ICC NOTE: The Majority of the 1,000 Catholics who call Kyrgyzstan home entered the church through German and other European migrants during the height of Stalin’s paranoia in Russia. Since then the Kyrgyz government have followed their Central Asian neighbors in passing religion laws ordering religious groups to register with the state as well as the names of its members. In other Central Asian countries all faiths are required to register, yet in Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Orthodox Church and Islamic groups have been able to bundle support within the government to maintain a place of prominence within the country. As for what the country considers “foreign” faiths, they must register as well as include the names of 200 of their members. 

9/9/2016 Kyrgyzstan (Irish Times) – Down a dusty lane in the outskirts of northern Bishkek sits an unremarkable two-storey building. Atop is placed a slight, solitary cross. In an overwhelmingly Muslim neighbourhood where the sounds of farm animals fill the air, Kyrgyzstan’s only Catholic church – a remodelled house – finds itself in unlikely surroundings.

A notice board to the right of the church displays a sun-worn photo of Pope Francis next to a temporary notice: “No Mass in English from July 3rd till August 21st”. Cyrillic script church notes make up the remaining literature.

If the signs and notes suggest a vibrant Catholic community is flourishing in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous country surrounded by China,Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and coloured by Soviet and Islamic histories, they are misleading: the church is bolted closed six days a week.

The St Michael the Archangel church was built in 1969 by ethnic Germans. According to Fr Janez Michelcic, a Slovenian Catholic priest who gives the weekly English-language sermon, 60-70 people attend Mass on Sundays. Yet Michelcic says none among his congregation speak English.

Kyrgyzstan’s other two parishes are located hundreds of kilometres to the south, across some of the world’s highest mountain ranges, and serve tiny communities of about 70 worshippers in total.

Kyrgyzstan is home to about 1,000 Roman Catholics, many of them remnants of the hundreds of thousands of Germans, Ukrainians and central Europeans shipped out during the height of Joseph Stalin’s paranoia in the 1940s.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw about 100,000 ethnic Germans, mostly Lutherans and Catholics, return to Europe or leave to settle in the US. Thousands more Russian Christians have left over the past decade in search of better economic opportunities.

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