Pope Francis to participate in interfaith meeting in Kazakhstan

Agencies | Vatican City                                                                           

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Pope Francis is making a visit this week to the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, where he is ministering to a tiny Catholic community and participating in an interfaith conference aimed at promoting peace and dialogue.

Francis was flying Tuesday to the Kazakh capital of Nur-Sultan to meet with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev during the state visit portion of the three-day trip.

On Wednesday and Thursday, he participates in an interfaith meeting with more than 100 delegations of Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Shinto and other faith groups from 50 countries.

Francis will be in the Kazakh capital at the same time as Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is making his first foreign visit since the coronavirus pandemic.

But the Vatican says there are no plans for Francis to meet with Xi, who is not attending the congress, AP reports.

The Holy See and Beijing have not had diplomatic relations for over a half-century and the two sides are finalizing the renewal of a controversial deal over Catholic bishop nominations in China.

Kazakhstan borders Russia to the north, China to the east and is home to some 130 ethnic groups. The congress is a showpiece of its foreign policy and a reflection of its own multicultural and multiethnic population that has long been touted as a crossroads between East and West.

Darhan Qydyrali, minister of information and social development, said the presence of world religious leaders in the country was fully in Kazakhstan’s national interests.

"I think the congress will give an example that other issues can be also solved through the dialogue of religions."

When St. John Paul II visited in 2001, 10 years after independence, he highlighted Kazakhstan’s diversity while recalling its dark past under Stalinist repression.

Many of the deportees’ descendants remained and some of them make up the country’s Catholic community, which only numbers about 125,000 in a country of nearly 19 million people.

Sophia Gatovskaya, a parishioner at Our Lady Of Perpetual Help Cathedral in the capital, said she attended that first papal visit and that it has borne fruit to this day.

"It was actually amazing. And after this visit, we have peace and tolerance in our republic. We have a lot of nationalities in Kazakhstan, and we all live together. And we expect the same from this visit (of Pope Francis) that we will have peace in our republic."