KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan (UCAN) -- The ordination of Kazakhstan's first Greek Catholic priest has been joyously welcomed, but it hardly relieves the severe shortage of clergy in this former Soviet republic.

For the local Byzantine-rite Catholic Church, the event is largely symbolic after all the hardship and suppression its clergy endured in the Soviet era.

On June 10, when Deacon Ivan Chyzhik became the first locally ordained Greek Catholic priest, the number of such priests in Kazakhstan grew to seven.

About 300 people gathered under the golden dome of Protection of the Mother of God Church in Karaganda, 200 kilometers southeast of Astana, the capital. The white-walled building is one of two churches in the country that belong to the Greek Catholic Church, and both are in Karanganda.

The 3,000 Greek Catholics and their 250,000 Latin-rite counterparts together form the Catholic Church in Kazakhstan. The Greek, or Eastern, Catholic Church has regional and country branches, including the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which supervised Father Chyzhik's priesthood formation.

Roman and Greek Catholics attended his ordination, as did many Religious of both Catholic Churches as well as a Russian Orthodox priest.

Bishop Dionisiy Lachowicz (Basilian Order of St. Josaphat), the Brazil-born head of the Patriarchal Administration of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, came to Karanganda from Ukraine to preside at the ordination Mass.

"The Church in Kazakhstan is built on the bones of martyrs," he reminded the congregation, "and today we are harvesting the yield of their sacrifice."

The Greek Catholic Church to which Deacon Chyzhik is devoting his life dates back to the Union of Brest in 1596 when some Orthodox bishops in Poland and Lithuania accepted the supremacy of the pope and Roman Catholic dogma while maintaining their own Byzantine rite.

In 1946, the Soviet government nullified the Brest agreement and forced Greek Catholic priests and laypeople in the Soviet Union to join the Russian Orthodox Church. Those who refused were persecuted and often forced to move to Kazakhstan or Siberia.

Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, suppressed the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, and put all of its bishops and many priests in concentration camps.

Father Chyzhik's mother, Maria Chyzhik, told UCA News she is happy to give her only son to God. Oksana, a friend of the new priest, said Father Chyzhik had dreamed of becoming a priest since his childhood.

Father Chyzhik was born in Ukraine and moved with his family to Karaganda, where in 1998 he entered Mary Mother of the Church Seminary, a Latin-rite seminary run by Karaganda diocese.

He also studied for a year in the Greek Catholic seminary in Drogobych, Ukraine, but Monsignor Vasiliy Hovera, ecclesiastical superior of Greek Catholics in Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia, says that was not enough.

Monsignor Hovera, who concelebrated the Mass with Bishop Lachowicz, has told UCA News that Latin and Byzantine rites are so totally different that far more than just one year of study in a Greek Catholic seminary is needed.

The Greek Catholic superior noted that one Greek Catholic from Kazakhstan has gone to Ukraine for all of his seminary training, but the only other Greek Catholic seminarian is studying at the Roman Catholic seminary in Karaganda.

Monsignor Hovera aalso pointed out that the current roster of priests in Central Asia is so small that there are not enough to work just in Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan's Greek Catholics live in four Greek Catholic parishes and five mission stations. According to Monsignor Hovera, the huge area and severe winter climate make it impossible for priests to serve all of those people.

But the main problem, he added, is the atheism of the Soviet era. "The Greek Catholic community existed only in Karaganda," he said. "Elsewhere, about two generations of Ukrainians lived without God or shifted to the Russian Orthodox Church, so now it is difficult to attract them back to their native Church."

For many years, people secretly gathered in their homes to pray. In 1978, the government relaxed the rules and people began to profess their faith more openly. But only after 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, did the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches witness visible development in Kazakhstan.

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