Masons had the walls of the new Chelyabinsk Catholic church almost completed as of Sept. 12.
The walls of the main part of the church will be 40 feet high when finished, and on Sept. 12 they ranged anywhere from 32 to 37 feet. Thirty workers were rapidly raising them higher, four of them busy just moving the scaffolds.
The parishioners, who have been gathering within the walls after Mass each Sunday to pray the rosary for all the church's benefactors, now see significant progress weekly.
Work on the walls had been proceeding at a snail's pace till a week-long visit in March by the artist-architect Franz Wesinger of Freiburg, Germany. Wesinger was dissatisfied more with the quality of the work than with its pace, and a new firm was employed that same mouth.
The new supervisor of the project is now a 38-year-old Russian German, Alexander Depperschmidt, who is overseeing this project in addition to his fulltime work as director of a 700-man unit at Chelyabinsk's largest steel mill.
While the walls are going up, Depperschmidt's steel mill is fabricating the church's roof in four parts.
Local architect of the church is now Romand Kaiser, another Russian German, who has built many large apartment buildings. He is honored and proud to build this church, the last major project before he retires.
Vladimir Schmidt, one of Depperschmidt's employees at the mill and for some time a benefactor of both the parish and the Sisters, is directing a crew of largely German extraction.
The new church is circular and 80 feet in diameter and will hold about 1,000 people standing or 600 seated. Dividers are being planned to enable the church's possible use by the Lutherans and Orthodox, as it will be the only church building in all of Chelyabinsk, a city of 1.4 million people, and indeed the only one in the entire Chelyabinsk oblast of 2 million souls.
A full basement under the church will provide room for various parish functions, Caritas (Catholic Charities) offices, and a possible soup kitchen.
The new church will also have an 80-foot steeple 20 feet in diameter, which will house a chapel for daily Mass with four apartments above it for the local clergy.
The new impetus in building enabled Bishop Joseph Werth to bless the cornerstone in May, and the new leaders now hope to have the church under roof by January, so they can work inside throughout the winter.
Schmidt hopes to have the church finished by October, 1996, but the pastor still talks of the year 2000. The surge of building is eating up the building fund fast. Rental alone on two huge cranes takes $5,000 a month. $200,000 are needed to continue work until spring.
The reality of building in Russia is that no loans can be made, and cash must be prepaid before every step of the building.
The people of the parish can not provide the funds. Often they do not get paid for months because their firm or the government has to wait until more money comes in! Even pensions are late!
Most of the money for the new building is coming from the Church in Germany, but the benefactors also include people from Kansas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Oklahoma who have sent funds to the Russian parish through the Volga German Society of Ellis and Rush Counties (P.O. Box 1314, Hays KS 67601). Memorial plaques are being arranged through the VGS in amounts of $500 or more.
Sr. Lucy Ann Wasinger, Kansas-bom missionary in Chelyabinsk, wrote, "If any people are interested in helping to build the church and have memorials for living or deceased dear ones, now is the crucial time to help. When the iron is hot, it needs to be bent; when it is molten, it pours!"
Unlike the present prayer hall which is in a gutted and remodelled, small, private dwelling, the new church is at a major Chelyibinsk intersection and is seen by parish leaders as becoming a beacon to the whole city as well as the parish's mission area, which is about the size of Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma combined.
Sr. Lucy said that while the church is being built as a beacon, "God is building the Church community here to be the Spirit-light in the lighthouse!"
"I am so grateful for the call to be a missionary here as God intervenes in the history of our times. My mission is to the young Russian-speaking adults, and increasingly more and more Russians are coming to our Sunday and Thursday evening Russian Masses. Many became aware of the Church's presence through the Ecumenical Evangelical Mission here in April."
Sister has already accompanied two groups of young people from the parish to Focoloare retreats and formation experiences at a camp near Moscow. Both were aimed at cultivating Gospel spirituality, personal spiritual growth in faith sharing, and community building. This month, with the help of these young people and the Focolare resource team from Moscow, the Chelyabinsk parish held its own five-day Focolare experience at Camp Kaldee on a nearby lake, and over 140 people participated, most of them baptized since 1992.
"The days at Camp Kaldee were most beautiful and fruitful for the growth of the living Church which will be the Light and Fire of the building going up," noted Sr. Lucy. "Every Sunday new young adults come to Church searching for meaning and faith, and we have a young flowering community learning to invite and embrace them. We do need the building space desperately."
"My own deep conviction is that the Faithful God Who has begun this
magnificent work will see it to completion."
[Photo unavailable]
Already on July 2, the walls had begun reaching upward as the parish
gathered to pray for its benefactors in Germany, America, and elsewhere.
(Part two of the address given at Colorado Springs CO on June 10, 1995, at the First International Conference to Aid the Church in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The remainder will appear in the next issue).
(The first part of this address appeared in Issue 15.)
Four years ago the Pope, in restoring the Catholic jurisdictions, founded the Apostolic Administration in Novosibirsk, and in this short time there have been many changes.
Last summer, I visited with a very wonderful man, named Deacon George, who had arrived the previous year in the northeast portion of our Administration in the parish of Magadan.
He then walked thousands of kilometers through tundra and taiga. After spending the winter in the parish of Vershina near Irkutsk, he walked to Novosibirsk, and thence towards Kazakhstan to the southwest. Thus he walked through our endless diocese. I considered the pilgrimage of this deeply spiritual man a great blessing for us.
Had Deacon George had the opportunity to visit each parish of our diocese, to visit each church or prayer house, to become familiar with the life of the faithful people there I think he would have found a very active Catholic life.
Today we have 50 priests from the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Slovakia, Chile, Paraguay, Korea, and Lebanon. A few of them are diocesan priests; we also have Franciscans, Redemptorists, Jesuits, Salesians, Salvatorians, and Claretians. Working with us also are 50 sisters from various religious families, such as the Eucharist Sisters, Sisters of Mother Teresa, Mary Ward Sisters, Adorers of the Precious Blood, Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, and Sisters of St. Agnes from the U.S. Besides the religious orders we also have the new movements such as the Neo-Catechumenate, Communion e Liberazione, Pro Deo et Fratribus, and Madonna House.
We now have 150 large and small Catholic communities in Siberia. Only five of them come together for prayer in a true church: in the cities of Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Vladivostok, and in the villages of Vershina and Sargatskoje). In Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, the Catholics assemble for prayer in their old churches which are now state concert halls for organ music. In 20 other villages and cities, the Catholics have only improvised churches - houses or apartments transformed into prayer houses. In other locales they rent rooms in hotels, churches, and other places, but most of them come together for prayers and Masses in family houses, like 10, 20 and 50 years ago. Today we are building churches in Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlosk, and buildings are planned for several other places. We can say that Catholics in every part of Asiatic Russia have the opportunity without huge difficulty to find a Catholic priest and obtain from him the blessing of the Catholic Church.
If there is a lot of work in the building of churches, there is a lot more work in the restoration of the living church of the people themselves. Most of the communities have been founded in the last three years. If today we have 150, perhaps in three years there will be 300.
Who will spiritually serve them food. There is a need of priests and sisters, of catechists and organists. And I consider my visit in different countries successful if I find one priest for my diocese. A very important thing in Novosibirsk three years ago was the opening of the diocesan pre-seminary. This year the first two students finished their studies and they will be going to the seminary of Moscow.
(To be continued in Issue 17.)
A huge area of Siberia is once again without a resident priest. Fr. Walter Bachmann, 44, who had been serving the Altai region south of Novosibirsk, died suddenly in his home at Barnaul on the evening of Aug. 28.
Born May 28, 1951, the son of German immigrants to Paraguay, Fr. Walter arrived in Siberia in August, 1993, and was serving a multi-lingual parish comprised of German, Polish, Lithuanian, Armenian, Latvian, and Ukrainian-speaking peoples.
After studying philosophy and theology at Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, Fr. Walter was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Villareal del Espiritu Santo on Nov. 25, 1978.
He served in various cities and states there in many different ministries - as a university and boy scout chaplain and busy pastor, minor seminary teacher and university professor, director of a junior high school and technical school, diocesan director of youth ministry, and assistant diocesan adminstrator. Father joined the Fidei Donum priests of Latin America in 1988.
According to a death notice from Novosibirsk, Fr. Walter was, "despite much work in the Barnaul parish, indefatigable and always cheerful and loved by his people."
Fr. Al Bitz of Wimbledon ND said when he visited Barnaul in early 1994, Fr. Walter asked him to sing all kinds of German-Russian hymns with the people, "since, as he told the people, God had not blessed him with a voice." According to Fr. Bitz, Barnaul is a city of about 600,000 and the parish covers an area "the size of North Dakota" and has in it "two other cities of about 600,000 people plus about 200 small rural communities."
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