TASHKENT (UCAN) -- This year's meeting of Catholics from across Uzbekistan focused on living up to their faith in this predominantly Muslim country.

About 100 Catholics attended the seventh annual meeting, held May 11-13 at Sacred Heart Church in Tashkent. The theme, Witnessing to Jesus in Asia, echoed the first Asian Mission Congress, held last October in Thailand.

Conventual Franciscan Father Wojciech Kordas, who works in Bukhara, represented Uzbekistan at the congress in Thailand and was the main speaker at the meeting in Tashkent.

Father Kordas, a Polish missioner, told participants the Church should live its mission in the local context. "The Church should consider the local mentality, psychology and culture while witnessing to Jesus in Asia," he said.

Pursuing "inculturation," he said, the Church should speak to people "in their language."

Regular churchgoing Catholics number about 500 in Uzbekistan, where Muslims make up 88 percent of 27 million people. Catholics are Uzbek nationals but mostly of ethnic Polish or Russian descent. The clergy in Uzbekistan are all Polish members of the Conventual Franciscans' Krakow (Poland) province. Many people in Tashkent call Sacred Heart the "Polish church."

The annual meeting included group discussions in which Catholics from Angren, Bukhara, Ferghana, Navoi, Samarkand, Tashkent and Urgench talked about interreligious dialogue, social communications, prayer experiences and witnessing to Jesus in an Asian context.

Participants agreed that witnessing should be about their personal meeting with Jesus rather than an attempt to convince people to become Catholics. Uzbekistan law bans public missionary activity, so Catholics must exemplify Gospel values to others in their daily life, they pointed out.

"I always try not to preach while telling about my experience of encountering Jesus," Eduard Chudov shared. "I just tell people about my life, and it is their business how they receive it."

Another participant, Anton, who like Chudov is a Sacred Heart parishioner, said a lot of people thirst for spirituality, which he thinks could help Catholics witness to Jesus among local people.

Aziz Usmanov, a teacher and architect, told UCA News that Uzbeks' respect for people who follow a religion could open opportunities to tell them about the Gospel. Usmanov, born in a mixed Uzbek-Russian family, was baptized at Easter 2006. He helped Father Kordas build a church and interreligious center in Bukhara, and later joined the Church.

Father Kordas told UCA News afterward that witnessing to Jesus means "living up to one's faith," as well as "dialoguing with people of other faiths."

In Bukhara, he said, the Church maintains good relations with others, observing Christian and Muslim holidays, and working with Muslim neighbors to settle common problems. Father Kordas said he also makes it a point to regularly visit local mosques in that ancient Silk Road trading city, 600 kilometers southwest of Tashkent.

The missioner recalled that at the congress in Thailand, he shared his concern about reaching out to ethnic Uzbeks, who make up only a "tiny" proportion of the Church, with so many people of European descent leaving the country.

This exodus to Russia and elsewhere in Europe began following Uzbek independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up.

"I am well aware of this problem," Father Kordas said. Priests and nuns "need to expand our mission," he added, if they are "not to be left alone in the church building."

END

(Accompanying photos available at here)