We expected caution on catholic.by to leave a simple trace: a falling share of news about Belarus and a rising share of reprints from the Vatican. The data do not show that. The site’s Belarus rubric took between 47 and 58 per cent of items every year from 2017 to 2024, and 66 per cent in 2025. The Vatican rubric stayed between 10 and 19 per cent until 2025. The change came in volume and in form. In February 2025, the month after the presidential election, the portal published 14 items, against an average of 117 a month in 2024. In the cases we traced since 2021, it reported detained priests only in short notices from church offices. Their headlines name neither the priest nor the event, and the trials and sentences went unreported. Greetings from Lukashenko appear under his name every Christmas since 2022. What we cannot see is why the portal shrank: we found no public explanation, and the data cannot tell an editorial decision from a loss of staff.
Fewer stories, the same mix
The drop shows in the portal’s own numbering. Every item on catholic.by carries a sequential number in its address. In 2024 the portal used about 1,500 numbers. In February 2025 it used 16, from 18333 to 18348, and our collection holds 14 of them. Output stayed between 12 and 60 items a month for the rest of 2025, reached 100 in April 2026, and ran between 71 and 90 a month from May to September. The year totals are 1,409 items for 2024 and 422 for 2025.
The mix barely moved. The Vatican rubric rose to 22 per cent in 2025, a year with a papal funeral and a conclave. The rubric that fell most was announcements of parish events and pilgrimages: from 276 items in 2024 to 26 in 2025. That was also the year religious communities had to register again, as an official noted at a meeting with the papal nuncio that the portal reported this August.
In February 2025 it used 16, from 18333 to 18348.
From “persecution” to greetings
In August and September 2020 the portal was loud. It published an appeal to the authorities by Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz on 14 August. On 31 August it reported that border guards had refused him entry to Belarus, and then carried the bishops’ statement on the ban. On 11 September it reported a Way of the Cross in Minsk “for an end to the persecution of the Church”. On 8 December a headline said the authorities had detained two priests in Vitebsk.
That was the last headline of its kind. In July 2022 Bishop Yury Kasabutsky asked the faithful to pray for “a priest in imprisonment”, without giving a name. The portal still covered arrests of clergy abroad: Cardinal Zen in Hong Kong in May 2022, and a bishop jailed in Nicaragua in February 2023.
Greetings took their place on the calendar. Lukashenko’s Christmas greeting to Archbishop Józef Staniewski appeared in December 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, and his Christmas message ran in full a day later. In August 2024 Staniewski, on behalf of the bishops’ conference, congratulated Lukashenko on his 70th birthday. Greetings also pass both ways with the state Commissioner for religion. On 30 September 2026 the chairman of the bishops’ conference congratulated Oleg Dyachenko on his appointment to the post and thanked his predecessor for cooperation.
The portal still covered arrests of clergy abroad.
Notices without a headline
In June 2023 Father Yuri Sanko, the bishops’ spokesman, told OSV News that Catholic.by “also had decided not to report the latest arrests”, considering them “too delicate to publicize”. What the portal did publish after that took one form.
Greetings took their place on the calendar.
When the authorities arrested Father Henrykh Akalatovich in November 2023, as OSV reported, the portal ran a “Notice from the Curia of the Minsk-Mahilyow Archdiocese”. It said he could not serve “in connection with his detention” and that the circumstances “are being clarified”. It did not say who had detained him. In May 2024 a notice from the Vitebsk Curia “regarding priests from Shumilino” reported that “law enforcement bodies” had detained Fathers Andrzej Yukhnevich and Pavel Lemekh, and asked for prayers. Neither notice put a name or a detention in its headline.
The trials left no trace on the portal. On 30 December 2024 a court sentenced Akalatovich to 11 years; Yukhnevich received 13. Neither sentence appears in our collection of the portal. In October 2025 the portal reported the papal envoy Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti’s meeting with Lukashenko under a headline about “the importance of dialogue”. On 20 November the bishops’ press service reported the release of both priests. It named them, thanked the Vatican and said “the President of the Republic of Belarus” had decided to pardon them; it gave no charges and no sentences. The same day AP reported the release and Viasna’s count of political prisoners, which still included 29 priests. Independent outlets in our collection named the two priests in 218 items from November 2023; the portal named them in three.
This summer the same form covered the Polish priests. From early July independent outlets reported that Polish priests were leaving after the authorities refused to extend their permits to serve (Reform.news, Zerkalo). On 15 August the portal reported Mogilev’s farewell to the Dominican Father Roman Shults, who after thirteen years was “returning to Poland”. It did not mention a permit. The same day it reported the nuncio’s meeting with Mogilev officials, where an ideology official called the Church “a reliable partner” and the religious situation “stable and conflict-free”. The next day Nasha Niva reported that Shults had no permission to stay and that more than ten Polish priests had been refused extensions.
Neither notice put a name or a detention in its headline.
How sure we are
The fall in output and the stable mix are High, because they rest on every URL in our collection and on the site’s own numbering. The pattern of notices is High for Akalatovich and Yukhnevich, whose names we searched in the full text, and less certain for other priests detained since 2021. The weakest row is the reason the portal shrank in 2025, for which we have only the timing.
How it fits
How it fits. The portal reports the detention of priests in the voice of church offices, under headlines that name no one, and leaves out their sentences. It reports an expulsion as a return home. Greetings from officials run under the officials’ names. This fits T4, incidents come with a media plan, including silence. It is the first test of T4 outside state and pro-government media: here a church institution inside the country keeps the silence, and the state’s greetings fill the space. A simpler reading is that the portal follows the Vatican’s quiet diplomacy, which ended with two priests freed and named in November 2025. On that reading, the silence belongs to no one’s media plan. If the portal calls the Polish priests’ departures expulsions once the permit dispute is settled, the silence served the talks. If departures keep appearing as returns home, the silence is part of the constraint.
What to watch
By 31 December 2026, catholic.by publishes a Christmas greeting from Lukashenko. We expect it does, with High confidence.
By 31 December 2026, a catholic.by headline names a priest detained, sentenced or refused a permit in Belarus. We expect it does not, with Medium confidence.
By 30 June 2027, catholic.by publishes 100 or more items a month for three months in a row. We expect it does not, with Medium confidence.
Method and limits
Our collection holds 13,423 items from catholic.by, almost all published from 2016 to 17 October 2026. We took each item’s rubric from its address. In 2025, 38 items use a new address with no rubric, and in 2026, 178 do, so we leave 2026 shares out. We checked monthly counts against the sequential numbers in the addresses. Keyword counts on headlines and opening paragraphs are noisy: the Belarusian word for court also matches the Last Judgement. We therefore read headlines since June 2020 by hand, and searched the full text since 2023 for the names of Akalatovich and Yukhnevich in several spellings. Yukhnevich’s sentence is taken from AP. Mentions of Archbishop Kondrusiewicz fell from 13 per cent of items in 2020 to between 3 and 5 per cent later. He retired as metropolitan in January 2021, so we do not read that fall as caution. Fewer items name Vatican News as their source after 2020, which may reflect a change in how sources are credited rather than less reprinting. The election and the re-registration mark timing only; we do not claim either caused the drop. Thesis tag: T4.