Cardinal Sodano to Represent Pope at Kazakhstan Dedication

The Vatican announced today that Benedict XVI appointed Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, as the pontifical legate to the consecration of the cathedral of the Diocese of Karaganda, Kazakhstan.

The cathedral will be consecrated Sept. 9, Zenit informs.

Karaganda was elevated to a diocese in 1999. It has some 40,000 Catholics, served by just over a dozen priests. Forty-seven-year-old Bishop Janusz Kaleta, a native of Poland, is the bishop of the diocese.

In a pastoral letter in April, the bishops of Kazakhstan wrote of the history of the cathedral and the diocese, explaining that during the Soviet era, the city of Karaganda and the surrounding region, "earned for itself hideous notoriety as being a place of repression and banishment for anyone and everyone, of whatever nationality, ethnic group or religious denomination, who dared to challenge atheistic materialism. It was known at that time under the code-name of 'KARLAG,' an anagram made up from the two words: KARaganda and LAGer."

The Karaganda Concentration Camps covered an area as big as France and was "one of the largest, one [of] the most important and notorious of all Soviet concentration camps under Stalin’s dictatorship."

"[I]t is fair to say that soil of Kazakhstan has in no other place been so thoroughly soaked in the blood and tears of more innocent victims of Communist repression than here in Karaganda," the bishops added. "On his first visit to Karaganda, the Patriarch of All the Russias, His Excellency Alexis II, stated that this city is like a huge 'antimins' or altar-veil spread reverently over the mortal remains of all the martyrs who lie here."

The bishops noted three priests who died there, now in the process of canonization.

They also recalled that in 1980, a bishop for the first time in six centuries celebrated the liturgy publicly "on the soil of Kazakhstan, robed in his Episcopal vestments and holding his crozier. The Bishop in question was Monsignor Alexander Khira. The last bishop before him, when the Episcopal seat was at Almaty, was a man named Monsignor Richard of Burgundy, who died a martyr’s death about the year 1340."