Why Pope Francis chose to highlight religious freedom during his visit to Kazakhstan

Though Kazakhstan is predominantly Muslim, over 4 million Kazakhstanis profess Christianity. This represents over 1 / 4 of the nation’s whole inhabitants of 19 million. Over 80% of Kazakhstan’s Christians are ethnic Russians.

Christian missionaries introduced their gospel to Central Asia as early because the third century after Christ. By the seventh century, Christians had established necessary facilities alongside the Silk Highway, the buying and selling routes from China to Constantinople.

The Assyrian Church of the East, a department of Christianity that developed within the Persian Empire, had a major presence on the territory of Kazakhstan properly into the twelfth century.

After the Muslim conquest of Central Asia within the seventh and eighth centuries, Christianity slowly misplaced affect and commenced a protracted decline. Within the 14th century, Franciscan missionaries from Italy briefly created a diocese in as we speak’s southeastern Kazakhstan.

The Russian conquest

Within the seventeenth century, Russia started its enlargement into Siberia and the northern Kazakh steppes. Cossack troopers, who belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church, established army outposts, the place additionally they practiced their religion. As well as, the “Outdated Believers” – non secular dissenters who broke with the official Orthodox church over ritual questions – fled to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan to flee persecution. Outdated Believers proceed to keep up their communities in jap Kazakhstan’s Altay Mountains.

The Russian conquest of Central Asia in 1860s and 1870s additional elevated the numbers of Christian settlers within the area. In 1871, the Russian Orthodox Church established the Diocese of Turkestan, which included a lot of as we speak’s Kazakhstan. The diocesan heart was the city of Vernyi, which is now referred to as Almaty and is Kazakhstan’s largest metropolis.

The Russian Orthodox Church additionally tried, with restricted success, to transform the nomadic Kazakhs, who practiced Islam. In 1881, it created a particular missionary society to evangelise the gospel to the Kazakhs. The mission translated the Bible and a few liturgical texts into Kazakh. Regardless of these efforts, most Kazakhs remained Muslim.

Searching for new farmland, German Mennonites and Russian evangelical Christians settled in Kazakhstan within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These colonists established a Protestant presence on this more and more numerous territory.

Faith in Soviet Kazakhstan

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the imperial authorities, ushered in a interval of extreme anti-religious persecution. Most church buildings and mosques have been closed by 1939. The Soviet authorities additionally compelled the Kazakh nomads to settle in collective farms, destroying their conventional lifestyle.

Kazakhstan grew to become the location of a sequence of collective labor camps housing political prisoners. In campaigns of ethnic cleaning, the Soviet authorities deported 1000’s of Poles and Germans to Kazakhstan within the Nineteen Thirties and Forties. Most of Kazakhstan’s small group of Catholics, which numbers about 125,000, descends from these deportees.

Spiritual persecution as we speak

With the dissolution of the us in 1991, Kazakhstan grew to become an unbiased nation. In response to the newest census, carried out in 2009, about 70% of the inhabitants professes Islam. Christianity, at 26%, is the second-largest faith.

Pope Francis particularly referred to as for Kazakhstan to extend non secular liberty, which he described as a “primary, main and inalienable proper.” The human rights group Discussion board 18 reported that within the calendar 12 months 2021, Kazakhstani authorities convicted not less than 114 folks and 5 organizations for exercising their non secular religion with out state permission. Such convictions often lead to heavy fines. For instance, police raided the worship service of an unregistered Baptist congregation within the city of Oral in January 2021. Church leaders every needed to pay one month’s common wage for the violation.

Regardless of their important numbers, Christians – particularly these in smaller denominations – have skilled persecution. In 2011, Kazakhstan adopted a legislation on faith that instituted a laborious technique of registration for non secular organizations. In response to the U.S. Workplace of Worldwide Spiritual Freedom, Kazakhstani authorities arrest and imprison folks for his or her non secular beliefs. For instance, in 2019 three pastors of Almaty’s New Life Pentecostal Church have been every sentenced to jail phrases starting from 4 to 5 years for his or her non secular actions.

For his or her half, Kazakhstan’s leaders have been extra involved about making certain the safety and stability of the state than advancing particular person non secular liberty. They’ve most well-liked to favor what they contemplate to be conventional world religions reminiscent of Hanafi Sunni Islam, the Russian Orthodox Church, Catholicism, Lutheranism and Judaism. To this finish, in 2003 the president of Kazakhstan created the Congress of World and Conventional Religions.

Pope Francis selected this venue to voice his considerations concerning the controversial subjects of peace and of spiritual freedom. Time will inform whether or not or not his appeals have any success.

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