KURGAN-TUBE, Tajikistan (UCAN) -- In a room hardly big enough for a cat to pounce on a mouse, youngsters are huddled watching cartoons intently, but the ever-popular Tom and Jerry are nowhere in sight.

The eight eager viewers crammed into this four-square-meter room are focusing their attention on Moses parting the Red Sea, not slapstick characters that never tire of annihilating one another.

On Sundays for the last two months, Father Pedro Lopez has been showing the group of 11- to 16-year-olds "Bible stories," an American series of animated Old Testament stories, dubbed into the Russian language.

St. Roch Parish in Kurgan-Tube, about 100 kilometers south of Dushanbe, is pressed for space. The old Soviet-era parish building has little room for youngsters to play or study.

While Tajik children enjoy watching Western cartoons including Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse, the cartoon characters at St. Roch include Moses parting the sea and Noah bringing the animals aboard his ark.

"It is a more effective and practical way of teaching catechism I think," Father Lopez, the parish priest, told UCA News in April, keen to add Biblical characters to more familiar names in the cartoon pantheon such as Tom, Jerry, Donald Duck and Aladdin.

"Children can easily learn from video images and remember them," he said, adding that they talk about the episodes afterward. Sometimes, he added, he even stops the cartoon "at the most important moments to explain to the kids what is happening."

The Sunday catechism classes run only about 30-40 minutes, the Argentine priest noted. "So one cartoon will last us two or three weeks, because we not only watch but also discuss the events, trying to bring out the meaning."

One way of enhancing the classes is to inject life into them, capturing the students' attention, and the television and video player have done this well.

"I like our new way of studying the Bible," Dmitry Chyrsin, 15, told UCA News. "It is much more interesting than the classes we used to have before."

Evgeniy Samsonov agrees. "I don't know why. but I like the new form of classes very much," the 11-year-old boy said.

Father Lopez said the idea came to him after a Catholic in Dushanbe recently gave him two videocassettes of the American Bible cartoons. Since the church had an old television and video player, he decided to experiment with the young members of the parish community.

The cartoons grabbed the youngsters' attention and helped renew their interest in catechism classes, he acknowledged.

One regular member of the audience, Vlad Cheremushkin, said he liked "the cartoon about Moses because it is interesting and beautiful." Ruslan Girikh was more matter-of-fact in his appreciation, telling UCA News the cartoons "show us old prophets and what they've done."

Having evaluated the experiment as successful, Father Lopez said he is preparing to show the children New Testament cartoons and religious movies that he has ordered from Russia. No stores in Tajikistan, where Sunni Muslims make up 96 percent of the 6.5 million population, stock such videos.

"We've watched cartoons about Noah, Moses, Abraham and some others, but there are other interesting Bible story cartoons and movies. I want our children to watch them and have a complete conception about the Bible," he said.

Father Lopez and another Incarnate Word priest travel from Dushanbe to St. Roch, Tajikistan's second-largest parish, every weekend to offer Mass and look after the small Catholic community here.

Germans founded the parish in the second half of the 20th century, but almost all of them left during the civil war that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and independence in 1991. Parishioners today are either Russian or the children of mixed marriage, and church services are held in Russian, still the lingua franca of the Central Asian region.

The largest Christian group in the country is the Russian Orthodox community, to which about 3 percent of Tajik citizens belong. Catholics number only about 250.

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