Archpriest Michał Plis: An Obituary

(Obituary)

On 29 April 1924 there died a member of the Vilnia Spiritual Consistory and Keeper of the Keys of the Cathedral, Archpriest Michał Plis.

The deceased belonged, together with the late Archpriest A. Belavents, to the already small handful of older Belarusian priests.

Father Michał was born in the Hrodna region and was educated at the Vilnia (then Lithuanian) Spiritual Seminary, which he completed in 1879. From that time, for forty-five years, the working life of the deceased went on, first in the countryside (in the Ashmiany region) and then in Vilnia. And one can only marvel, and take as an example for oneself the ideology of this man, when one recalls the conditions in which he had to live and work. A young lad who knew no language but Belarusian in his parents' home was carefully worked upon in the local seminary, that well-known factory of "the Russian spirit and autocratic Orthodoxy". But all this did not break the strong spirit of Father Michał, and he was able to carry through, for nearly half a century, a sincere love for his native culture and to create the ideology of a native Belarusian church.

The abilities of the deceased more than once drew to him the attention of the distinguished prelates who occupied the Vilnia see. In the end Tikhon, Archbishop of Lithuania and Vilnia (now Patriarch of Moscow), appointed him his representative at the Moscow Church Council of 1917–1918.

In recent years Father Michał firmly took his stand on the path of the revival of the Belarusian church, and boldly and steadfastly spoke of the need to have it, resolutely rejecting foreign tutelage, from whatever side it might come.

It is dear to us Belarusians to note also that the deceased archpriest was the first teacher of Religion at the Vilnia Belarusian Gymnasium and that he was the first to introduce into the church the singing of religious songs in the native Belarusian language.

May the native earth lie lightly upon you, our dear Father Michał! We shall not forget your thoughts!