Luominės visuomenės reliktai vienuolijų struktūroje XX a.

ENUntil the 1970s, in most of the old religious orders of Catholic men and women established in the Middle Ages and even in the 19th and 20th centuries there were unequal categories of members, the so-called religious choirs. This paper analyzes: 1) how the choirs functioned in Lithuania’s religious orders in the 20th c.; 2) the factors for the deterioration of the structure of the estate religious orders and the Vatican’s attitude toward the religious choirs are investigated; and 3) because the book is devoted to the history of the Kaunas Benedictine convent, the division of this convent into two choirs is highlighted. Until the middle of the 20th c. the Holy See tolerated the estate structure of religious orders, which is reflected in the Code of Canon Rights adopted in 1917. The Church abandoned such an approach in the Second Vatican Council and later decisions, urging the orders of monks and congregations to make the rights of their members equal. In Lithuania the estate structure of the religious orders began to deteriorate long before the Second Vatican Council – in the first decades of the 20th c. with the restoration of the religious orders and the establishment of new Lithuanian ones, people of the peasant estate filled the religious orders. Moreover, the managers and founders of the revived and newly established religious orders came from the unprivileged estates. This paved the way for a more democratic approach to the status of the religious orders.One can notice that the Church of Lithuania, compared to that of Poland, in the interwar period was more democratic and dynamic. While the process of the restoration and creation of new religious orders was going on, the categories of the religious were abandoned here more rapidly. For the Church of Poland the estate structure of the religious orders did not appear as problematic as in Lithuania, for example, the division of the women convents into choruses was directly related to the non-equality of the rights of the first choir representing the Polish-speaking nobility and the second – the Lithuanians peasants. In Lithuania the influence of Archbishop Jurgis Matulaitis MIC determined the attitude to choirs to a great extent. From the beginning of the 20th c. he advocated the alignment of the religious status of men and women, and in 1926 when reforming the Kaunas Benedictine convent, the existing division of sisters into choruses was finally abolished. [From the publication]