Transcript:
The Catholics in Kazakhstan are a very small community. We are 0.5 percent of the entire population. We are living in the majority of a Muslim nation. But thanks be to God, they are very peaceful with us. We are living in friendship because the government is pursuing a policy of harmony and peace with all the confessions. We also have a considerable presence of Russian Orthodox faithful, maybe twenty to twenty-five percent, and we have good relationships with them. Thanks be to God.
Our challenges are that the faithful are living very widely spread in small communities, and oftentimes the priests find it very difficult to reach them in the wintertime. There are not sufficient priests to serve all the small communities. Some communities are two hundred to three hundred kilometers from one another. To reach them is not so easy for one priest. He has many communities at such large distances. Of course, we need more local native priests. We have very few. More than eighty percent of all the priests are foreigners from abroad. A local church needs the majority to be local priests, and this is our challenge. We have to educate a new generation of good, solid local clergy. But we hope that with the help of God and the saints and the martyrs, whom we also have had in Kazakhstan, we will slowly grow as a small church.