Pontiff Hails a Tenuous Success Story

Maria Messmer, 72, climbed to the choir loft for a bird’s-eye view of the pope’s Mass here Monday in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It was, she said, a moment of closure on her years of suffering under Soviet rule.

Nearly every Roman Catholic bishop, priest, nun and seminarian in Central Asia’s five former Soviet republics was present--about 160 in all. They joined Pope John Paul II in celebrating the survival of Catholic communities, which Josef Stalin had outlawed, uprooted from Eastern Europe and banished to closed cities or death camps on the Kazakh steppes.

But despite the church’s new freedom here in the decade since the Soviet Union’s collapse, its membership has been dwindling as tens of thousands of ethnic Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and others flock to their ancestral lands. And though the pope held up Kazakhstan this week as a model of interfaith tolerance, some Catholics here wonder whether their church can survive in this predominantly Muslim region.

Monday’s Mass was part tribute to the Catholics who suffered what John Paul called “unspeakable trials” of the Stalin era and part rallying cry to the survivors and their descendants to shore up the region’s fragile Catholic parishes.

“Brothers and sisters! Remain ever faithful to the Lord of life,” the pope said. “Together rebuild his living temple which is the ecclesial community spread throughout this vast Eurasian region.”

Messmer, the matriarch of a devoutly Catholic family, greeted the pope’s appeal with hearty applause. But she will not be around for the task. Nor will six of the nine children she bore and raised in exile while working at a Kazakh steel mill.

An ethnic German who was deported as a teenager from Ukraine, she left Kazakhstan four years ago to live in Nuremberg, Germany--close to a brother and her two married sons. She traveled here last week to witness the first papal pilgrimage to Central Asia.

Four of her six sons are priests. One of them, Otto Messmer, has headed Astana’s parish since 1988 and oversaw the building of its small brick cathedral, which opened two years ago.

But the parish’s ethnic Germans have shriveled from several hundred families to just three today, so he is being reassigned next month to a German-speaking parish in Russia. A Polish priest will replace him in this capital.

One of Maria Messmer’s priest sons remains in Kazakhstan; two others work elsewhere in Germany and in Italy. Her three daughters are nuns; two of them are here, the other in Russia.

“I am delighted that the pope has honored our suffering and bestowed God’s blessing on this country,” said Messmer, a woman with thick gray hair and penetrating brown eyes. “But it is not my country. It never was.”

Messmer’s father was imprisoned in Ukraine for his Catholic faith and died in a Siberian labor camp in 1937. For nine years after her own deportation in 1947, Messmer and other Germans were confined to the Kazakh city of Qaraghandy. They prayed together behind closed shutters in private homes.

In the late 1950s, as the Stalin era passed, Polish and German priests began ministering secretly to Kazakhstan’s underground Catholic communities. Messmer and her husband sent four sons to a seminary in Latvia, a more tolerant Soviet republic, but the family’s requests to emigrate to Germany were denied. Messmer’s husband died in 1983. Along with more than 2 million other Europeans exiled to Kazakhstan, she put down tentative roots here in an ethnic community that remained aloof from Kazakh culture.

For many, those roots are no longer binding. Germany’s strong economy has lured away most ethnic Germans. The Polish government pays travel and relocation expenses for Poles who return from Kazakhstan.

“This has led to a sort of emigration frenzy,” said Father Edoardo Canetta, an Italian missionary here.

The Vatican recently lowered its estimate of Catholics in Kazakhstan from 309,000 to 180,000, with the bulk of the country’s 16.7 million people divided about evenly between Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The combined number of Catholics in the other four Central Asian republics--Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan--is even smaller and also diminishing.

Thousands of ethnic European Catholics attended an outdoor Mass with the pope here Sunday, and some said they are content to stay in Kazakhstan.

“The Kazakhs are so tolerant,” said Olga Timchuk, 73, a Ukrainian Catholic who watched five members of her work brigade die during her seven years in a Soviet labor camp near here. “No one here has ever held my past against me.”

Timchuk said her son recently visited Ukraine, weighing a move there, but was discouraged by the country’s poverty.

Young ethnic Europeans, however, face long-range obstacles here. Kazakhs, once a minority in their homeland, are now a slight majority, heavily favored in government employment and business opportunities over Europeans, most of whom speak Russian but not Kazakh.

“We cannot guarantee anyone’s economic future, so I’m afraid that the Catholic presence in Central Asia will keep going down,” said Magdalena Sumilasova, a Slovak missionary in the country. “If Kazakhstan continues to have a tolerant government, we will not disappear altogether. But there is no guarantee of that, either.”

The rise of fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan and other nearby countries has prompted tighter bureaucratic restrictions here on all religious organizations. Catholics complain of delays in getting visas for foreign missionaries and registering new parishes.

“They generally let us do what we want, but we’re always being watched,” said Otto Messmer.

John Paul appealed Sunday to President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev to assure Catholics the full religious rights they gained after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. He urged Catholics to speak more openly about their beliefs to non-Catholics but counseled “gentleness” to avoid charges of proselytism by Muslims and Eastern Orthodox leaders.

Igor Rotar, who monitors religious freedom in Central Asia for the British-based Keston Institute, said the Catholic Church cannot survive here without converts. But the region’s prevailing view on freedom of choice is: “You are free to become Orthodox if you are ethnic Russian, Muslim if you are ethnic Kazakh, and Catholic or Protestant if you are ethnic German.”