KESTON NEWS SERVICE SUMMARY 30 April – 4 May 2002

Summaries of recent reporting on violations of religious liberty and
on religion in communist and post-communist lands.
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KYRGYZSTAN: ORTHODOX STAND BY OBJECTIONS TO
DRAFT RELIGION LAW (30 April). A senior priest of the Russian
Orthodox Church in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek has strongly defended
his diocese's attack on the proposed new religion law which has been
drawn up partly with consultation from international human rights
experts. The diocese has appealed to Kyrgyz parliamentarians not to
adopt the law, which it says does not take account of the specific
situation in Central Asia and could lead to instability in the
region. They have particularly criticised the role of the
Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of
which Kyrgyzstan is a member. However, an OSCE official told Keston
News Service that his office had been asked to provide advice at the
invitation of the Kyrgyz government.

REGISTRATION: CUTTING OUT THE COMPETITION (1 May
2002). Religion laws in the former Soviet republics increasingly
feature measures to support state-approved religious administrations
and outlaw any competitors. Practice from a variety of states in the
region shows that "traditional" faiths have been the main victims of
these government-sanctioned bans on rival jurisdictions, especially
Muslims and Orthodox. As long as major religious denominations can
lobby their governments to "protect" them from competition from
rival jurisdictions, and as long as international human rights
mechanisms are ineffective at overturning such selective
discrimination, true religious freedom - not only for all faiths but
for all strands of any faith - will not be assured.

THE BULLYING OF RUSSIA'S CATHOLICS. (This article was
published in The Tablet of 4th May 2002 and is reprinted with
permission.)

by Lawrence Uzzell, Director of Keston Institute

An organised campaign is being waged against Catholics in Russia.
The director of the Keston Institute research centre, based in
Oxford, is concerned at this threat to religious freedom.

"THE real founder of the Roman Catholic Church in Siberia was
Stalin." Those bitter words from a Moscow Catholic recall the tens
of thousands of Russian citizens of Polish, Lithuanian, or German
descent exiled to places such as the Magadan prison colony on the
Pacific coast, where some of their descendants are still living.
Today Magadan is part of the largest (in territory) Catholic diocese
in the world, with its see in Irkutsk near Lake Baikal – six time
zones east of Moscow. But since 19 April Moscow officials have
blocked the bishop of that diocese, Jerzy Mazur, from entering
the country – part of Russia's fiercest anti-Catholic crackdown
since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That crackdown feeds on an ultra-nationalist myth, nurtured by too
many irresponsible Russians in high places. Simply put, the myth is
that the pre- Soviet Russian heartland was homogeneously Orthodox,
with Roman Catholics to be found only in the tsarist empire's
westernmost possessions such as Poland. The myth-makers insist that
the Vatican today is practising "spiritual aggression" (they favour
military metaphors) against this Orthodox homeland. They point out
that since 1991 Rome has established about 300 Catholic parishes in
a country which had only two during most of the Soviet years. Also,
Rome has sent several hundred priests to serve these parishes,
nearly all of them foreigners.

Like many myths popular in today's Russia, this one depends on the
amputation of historical memory so effectively performed by Soviet
propagandists. The average Russian has no idea that even tsarist
Russia was already a demographic mixing bowl, though not to the
bloody extent of Stalin's regime, with its forced transfers of
entire peoples such as the Chechens. The typical provincial capital
in nineteenth-century Siberia was already home to a local minority
of ethnic Poles, some of whose ancestors had been exiled for taking
part in Poland's futile attempts to secede from the Russian empire.
The later Romanoff tsars were sufficiently tolerant to allow these
local ethnic enclaves to form Catholic parishes, whose priests could
function freely as long as they did not try to win converts from
outside their ethnic communities; thus the Orthodox were free to
proselytise the Catholics, but not vice versa.

Despite decades of Soviet vandalism which destroyed both Orthodox
and Catholic church buildings, a fair number of nineteenth-century
Catholic churches are still standing today. One of the most
impressive is the Church of the Assumption in Irkutsk, a charming
city once renowned as "the Paris of the East". Nobody would ever
mistake this Western-style building for an Orthodox church: it looks
as exotic in eastern Siberia as Russian onion domes would in Dublin.
Like most churches of all confessions in Russia, it was confiscated
by the Bolsheviks and converted to secular use; today it is a
symphony hall. In some Russian cities the current occupants of such
sacred buildings, be they Catholic or Orthodox, refuse to make even
the slightest concessions to their rightful owners. The civilised
musicians of Irkutsk, by contrast, have voluntarily shared their
concert hall with the restored Catholic parish since the early
Nineties.

The overwhelming majority of Catholic parishes in Russia today are
like that of Irkutsk, in that they are not newly planted missions
but restorations of parishes forcibly disbanded under Stalin. The
total number of parishes is roughly equal to the number that existed
before 1917 within what is now the Russian Federation. The few
exceptions are in places such as Magadan, a city which did not even
exist before Stalin's security organs developed it as a labour-camp
centre to exploit the remote region's newly discovered precious
metals. As a totally Soviet creation, Magadan did not have
above-ground Christian worship of any kind until the Eighties.

Magadan's Catholic priest is from Alaska, his counterparts in
Irkutsk are from Poland, those of Kazan on the central Volga are
from Argentina. The awkward fact is that only 15 per cent of
Catholic priests are citizens of the Russian Federation – a fact
made much of by Russia's xenophobes. This fact, too, has a perfectly
natural explanation. Before the Nineties, Russia had no seminaries
in which young men could study for Roman Catholic orders. Thus it is
inevitable that for the next generation, the majority of Catholic
clergy in Russia will be foreigners. Also inevitably, the largest
contributor of these foreign priests is Poland – the one country
that has large, readily available reserves of priests who speak
Russian.

Unfortunately, relations between Poles and Russians are always
tricky. Russians remember the Polish invasion of the early
seventeenth century in the way that Victorian Englishmen remembered
the Spanish Armada, as an assault on both their state and their
religion. Russian folk prejudices are more deeply and intensely
anti-Catholic than anti-Protestant, not because of the genuine
theological disagreements (far fewer than the disagreements
between Orthodoxy and Protestantism), but because of secular
political memories. Thanks in part to the insensitive behaviour of
many Western Protestant missionaries in the Nineties,
anti-Protestant prejudices are now growing as well.

Nevertheless, until recently Catholics had relatively fewer problems
than Protestants in post-Soviet Russia. It has usually been
Protestants who have found themselves barred from renting rooms in
public buildings for Sunday worship. It has usually been Protestant,
not Catholic, missionaries who have been abruptly expelled from
Russia. Again, the reason is political: the Roman Catholic Church is
a tougher target. Even its remotest Siberian parish is part of a
unified, worldwide organisation with hundreds of millions of
members in countries with which Moscow desires good relations. The
splintered Protestant denominations, especially those with extremely
decentralised doctrines of church governance, have no such
advantage.

In principle the statement of the Second Vatican Council on
religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, should require Catholics to
uphold not only their own but Protestants' rights in Russia.
Unfortunately, that has not always happened in practice. In 1997 the
Vatican sent an official letter to the Kremlin calling for an
amendment to the proposed new law on Church- State relations then
under debate, so that Catholicism would be formally listed as
one of the country's "traditional religions", along with Orthodox
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism. The Vatican letter simply
ignored the proposed law's most serious flaws, such as its
provisions discriminating against the independent initsiativniki
Baptists and other religious bodies which had refused to collaborate
with the Soviet regime. Essentially, Rome was appealing to Moscow to
add Catholics to the short list of religions with special
privileges, while leaving the Protestants as second-class citizens.
President Boris Yeltsin rejected that appeal, and the law that
he signed later that year was and is equally threatening to both
Catholics and Protestants. For Russia's Catholics it took longer for
that threat to become reality – but this spring it did so with a
vengeance.

Within the span of just a few weeks in April, Catholics suddenly
caught up with Protestants as targets of Russian repression.
Officials at Moscow's international airport confiscated the
multiple-entry visa of Fr Stefano Caprio, a prominent Italian priest
serving parishes in Vladimir and Ivanovo, north-east of Moscow. The
local authorities in Magadan stepped up threats to liquidate the
parish there on the spurious grounds that its priest (a citizen of
the United States) does not have a residence permit. An Irish priest
serving in the Volga River town of Saratov was warned that he would
have to suspend his religious activities on one week's notice. The
city of Pskov in western Russia blocked construction of a Catholic
church building.

The climax came on 19 April, when Bishop Jerzy Mazur was barred from
flying back to his flock in Irkutsk. The head of Russia's Catholics,
Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, declared the next day that "an
organised campaign is being waged against the Catholic Church in
Russia".

The good news is that this campaign has turned out to have less
popular support than one might have expected. The Moscow
correspondent of Keston News Service, Geraldine Fagan, reports that
the turnout for the big anti-Catholic demonstration in that city on
28 April was less than impressive – only 1,500 according to official
police figures, in a city of 10 million. She predicts that if
President Vladimir Putin wants to, he can safely override public
opinion on this issue; the key lobbyists trying to influence him
will be highly placed anti-Catholic forces such as the Moscow
Patriarchate, against Western governments and international
organisations committed to religious freedom.

So far Putin and his inner circle have kept their distance from the
new anti-Catholic campaign, which bizarrely contrasts with the
President's recent overtures to the Vatican. In this, as in other
areas, Putin apparently is trying to balance his strategy of
reaching out to the West with his need to appease domestic
constituencies that remain viscerally anti-Western. Another
ingredient is his own authoritarian instincts; genuine religious
freedom sits uneasily with his KGB-honed preference for order and
obedience.

Putin may well make his officials back down on the case of Bishop
Mazur, whose press interviews from his current perch in Warsaw are
all the more embarrassing to Moscow precisely because the bishop's
rhetoric is so conciliatory. Lower-ranking Catholic clergy, however,
are likely to continue facing petty harassment punctuated with the
occasional harsh crackdown. For advice on how to cope, they can draw
on the all too rich experience of their Protestant brethren.

Copyright (c) 2002 The Tablet. All rights reserved.

Kyrgyzstan & Registration summaries (c) 2002 Keston Institute. All
rights reserved.

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