Fr Edoardo Canetta, a missionary in Kazakhstan, warns that new rules adopted by the Kazakh government limit entry visas for foreign religious. More than half of the country’s priests and bishops do not have Kazakh citizenship. The local Church and the Vatican’s relations with local authorities are to blame.
ICC Note:
“The new laws on registering and controlling religious communities put at risk the Catholic Church of Kazakhstan,” Fr Edoardo Canetta told AsiaNews.
10/18/2011 Kazakhstan (AsiaNews) – “The new laws on registering and controlling religious communities put at risk the Catholic Church of Kazakhstan. There will be restrictions on visas for foreign religious. About half of all Catholic priests and bishops come from other countries,” Fr Edoardo Canetta told AsiaNews. The Italian missionary and university professor, who has lived in Kazakhstan for 11 years, is in Italy for family reasons. “The new rules,” he explained, “concern mainly Muslim and Protestant groups deemed aggressive, but they damage all non traditional religious groups.”
Enacted on 13 October by will of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the new rules want to indigenise religious communities in accordance with a control system used by the Chinese government. Only the Russian Orthodox Church and Kazakh Muslims are considered traditional and thus do not fall under the new restrictions. In order to survive at the national level and avoid penalties, non-indigenous groups must prove that they have 5,000 members.
According to Fr Canetta, the new rules are very similar to those already in place. They include tight state control over religious groups. However, the “worse novelty for the Kazakh Church is the tightening of visas for foreigners and the criteria for confessional group registration, which slow down the birth of new communities, including Catholic ones.”
In order to keep a lid on the expansion of Islamic terrorism, the Kazakh president has banned foreign imams from the country, and denied would-be local religious from studying abroad. The country’s Muslim population is made up primarily of ethnic Kazakhs. It is the same case for Lutherans, who are ethnic Germans deported to Kazakhstan during the Soviet era, and Jews.
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