Pope Francis’ Eurasia

Milan () – From September 13 to 15, the apostolic trip of Pope Francis to Kazakhstan will take place, which for various reasons can be considered historic. Undoubtedly, all pontifical trips are in some way destined to leave important traces in the history of the Church, of societies and of peoples who meet the Pope of Rome, and also of the entire world, because he has always been one of the main spiritual leaders.

Pope Bergoglio will retrace the same itinerary as his holy predecessor John Paul II, who visited the Kazakh capital Astana, now called Nur-Sultan, in 2001. On that occasion, the Polish pontiff spent three days of very intense meetings, including one with young people at the University of Eurasia. He finally made his way to Armenia and concluded the trip with a joyous Mass at the headquarters of the local Apostolic Church in Echmjadzin.

His Holiness will meet Kazakh President Kasym-Zomart Tokaev, the second post-Soviet head of state after his “eternal” predecessor Nursultan Nazarbaev. Tokaev had already held a video conference with Francis in April and invited him to participate in the World Congress of Religious Leaders, the formal reason for the visit. For the president of the former Soviet republic, who has been in office for three years but is only now freeing himself from the Nazarbaev “family” – in power since the fall of the USSR – it will be in some ways an extremely valuable consecration.

A meeting with the authorities, civil society and the diplomatic corps has also been planned. The changes that are taking place in Kazakh society are not only of interest at the internal level but are proposed as the search for a new model for all the states born from the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

In the new Constitution of Kazakhstan, approved in June, there are elements of openness towards a greater participation of the whole society in the management of public affairs, promoting not only the institutional mechanisms of democracy but also and above all the traditions and culture popular, largely repressed by ideological systems and formal principles.

Tokaev insists on the rediscovery of “steppe democracy” through the “kurultaj”, village or territory councils, a community modality to deal with problems that supports and complements the delegations and public officials.

In times of great “populist” impulses, often biased towards dictatorial or anarchic forms, Kazakhstan and the ex-Soviet countries of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) could be a laboratory of new perspectives. And not only for the Caucasian and Asian neighbors, but also for many other societies around the world that are seeking their own identity and at the same time maintain sustainable and non-conflictive relationships with other peoples and political systems at different levels.

Along with social and political questions, cultural identity is, in fact, one of the dimensions that Pope Francis will not fail to underline, including religious factors. The pontiff has on several occasions shown an attentive look at the Asian continent, as happened recently with the surprising appointment as cardinal of the Italian missionary in Mongolia, Msgr. Giuseppe Marengo, shepherd of a small flock in a country particularly representative of the “peripheries” of the world, heir to ancient semi-nomadic peoples who never dominated others and were often reduced to pawns in the “great games” of the superpowers.

Christian Asia is a story of openings and sufferings, discoveries and persecutions, in dialogue with the great ancient religions, from Islam to Buddhism, passing through the traditions of India and the Far East. It was not “colonized” by Christian missionaries, as happened in Africa or America. Like in Canada, where Francis has just been and has apologized for the excesses in the zeal of the Church and of the European peoples towards the Native Americans. In Asia the Church meets proud but not hostile peoples, and she must accept the challenge of great spiritual traditions, distant but not incompatible with the Gospel.

On September 14, the plenary session of the Congress of Religions will open in the “Palace of Peace and Reconciliation” with a silent prayer by all the leaders present, including the Pope. The closing will be in the afternoon of the following day with the reading of the Final Declaration. This is the seventh edition of the Congress, which continues an itinerary started in the late 1990s at the initiative of former President Nazarbaev. The Holy See has always sent high-level representatives, cardinals and archbishops, recognizing the value of this special opportunity for interreligious dialogue.

Nazarbaev intended these meetings to be a celebration of the spirit of global reconciliation in the world stemming from the Cold War and the militant atheism of Soviet ideology. The “religious renaissance” of the end of the century, which led Russia to rediscover Orthodox Christianity in “symphony” with secular power, in Central Asia has revalued above all the Muslim tradition, also persecuted by atheistic communism but in a less suffocating than Christian denominations and other religions, because it was seen as somehow more “compatible” with the socialist ideology and system.

The main concern of the post-Soviet satraps of these countries – who turned party militancy into family management of power – was to accompany the resumption of official celebrations of Islam, but avoiding extremist drifts at all costs. Central Asian countries have built even more sumptuous mosques than Arab countries, and presidents have almost always led popular pilgrimages to Mecca, while at the same time ensuring a secular and “ecumenical” version of life in society.

These balances have not always worked properly, both because of internal separatist pressures from various ethnic groups, often motivated by religious impulses, and because of external pressures from more aggressive Islamic neighboring countries, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pope will propose to the Congress the recent grand openings of the encyclical “Fratelli tutti”, translated into Russian at the initiative of the Muslims of Asiatic Russia, and above all of the historic document “On human fraternity in favor of peace and peaceful coexistence “, signed by the Holy See and the Islamic center of Al-Azhar, and approved by the UN General Assembly in December 2020. It will not only be a confrontation between Christianity and Islam, but on this basis solid criteria will be offered for a constructive and non-formal dialogue between all religions.

Francis will have the opportunity to meet the Catholic faithful at Holy Mass on September 14, which will be celebrated on the Expo esplanade. On the morning of the 15th he will meet his Jesuit brothers at the Nur-Sultan nunciature and then have a public meeting with the bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated persons, seminarians and pastoral agents at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. . It will be a true celebration for the Catholic communities of the region, inheritors of the deportations of Poles and Germans from the Soviet era and currently committed to building a new and original face of local Catholicism.

The second historic meeting of Pope Francis with the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill should also be held, already planned and announced before the Russian invasion of Ukraine but which was postponed precisely because of the ambiguities of patriarchal support for war actions. The Pope and Kirill already spoke by videoconference after the fateful February 24 and were due to meet in June in Jerusalem. However, the increasingly catastrophic continuation of the conflict has suggested a new postponement. Nur-Sultan looks like a neutral opportunity worth pursuing.

The visit of the patriarch of Moscow to Kazakhstan is more natural than that of the pontiff because it is still a majority Russian-speaking country with a strong Russian ethnic minority of Orthodox religion. However, this closeness is not exempt from tensions similar to those in Ukraine, since various statements by President Putin and other high-ranking Russian politicians have tried to define Kazakhstan as a “naturally Russian country”, almost like Ukraine itself.

President Tokaev, on the other hand, proudly called for his country’s neutrality and independence, going so far as to deny Russian sovereignty over Crimea and Donbass in a public face-to-face meeting with Putin himself during the recent St. Petersburg.

If the meeting takes place, it will not be easy for Francis to preserve the good relations with Kirill, laboriously built in the last decade, especially after the meeting in Havana in February 2016. In these months the pontiff has tried to avoid direct criticism of the positions of the Russian Church, but could not help suggesting to Kirill not to behave like an “altar boy of power”. The patriarch, in turn, will try to involve the Pope in the worldwide crusade against the moral degradation of secularism, but the Pope will certainly not be willing to play the altar boy of clerical war fundamentalism. The hope is that the meeting between the two can really be a message of peace, that puts a stop to the terrible war of peoples and worlds.

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