic doctrine with liberal and neo-modernist ideas of opportunism, subjectivism, immanence, progressivism and continuous evolution, a false concept of "living tradition" that distorts nature the content, role and application of the whole Teaching of the Church;
the second, unjustly ridiculed and slandered, attacked with great aggression, but uncompromising and rooted in devotion to the Doctrine which the Church always and everywhere professes; the path of fidelity to the true liturgical and mystical Sacrifice and Divine worship; true and holy priesthood; the way of struggle for the preservation of the orthodoxy and the treasures of the doctrinal, moral and liturgical tradition, handed down to us by the Holy Councils and the Fathers of the Church.
On the one hand, the apparent majority of bishops and "reformers", modern believers, among whom for some reason constantly hear about the crisis of faith and vocations, the mass abandonment of monasticism and the priesthood and devastated churches, on the other - the number of traditional believers increases. Their living communities and large Catholic families give the Church new vocations for monasticism and priesthood. Their seminaries, schools, high schools, institutes are growing, establishing themselves in the treasury of the Church Tradition.
With deep gratitude to God, seeing the vital role for the Church of Christ of the true apostolic ministry of the Brotherhood of St. Pius X, which is the flagship among the many in the struggle to preserve the Tradition, believers and priests from Latvian Greek Catholic communities wished to participate with him in the fight against the destructive diseases of the Church. The cooperation with the Brotherhood began in 1993, in the unity of faith, worldview and goals and began to bear fruit.
Seeing the avalanche-like Protestantization of the Church, realizing that these processes cannot refer only to its Latin part, because the Church is one organism and all processes taking place in one part are reflected in its entire existence, the priests W. Svilst and W. In 1997, Masan wrote to the FSSPX superior, Monsignor Bernard Felle, asking the Brotherhood to contribute to the preservation of the Latin tradition in Latvia. In response, the Brotherhood Fathers began to visit Latvia more regularly, serving the Mass "of all times" and preaching the traditional teachings of the Church in their sermons and lectures.
In all, over the years (1993-2015), two bishops and 30 priests from the FSSPX visited Latvia and officiated at the Trent Mass, including the Brotherhood's first and second assistants, Fr. F. Schmidberger, Fr. N. Pfluger, Fr. A. Nelly; 9 hieromonks and 12 religious worshipers of the Catholic tradition. In addition, seminarians and believers came who deliberately visited the faithful in Latvia, or while passing through that country, using the opportunity to participate in traditional worship.
By 2003, four Greek Catholic municipalities were already registered in Latvia: in Riga (1992), in Daugavpils (1992), in Rēzekne (1996) and in Ludza (2003). These municipalities are united in the Protopresbytery (Deanery) of the Catholics of the Byzantine rite, established in 1998 by the Metropolitan of Riga, Archbishop Janis Pujac (Decree № 20 of 21.03.).
In 2017, shaken by the ecumenism of the Catholic Exarchate in Bulgaria, a Bulgarian priest and deacon addressed a letter to Ep. Felle to be accepted in communication with FSSPX. In March 2018, the two were accepted by the FSIPD and are the first mission of traditional Catholicists in Bulgaria. The services are according to the Byzantine rite and are performed in the Church Slavonic language according to Tipika, published in Lviv in 1899 by Father Isidor Dolnitsky.
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