Testimony from the Kazakh CL community, which collaborated in the logistics of the papal visit. Deepening the awareness of belonging to a history that embraces the whole world

For some months, our community in Kazakhstan lived in expectation of the Pope’s visit, like children whose parents have said to them, “Take this gift, it’s for you;” we remained perplexed, stretching out our hands yet not fully understanding the value of this gift. Our older friends, like affectionate, understanding parents, helped us to get to the bottom of this event.
Brought up and educated in an atheistic environment (in the family, at school and the university, and in society in general), we have encountered the Christian experience only recently. Seven years ago, Fr Edo and Fr Massimo came to Karaganda and enabled our history to begin. From the outset, none of us thought that our friendship in Kazakhstan grew up out of nothingness; everyone perceived that it was part of that great history that is 2,000 years old. Each of us, sooner or later, started asking our friends, “What is the root of the unity that becomes so evident when you start to live this experience?” The answer was surprisingly simple and human: there, at the bottom of everything, is the One who loves your Destiny as no one else does. Living in our companionship, we have understood more and more how the Mystery embraces our life, and how we become more certain: what we have encountered is for us, for our happiness. The community becomes more the place of memory, the house where we return to share our life with our friends.
Thus, some years have passed since that initial encounter. The period of falling in love has passed, of the superficial attraction of friendship, and many in the community have begun to feel the unending challenge of the word “belonging” to be more pressing in daily life. His Face has become more visible, and how He works in us has become more clear.

Through a face
Just as it happened more than 2,000 years ago, the Mystery made flesh came among us at the right time, when His people, born according to His plan seven years ago in Kazakhstan, would need Him more than ever. The Pope’s visit showed that Jesus lives in our midst and redeems each moment of life through our free, reasonable, serene, simple “yes.” He comes among us through the faces of our friends, coworkers, husbands, wives, and children; He came among us in the person of the Pope. Through the various circumstances of life, good and bad, He says, “Have no fear, I am with you always, I never leave you.” This is what we saw and felt in the days of the pilgrimage to Astana.

During the preparation for the Pope’s visit and during his stay in Kazakhstan, we watched and followed our priests and older friends who helped us to stand before the Pope as before Jesus, before His body; that is, before the Church.

Fr Edo, during the summer, did an enormous job. Among other things, he read, translated, and transmitted to the Pope many passages from Kazakh literature, as a support to understanding more deeply the culture and history of this people. And this turned out to be a very useful tool, because the Pope, quoting the Kazakh authors in their original tongue, was able to enter into a more direct and human relationship with the Kazakh population. Fr Adelio, together with representatives of the administration of Astana, was in charge of maintaining order. Fr Eugenio and Claudio, who were in Italy, helped us with their letters to follow and live the beauty of unity, while Fr Livio and Fr Giuseppe were close to us in the moments of fatigue or to answer the questions that arose. Our friends the Ceresanis, husband and wife, with their open hearts and childlike eyes, helped us live the experience of these days in a truer, more profound way. Everything has been given to us as an instrument for loving Jesus more and serving our Company more.

The encounter with the Pope became for us a great gift, because inside the encounter and through our joy we understood better what we had met a few years ago. Precisely in the moment when this physically frail, weak man arrived among us, we felt so strongly the power of the Spirit, which came from him, that it was impossible not to understand what the root of this strength is. This very man is the prime witness of the fact that Jesus acts in our midst. The Holy Father helped us recognize the passion and faithfulness with which Jesus follows our life and clearly takes the initiative in the relationships that we are called to live. The Mystery, in the Pope’s face, wanted to wake us up so as to change our life.

Like two thousand years ago
“For me the Pope’s visit was a very great gift,” Juliana recounts, “because his presence confirms me in living the experience of the Movement that I have encountered. When I heard that the Pope was supposed to come to Kazakhstan, at first the news did not seem so very important. In that moment, he was only a person who was famous, but far away. But then I saw that our friends talked of him with great admiration and passion. And through the gestures we did together (we read Crossing the Threshold of Hope and watched films on the Pope and Christianity), I understood better the experience and figure of this man.

The first challenge they threw at me at work (I am an interpreter in an English company that builds highways) was, ‘Why do you want to go to the meeting with the Pope if you are not Catholic?’ And this became an even bigger challenge for me, because to be able to answer this question, I had to understand it first of all myself. Thus the expectation of the encounter was born in me, as had happened to the Apostles 2,000 years ago. They met a man in flesh and blood. The Pope became for me the physical sign of a Presence that has united all our friends. I saw the Pope as a person who is ill and no longer young, but through this, what he really is. His physical weakness is only a sign, which makes even more visible what he bears inside him, a Presence and an infinite love that moved me to tears”.

It is as if, through the Pope, Jesus had asked us, “Do you love me?” It is a great challenge and a great task to answer Him, discovering within this task our own freedom, our own reason, our own truth.

An unconditional embrace
In these days we became closer friends, that is, in us was born the desire to share that very passion for the world which arises from acknowledgment of the Mystery as a present event. All the young people who worked as interpreters or volunteers during the Mass or at the other meetings told of this living experience. A girl named Anna recounted, “Serving as a volunteer at the Pope’s meeting with young people became for me a gift that I didn’t even expect. Listening to the words that Fr Adelio addressed to the volunteers so that their service would have a great purpose, I was struck by the fact that people would see the Pope’s face in mine. In that moment, I realized the great responsibility I had and I began to get the shivers. In the parking lot in front of Eurasia University, where the meeting of the Pope with the youth took place, I asked myself why I was there and how I could help such a multitude of people. At a certain point, a girl drew close to me out of cold and weakness. I put my arm around her and we stood like that until the end of the meeting. Then I understood why it is worth it to stand there for five hours: by embracing one person, I embraced everybody who was in that square.”

The special meeting between the Pope and Julia and Lucia was very meaningful; he gave them his personal blessing for the opening of the first house of the Memores Domini here in Kazakhstan.

The Pope’s visit was a gift for all of Kazakhstan which, as he pointed out, is a particular example of multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, a society of many civilizations in the same country. This nation–and this is at the same time the task and the challenge that the Holy Father launched to everyone at every level–has “the particular mission which it has in common with your great nation, which is a point of contact between Europe and Asia: a mission of linking two continents, their respective cultures and traditions, and the different ethnic groups who have mingled here through the centuries.”

In these days of unrest, when the whole world has been struck by the tragic events in the United States, the words of the Pope rang out from Kazakhstan, brave words that called for peace, true love, and faith. President N. A. Nazarbaev thanked the Holy Father for precisely these words in the final meeting with important figures from the world of culture, art, and science. The President, impressed by this historic event in Kazakhstan, said that it touched his personal life, his humanity. Many eyewitnesses were struck by the human climate of all the meetings between the Pope and President N.A. Nazarbaev, who in these days presented himself to his people in a completely different way. Precisely by the way the President acted, after the Pope’s farewell at the airport, thousands of young people were able in the end to understand what this gesture means for them.

The positivity of life
The real encounter stimulates the question of vocation to present itself in all its force. This encounter has become a provocation to look for the answer. The Pope made this proposal to us. A person can accept it or refuse it. It is as though he had asked us, “Do you want to verify what you have encountered?” Each of us in these days has faced this question about his own life. The Pope’s visit became the confirmation of the fact that we are living the greatest experience a person can live; “our friendship has a breadth that embraces the whole world.” As our friend Julia said, in her greeting to the Pope at Eurasia University, “the visit became an opportunity for all to acknowledge the positivity of life that has been given to us and the kind face of the Mystery.”

Looking at reality in this way, we encounter Jesus as a living man, present among us. Only in this case can we respond to Him, that is, be responsible. God proposes that we collaborate with Him. Life becomes an offering to Him and a great task. The Pope recalled us precisely to this serious and great attitude toward our own Destiny. What is our answer to him?

The adventure that began 2,000 years ago still continues today. Thank you, Lord, for this divine grace, for the love and infinite mercy that You have given us as a horizon for our future.

The Kazakh CL community