A new Catholic bishop for Siberia

Pope Francis has appointed German Jesuit Stephan Lipke, 49, as auxiliary bishop of the diocese of the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, alongside Bishop Joseph Werth, the last of the three bishops appointed in 1991, when Catholic structures were restored in Russia. An important task in a particularly delicate period for the country's political and religious history.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - The main seat of the Catholics of Siberia, the diocese of the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, has had a new auxiliary bishop since yesterday, the German Jesuit Stephan Lipke, who has been active in Russia for many years as director of the St Thomas Aquinas Institute, founded in 1991 for the training of lay collaborators in parishes, and which has become an important cultural centre in Moscow for interreligious and cultural dialogue.

The new bishop, who will turn 50 at the end of the year, joins 72-year-old Bishop Joseph Werth, who has been in office in Novosibirsk since 1991, when the Catholic structures in Russia were restored with the two apostolic administrations for European and Asian Russia.

Bishop Lipke is a German Jesuit like his predecessor, who was however born in Kazakhstan to a family of Russian Germans deported to Central Asia at the time of Stalin, from the Volga area where Werth had been a parish priest in the city of Marx for some years. This was one of the historical realities of the spread of European emigrants to Russia, particularly from the Germanic territories, as decided by the ‘Westernist’ Tsar Peter the Great in the early 18th century.

The Volga Germans were themselves heirs of the ancestors who had built the northern capital of Sankt-Petersburg, founded with a German title (although it was originally Dutch, St. Peterburg) to give Russia a new image as a ‘window on Europe’, becoming a very significant component of the Russian Eurasian Empire.

Further Stalinist deportations dispersed many Russian-Germans, who lived in compact communities according to their own customs, even in the expanses of Siberia and the countries of Central Asia, particularly in Kazakhstan and around the city of Karaganda, where Bishop Werth was born.

When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, most of the Germans in those areas tried to emigrate to Germany, and in the Catholic churches still open under the Soviets, only representatives of the other ethnic group of Russian Catholics, those of Polish origin, remained.

In those years, in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Fatima in Karaganda, the church was filled only from the left side, because the pews in the right aisle were ‘the seats of the Germans’ who were no longer there, but no Pole dared to sit in their place.

The 1991 appointments had to respect the Soviet nationality of the new bishops, and so a Belarusian was chosen for Moscow (Msgr. Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, now retired in Minsk), a Pole for Karaganda (Jan Pawel Lenga, retired in Poland) and a German for Novosibirsk, Msgr. Werth, recognising the main ethnic references for Catholics in Russia.

There was in fact one link that was excluded from the appointments, that with Lithuanian Catholics, which was impracticable in 1991 due to Lithuania's conflict with Moscow, as the first country to decide to separate itself from all ties with the Soviet past; but all three bishops appointed had been trained in Lithuania.

It was not easy for the first apostolic nuncio to post-Soviet Russia, Msgr. Francesco Colasuonno, to convince Father Joseph Werth to leave the parish of Marx to accept the episcopal appointment, of which he did not feel worthy and which he has since held until today, and in whose ministry he will now be joined by his Jesuit confrere.

Archbishop Lipke thus inherits a double important tradition, that of the German Catholics of Russia and that of the Society of Jesus to which Werth himself belonged, and which precisely in Novosibirsk found the possibility of rebirth in a land from which it had been expelled in the mid 19th century, but where it had left a very important mark in the spread of the Gospel and Western Catholic Christian culture.

The Jesuits had decided at the beginning of the 1990s to reopen their structures far from Moscow, to avoid possible conflicts, as the Society had always been under observation as the main ‘western agent’ in Russia, and around Bishop Werth they were able to create important pastoral and cultural structures.

In 1998, however, they also took over from the Moscow diocese the responsibility for the institute of philosophy and theology for the laity, making it an effective protagonist of dialogue in the Russian capital, with a succession of very incisive personalities, from the first director, Polish Fr Stanislaw Opiela (the first Catholic priest in the new Russia to be denied a visa in 1999), to the last predecessor of Mgr Lipke, American Fr Anthony James Corcoran, now apostolic administrator of the Catholics of Kyrgyzstan.

Msgr. Lipke began his service in Russia in 2011 in Novosibirsk and then in Tomsk in Siberia, the only Russian city where a Catholic school is active thanks to the Jesuits. In Moscow he then took over responsibility for the St Thomas Institute, becoming an important reference point for Catholics in Moscow and beyond. Since 2020, he has also been secretary of the Russian Catholic Bishops' Conference.

He takes on a very important legacy, standing alongside the last bishop appointed in 1991, in a particularly delicate current period of Russia's political and religious history, taking this cross on his shoulders with great humility and sense of responsibility, for the future of Christian and Catholic Russia.

• Russia
• Siberia
• Novosibirsk
• Lipke
• Werth