Pope_decries

Pope Decries Wars Over Faith

In Volatile Central Asia, Pontiff Pleads for Tolerance

By Sharon LaFraniere

Washington Post Foreign Service

Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A13

ASTANA, Kazakhstan, Sept. 23 -- In a special prayer at the end of an open-air Mass, Pope John Paul II today urged Christians and Muslims to react to growing international tensions by working together for peace, saying, "religion must never be used as a reason for conflict."

"We must not let what has happened lead to a deepening of divisions," the pope said in the capital of this former Soviet republic in Central Asia. "With all my heart I beg God to keep the world in peace."

His words held special meaning for many of the nearly 20,000 people who read from prayer booklets and waved yellow flags from behind blue iron barriers as the frail pontiff celebrated Mass before a simple wooden altar under sunny skies in the town's central square.

Although Kazakhstan has so far escaped the Islamic extremism that troubles some of its neighbors, its citizens fear that a war in nearby Afghanistan could upset the religious harmony among the many faiths and nationalities in this vast land of barren steppe and mountains between Russia and China.

"We are afraid, very afraid," said Galina Kim, 26, a teacher who took an overnight train from her village in southern Kazakhstan. "It's not far away. We already see refugees. We don't even want to think about it, because if there is a war, it will be the last war."

The Mass was attended by an unusual mix of Muslims, Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholics and people of no particular faith. Their nationalities were even more diverse, a reflection of the more than 2 million people deported to Kazakhstan by Joseph Stalin.

Catholics appeared to be in the minority, although special trains transported believers from hundreds of miles away. Fewer than 2 percent of Kazakhstan's 15 million people are Catholic. While the Catholic church has won converts since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, they roughly equal the number of Catholics leaving Kazakhstan for their homelands.

Priests in white robes carried half-full bowls of communion wafers, scanning the smaller-than-expected crowd for takers. The crowd was gently reminded over a loudspeaker that it is a sin to accept communion without first confessing one's sins, "preferably to a Catholic priest."

The 81-year-old pope sought to include all faiths in his message of peace and reconciliation. "I wish to make an earnest call to everyone, Christians and the followers of other religions, that we work together to build a world without violence, a world that loves life, and grows in justice and solidarity," he said in a final prayer repeated in German, English, Russian and Kazakh and not included in his prepared text.

John Paul's first visit to Kazakhstan -- the 95th foreign trip of his pontificate -- is significant in several respects. Like Syria, where he traveled in May, Kazakhstan is predominantly Muslim, and a good setting for the pope's call for harmony among religions.

Like Ukraine, which he visited in June, Kazakhstan is on Russia's doorstep, and a substitute for the Russian visit he cannot make. Much of the former Soviet Union adheres to Eastern Orthodoxy, which broke from Roman Catholicism in 1054. John Paul hopes to mend the rift, but Russian Patriarch Alexei II has kept the pope from his Russia. Alexei is now in Armenia but plans to leave before the pope arrives there Tuesday.

Kazakhstan is also of interest to John Paul as a former Soviet state. The pontiff, who used the Vatican's financial and moral authority to challenge communism in his native Poland, repeatedly congratulated Kazakhstan on its 10 years of independence, urging people to cherish their freedoms.

Finally, Kazakhstan is where the pope's close friend, Vladislav Bukovinsky, was exiled as a Polish priest and tried to minister to Catholics from one of Stalin's camps. Bukovinsky, who was imprisoned three times, is buried in Karaganda, the center of Kazakh Catholicism. The pope hoped to visit Karaganda, 160 miles from Astana, but the government objected, apparently because officials considered the city too downtrodden.

Vatican observers said the pope overrode his security advisers' concerns to make this four-day trip, which put him roughly 1,000 miles from the Afghan border. The pope was shot by a Turkish terrorist in Rome in 1981, and a second assassination plot in the Philippines was foiled in 1995. Philippine officials have established links between those Manila conspirators and Osama bin Laden, the Islamic extremist in Afghanistan blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The pope alluded to security concerns tonight at Astana's Eurasia University when he advised students to "experience difference not as a threat but as an enrichment" and to focus on the good they can create more than the evils in Kazakhstan's past. "I was told many times that this trip would not be possible because of what happened in the U.S.," he said. "I am very happy I am in this part of the world now."

So was Andrei Yermashov, an unemployed 37-year-old who came by train from Karaganda to attend the Mass. Yermashov, who said he hopes to be baptized soon, praised the pope as a beacon of peace and reason.

If the United States attacks Afghanistan, he said, "nobody will take any steps here, but slowly this negative attitude will be developing among Muslims, maybe, because the United States is a Christian country. John Paul II is calling on us to create peace."