Starting tomorrow, Sept. 13, Pope Francis will spend three days in Nur-Sultan, the capital city of Kazakhstan, on the occasion of the Seventh Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. It’s going to be the thirty eighth international trip for Pope Francis, and the 57th country has visited. It is usually the second visit of a pope to Kazakhstan: Pope John Paul II visited the country in September 2001. The trip will even introduce Catholics all over the world to a rustic many know little about.
The pope is anticipated to deliver an address in Italian on the congress and to interact in private meetings with religious leaders, including Ahmad al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar of Egypt. Earlier plans had included a gathering with Patriarch Kirill, the spiritual head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who is not any longer attending the meeting. Pope Francis will even have a good time Mass for the country’s Catholics, a small community of around 250,000 that makes up lower than 2 percent of the population.
In American popular culture, Kazakhstan is thought largely because the home of Sacha Baron Cohen’s longtime fictional alter ego, the tv journalist Borat, who most famously was the star of the 2006 satirical movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Profit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” The film included quite a few depictions of Kazakhstan as poor, misogynistic and anti-Semitic, leading Kazakh officials to ban the film within the country. In 2020, nevertheless, the Kazakhstan tourism bureau decided to capitalize on Borat’s popularity, releasing an English-language commercial that repeatedly features Borat’s catchphrase, “Very nice!”
Kazakhstan’s neighborhood is a fractious but geopolitically vital one: Its borders touch Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Quick facts
In point of fact, Kazakhstan plays a major role within the economy of Central Asia and straddles among the most important territory in human history. Horses could have first been domesticated in what’s now Kazakhstan; the traditional Silk Road passed through its territory, as does China’s modern try to recreate that cultural and economic throughway. The most important country in Central Asia, Kazakhstan can also be the most important landlocked country on this planet and the ninth-largest by total territory; it covers just over a million square miles and reaches across the normal divide between Europe and Asia on the Ural River and Ural Mountains. Its neighborhood is a fractious but geopolitically vital one: Kazakhstan’s borders touch Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
[Related: Pope Francis heads to Kazakh interfaith congress—without hope for a meeting with Patriarch Kirill]
Most of Kazakhstan is thinly populated, and the whole country includes barely greater than 19 million inhabitants. (Against this, neighboring Uzbekistan, at one-sixth the scale, has over 35 million inhabitants.) Historically much of Kazakhstan’s territory was given over to pastoral use and occupied by nomadic groups; “Kazakh,” like “Cossack,” has its origins in a Turkic word meaning “to wander.” Intensive agricultural cultivation and industrialization only began in earnest (often with unhappy consequences) under Russian and Soviet rule within the twentieth century.
The vast majority of the population is Muslim (70 percent, largely Sunni Muslims), though Kazakhstan has a large minority of Christians (26 percent), mostly Eastern Orthodox. Almost all the country’s 250,000 Catholics are ethnic Poles, Germans and Lithuanians, a consequence of Kazakhstan’s long history with the Russian empire and the Soviet Union.
Most of Kazakhstan’s Catholic community is found amongst its ethnic German minority.
Kazakhstan today
Today, Kazakhstan is a developing country that has seen relatively consistent economic growth over the past three many years, largely to its vast reserves of natural resources, including oil and gas. Kazakhstan is also a major exporter of rare minerals and chemicals; revenue spurred by these and other exports (including agricultural products) has led to a consistently improving way of life, and Kazakhstan is now classified by the United Nations as a “developed economy.”
Seven many years of control under the Soviet Union (the country declared its independence in 1991, the last of the Soviet socialist republics to accomplish that) left its mark on the country. Huge engineering projects from the Thirties through the Nineteen Eighties resulted in widespread societal disruption and ecological devastation, including a famine within the Thirties as Soviet leaders attempted to collectivize the national economy. The Soviets also used rural areas in Kazakhstan for tons of of nuclear tests in the course of the Cold War, with environmental effects lasting to this present day.
Further, disastrous agricultural and industrial engineering projects caused the just about complete evaporation of the Aral Sea on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Diversion of water sources for agriculture and the dispersal of pollutants into the Aral Sea have made much of the region inhospitable to human and animal life and caused almost the whole lake bed to show right into a toxic desert.
Russia still launches satellites and other spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan, from which the primary satellite (Sputnik) and the primary manned space mission (with Yuri Gagarin) were also launched, under an agreement with the Kazakhstan government.
Large urban centers in Kazakhstan include the capital of Nur-Sultan, renamed from Astana in honor of the country’s longtime quasi-dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled the country from its independence in 1991 until 2019 (and unofficially for several years after); the previous capital of Almady; and Shymkent. A fourth of the working population of Kazakhstan still works within the agricultural sector, and the country has significant disparities when it comes to income and wealth. While Kazakhstan officially promotes religious tolerance, some analysts have noted an environment of repression for a lot of small religious groups.
Earlier this yr, the country experienced significant political unrest after a spike in fuel prices. Quite a few protests against the federal government and former president Nazarbayev became violent confrontations with security forces, leading the present Kazakh president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to declare a state of emergency; the following violent suppression of protests was assisted by Russian troops within the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a regional defense association dominated by Russia.
In accordance with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the time, the Russian intervention had been crucial to defend Kazakhstan against ”a terrorist rebellion backed by external forces.”
Pope Francis will have a good time a public Mass in Nur-Sultan that is anticipated to attract as much as 3,000 pilgrims from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Mongolia.
Catholic Kazakhstan
Most of Kazakhstan’s Catholic community is found amongst its ethnic German minority. The existence of this community within the country is resulting from several historically momentous (and a few deeply tragic) political decisions by Russian and Soviet leaders. In 1763, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (herself a German national) invited German immigrants to settle in Russia, largely to enhance the nation’s economic fortunes, and promised land, freedom of faith and freedom of language. Two large waves of German migrants settled in Russia over the following 50 years, a lot of them along the Black Sea and the Volga River. By the center of the nineteenth century, there have been half 1,000,000 ethnic Germans in Russia.
The slow reversal of lots of the privileges initially granted to German settlers—in addition to persecution during and after World War I—led to sporadic emigration from the Russian empire and the Soviet Union in later many years to Canada, america and South America.
During World War II under Joseph Stalin, ethnic Germans were forcibly uprooted from their homes (particularly in areas where advancing German armies might find collaborators) and moved to more distant areas of the Soviet Union; many perished in prison camps or due to starvation. Greater than 100,000 Germans were deported to Kazakhstan. Members of other ethnic groups exiled to Kazakhstan in Stalin’s purge included Poles, Lithuanians, Greeks and Ukrainians.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Germany offered all ethnic Germans the “right of return,” a suggestion accepted by greater than two million ethnic Germans in the previous Soviet Union who moved to a newly reunited Germany, greatly reducing the variety of German-identifying people in Siberia and Kazakhstan.
In consequence, the Catholic population of Kazakhstan has shrunk considerably but grow to be more diverse. “Generally, the variety of Catholics has decreased previously 20 years for the reason that last visit of the pope,” Archbishop Tomasz Peta of Astana, Kazakhstan’s only archdiocese, told the Astana Times, an area English-language journalistic cooperative, on Aug. 31. “However the Catholic church has grow to be more international.”
On April 14, 1991, Pope John Paul II established the Apostolic Administration of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, which later became the Archdiocese of Astana. The seat of the archdiocese is the Cathedral of the Mother of God of Perpetual Help. Archbishop Peta, who was born in Poland, noted that “twenty years ago many had the concept that Catholics in Kazakhstan were mostly Germans, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians—nationalities that traditionally belong to the Catholic church. Today in Kazakhstan there are dozens of various nationalities within the Catholic church.”
Pope Francis also intends for his visit to Kazakhstan to be a pastoral one.
The papal visit
Along with his participation within the Seventh Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, Pope Francis will have a good time a public Mass in Nur-Sultan on Sept. 14 that is anticipated to attract as much as 3,000 pilgrims from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Mongolia.
Pope Francis originally had political goals for the visit. His now-canceled meeting with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, who has justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on religious and moral grounds, would have been their first face-to-face meeting for the reason that invasion and a high-profile diplomatic mission. Pope Francis has been vocal in his criticism of the invasion and Patriarch Kirill’s support for it, telling the Italian newspaper Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in May that “the patriarch cannot turn himself into Putin’s altar boy.”
Pope Francis had also expressed hope for a visit to Ukraine itself as a part of the trip, though the logistics of such a visit and Francis’ limited mobility have made that highly unlikely.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will even be in Kazakhstan in the course of the pope’s visit, though no meeting between the 2 has been planned.
Pope Francis also intends for the visit to be a pastoral one, in line with Anthony Corcoran, S.J., the apostolic administrator of the Catholic church in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, who has also served since 2008 as canonical superior of the Russian Region of the Society of Jesus. “In our ad limina meeting with Pope Francis in 2019, he referred to our little churches in Central Asia as ‘germoglio’ [a new growth on a plant],” Father Corcoran told America via email.
“He encouraged us to reflect on how God likes to work through small things. This has been an inspiring and insightful image for me in our work here in these tiny Christian communities.”
Correction: An earlier version of this text stated that that is Pope Francis’ 57th international trip. It’s his thirty eighth international trip, and Kazakhstan is the 57th country he has visited.