Background
Abrantovich was born in Navahrudak.
Abrantovich was born in Navahrudak.
He first studied there and then in Saint-St. Petersburg at the Roman Catholic seminary and the Imperial Theological academy. He graduated with the degree of Master of Theology and was ordained to the priesthood on November 9, 1908. As one of the best students at the academy, Abrantovich received scholarship for study at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, where he received Doctor of Philosophy in 1912.
Before World War I, Abrantovich was a faculty member at the Catholic Seminary in Street.Petersburg. There he became very active in the Belarusian movement. He organized several groups of students and initiated numerous Belarusian publications.
He was one of the Belarusian Roman Catholic priests who initiated the organization of the Belarusian political conference in Minsk in March 1917 and the conference of the Belarusian Roman Catholic Clergy, May 24–25, 1917.
When the Roman Catholic Seminary opened in Minsk during the fall of 1918, Abrantovich was appointed rector of this institution. His time was divided between pastoral obligations, teaching, and Belarusian activities in Minsk.
After the partition of Belarus in 1921 between Poland and Soviet Russia, Abrantovich moved to the Poland-controlled West Belarus: first to the city of Pinsk, and in 1926 to the town of Druja where the congregation of Marian Fathers has opened a Gymnasium and where Marianist priests settled in 1923. However, his political activities did not stop there: he vigorously protested the Concordat between the Holy See and the Polish government and supported numerous Belarusian political programs.
At the request of the Polish church authorities, Abrantovich was removed from Druja and sent away to Harbin (China) in the Far East.
In 1939 he was in Rome to elect a new Superior, and decided afterwards to visit his colleagues in Poland (Belarus and Galicia), but in September the Soviet troops invaded the East part of Poland, and the German troops the West part. Father Abrantovich was arrested by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs in October after an attempt to pass the frontier toward German-occupied Poland. He was imprisoned in Lwow, and tortured.
Later on he was transferred to the Butyrka prison in Moscow.
The place and the date of his death are not established with 100% certainty, although it is thought that he died from torture in the Butyrka prison on January 2, 1946.