Cathedral of Our Lady of Fatima: built by the grandchildren of gulag deportees, on the very date chosen to mark the Fatima apparitions

In Karaganda, in Kazakhstan, the Catholic presence has its roots in Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. It was ordered on 28 August 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR, and carried out between 3 and 20 September of that year, moving about 950,000 people to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Its other root is the forced labour system of Karlag (the Karaganda corrective labour camp), active from 1931 to 1959, which by various estimates held between 800,000 and over a million people of more than a hundred different ethnic groups, thousands of them Polish, German, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian Catholics. The descendants of the deportees and the survivors of the camps, who stayed on in the region after their release, formed the core of the local Catholic community on which the diocese was later founded. The minor basilica of Saint Joseph, the diocese’s original seat, had become too small. So Bishop Jan Pawel Lenga obtained from the city authorities, on 13 May 2003 — a date deliberately chosen to fall on the anniversary of the apparitions of Fatima — the land on which the present cathedral stands. The auxiliary bishop Athanasius Schneider, then at Karaganda until his move to Astana in 2011, is named by the sources as the figure most directly responsible for the building and for raising the money, which came from international donations with no single large documented donor. It was he, too, who commissioned for the crypt a cycle of fourteen eucharistic paintings from the Italian artist Rodolfo Papa. On the architect’s name the sources disagree: the German Wikipedia gives Karl-Maria Ruf, who drew on Cologne Cathedral and the proportions of Chartres, and the English Wikipedia gives Vladimir Sergeyev, with no more authoritative source to settle it. Built between 2003/2004 and 2012, the cathedral was consecrated on 9 September 2012 by Cardinal Angelo Sodano. It is neo-Gothic, with brick walls faced in travertine, two twin bell towers and a white marble statue of Our Lady of Fatima between the spires. It is often described as the largest Catholic cathedral in Central Asia, a claim widely repeated but not confirmed by independent sources of the first rank. It also holds what the sources describe as the largest organ in Kazakhstan, built by the Austrian firm Pflüger Orgelbau. The apostolic administration of Kazakhstan was set up on 13 April 1991, separated from the diocese of Vladivostok, and promoted to the diocese of Karaganda on 7 July 1999, later ceding territory to the apostolic administrations of Astana, Almaty and Atyrau. Lenga, bishop from 1999 to 2011, was followed by Janusz Wieslaw Kaleta (2011-2014) and, since 2015, by the present bishop Adelio Dell’Oro. On 11 September 2016 the cathedral hosted the first beatification ever celebrated in Kazakhstan, that of Blessed Wladyslaw Bukowinski, a Polish priest who survived more than thirteen years in the Soviet camps and then stayed in Kazakhstan for the rest of his life; the mass was led by Cardinal Angelo Amato on behalf of Pope Francis. Blessed Oleksiy Zarytsky, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest who died in the camp of Dolinka, near Karaganda, in 1963, was instead beatified at Lviv in 2001, as a member of a rite other than the Latin one of this cathedral. In September 2025 the diocesan phase of the beatification cause of the laywoman Gertrude Detzel closed, under Bishop Dell’Oro. On his apostolic journey to Kazakhstan in September 2022, Pope Francis did not go to Karaganda: his meeting with the bishops was held in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Astana, a different building — though in his address to the bishops he named Bukowinski, Zarytsky and Gertrude Detzel, honouring from a distance the history of persecution bound up with this community.