Pope Francis has appointed 49-year-old German Jesuit Stephan Lipke as auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, alongside Monsignor Joseph Werth, the last of the three bishops still in office appointed in 1991, when Catholic structures were restored in Russia. An important task in a particularly delicate period for the political and religious history of the country.
Moscow () – The main seat of Catholics in Siberia, the Diocese of the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, has since yesterday a new auxiliary bishop, the German Jesuit Stephan Lipke, active in Russia for many years as director of the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute, founded in 1991 for the training of lay collaborators in parishes, and which in Moscow has become an important cultural centre for interreligious and cultural dialogue. The new bishop, who will turn 50 at the end of the year, joins Monsignor Joseph Werth, 72, who has held office in Novosibirsk since 1991, when Catholic structures in Russia were restored with the two apostolic administrations for European and Asian Russia.
Archbishop Lipke is a German Jesuit like his predecessor, but was born in Kazakhstan to a family of Russian Germans deported to Central Asia during Stalin’s time from the Volga region, where Werth had been a parish priest in the town of Marx for several years. This was one of the historical realities of the expansion of European emigration to Russia, particularly from Germanic territories, decided by the “Westernist” Tsar Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century. The Volga Germans were in turn heirs to the ancestors who had built the northern capital of St. Petersburg, founded with a German name (although it was originally Dutch, St. Peterburkh) to give Russia a new image as a “window on Europe”, becoming a very significant component of the Eurasian Russian Empire. The subsequent Stalinist deportations dispersed many Russian-Germans, who lived in compact communities according to their own customs, even in the expanses of Siberia and the countries of Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan and around the city of Karaganda, where Bishop Werth was born.
When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, most Germans from these areas tried to emigrate to Germany, and in the Catholic churches that remained open under the Soviet regime, only representatives of the other ethnic group of Russian Catholics, those of Polish origin, remained. In those years, in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Fatima in Karaganda, the church was only filled on the left side, because the pews in the right aisle were “the seats of the Germans” who were no longer there, but no Pole dared to sit in their places. The 1991 appointments had to respect the Soviet nationality of the new bishops, so a Belarusian was chosen for Moscow (Monsignor Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, now retired in Minsk), a Pole for Karaganda (Jan Pawel Lenga, retired in Poland) and a German for Novosibirsk, Monsignor Werth, thus recognizing the main ethnic references of Catholics in Russia. In fact, one link was excluded from the nominations, that of Lithuanian Catholics, which was impracticable in 1991 due to Lithuania’s conflict with Moscow, the first country to decide to separate itself from its Soviet past since 1990; but all three bishops appointed had been educated in Lithuania.
It was not easy for the first apostolic nuncio in post-Soviet Russia, Monsignor Francesco Colasuonno, to convince Father Joseph Werth to leave the parish of Marx in order to accept the episcopal appointment, which he did not feel worthy of and which he has held until today, and in whose ministry he will now be accompanied by his Jesuit brother. Archbishop Lipke thus inherits a double important tradition, that of the German Catholics of Russia and that of the Society of Jesus to which Werth himself belonged, and which precisely in Novosibirsk found the opportunity to be reborn in a land from which it had been expelled in the mid-nineteenth century, but where it had left a very important mark on the spread of the Gospel and of Western Catholic Christian culture.
The Jesuits had decided in the early 1990s to reopen their structures away from Moscow, in order to avoid possible conflicts, since the Society had always been under surveillance as the main “Western agent” in Russia, and around Bishop Werth they were able to create important pastoral and cultural structures. In 1998, however, they also took over from the diocese of Moscow the responsibility for the Institute of Philosophy and Theology for Lay People, making it an effective protagonist of dialogue in the Russian capital, with a succession of very incisive personalities, from the first director, the Polish Fr. Stanislaw Opiela (the first Catholic priest of the new Russia to be refused a visa in 1999), to the last predecessor of Bishop Lipke, the American Fr. Anthony James Corcoran, today apostolic administrator of the Catholics of Kyrgyzstan.
Bishop Lipke began his service in Russia in 2011 in Novosibirsk and then in Tomsk in Siberia, the only Russian city where there is an active Catholic school thanks to the Jesuits. In Moscow he then took over responsibility for the St. Thomas Institute, which has become an important point of reference for Catholics in Moscow and beyond. Since 2020 he has also been secretary of the Russian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. He is assuming a very important legacy, standing alongside the last bishop appointed in 1991, in a particularly delicate period of Russia’s political and religious history, taking this cross upon his shoulders with great humility and a sense of responsibility for the future of Christian and Catholic Russia.
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