Eduard von der Ropp

Early life

Edward Ropp was the third of four sons of Julian Emeryk Ropp, a Polish noble, descendant of the Baltic German nobility. His father was a direct descendant of Theodoricus de Raupena, the eldest brother of Bishop Albert who founded the city of Riga in 1201. His mother, Izabela Józefa Plater-Zyberk, daughter of civil vice-governor of Vilnius Michał Plater-Zyberk, was from a family which owned estates at both Lixna (Līksna) in Latgale (then Vitebsk Governorate) and Bewern (Bebrene) in Sēlija (then Courland Governorate).

Edward Ropp was born in Līksna on December 2, 1851. He received his university education in Saint Petersburg and graduated in 1875. After graduation he remained in Saint Petersburg working for the Russian government. In 1879, he decided to enter the Roman Catholic seminary in Kaunas. He then went on to study theology in Innsbruck, Austria, and Fribourg, Switzerland. Upon his return in 1886, he was ordained a priest in Kaunas.

After ordination, Fr. Ropp was sent to Liepāja in Courland where he worked as a parish priest in years 1889-1902. There he began enlargement of a small church building into what is now the Cathedral of St. Joseph. In 1893 he was given additional responsibility as the vicar of all parishes in Courland.

Episcopal ministry

Ropp was appointed bishop of Tiraspol, with the see in Saratov, on 9 June 1902 by Pope Leo XIII. It was a huge diocese encompassing all of Southern Russia and Caucasus.

Only a year later on 9 November 1903 he was appointed bishop of Vilnius by Pope Pius X. On 2 December 1903, Ropp was installed in Vilnius Cathedral. He traveled back to Saratov in 1904 to co-consecrate his successor as bishop of Tiraspol Josef Alois Kessler on 10 November.

The Diocese of Vilnius was the largest Catholic diocese in the Russian Empire in terms of the number of believers and parishes. It was also subject to the greatest repression because of this. Bishops were usually subject to exile, and the diocese was ruled by administrators. In early 1902, Bishop Stefan Aleksander Zwierowicz was exiled to Tver for issuing a ban on Catholics sending their children to Orthodox schools. In 1903, he agreed to take over the Sandomierz diocese, and in his place Edward Ropp was appointed Bishop of Vilnius.

On April 17, 1905, Tsar Nicholas II issued a tolerance decree allowing members of the dissolved Uniate Church to return from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism. Bishop Ropp issued directives facilitating conversion, including conducting religious instruction in the language of the faithful. By the end of 1908, according to official Russian data, 30,318 people in the Vilnius diocese had converted.

In January 1906, the bishop founded the daily newspaper Nowiny Wileńskie. However, he soon purchased Kurier Litewski from Feliks Zawadzki, merged the editorial staff of his newspaper into it, and continued publishing under that title. Additionally, the Catholic weekly Przyjaciel began to appear in Vilnius. The press activities aimed to promote the program of the Constitutional Catholic Party of Lithuania and Belarus, founded by the bishop, which sought to fight for the social and religious rights of Catholics of all nationalities and to prevent ethnic conflicts among them. The party's program included land reform, the fight for workers' rights, the right to strike, freedom of speech and religion, and judicial independence. The progressive nature of the program led to the party's closure after just eight months, on October 6, 1906.

The bishop carried out active pastoral work, visiting parishes with the charismatic Fr. Jan Kurczewski, consecrating churches, and delivering sermons in both Polish and Lithuanian. His goal was to ease Polish-Lithuanian tensions related to the struggle over the auxiliary language of worship in mixed parishes.