Aisuluu Maria Talipbek saw Pope Francis as an inspiration and a role model.

“Francis was like [a] father,” the 34-year-old said after mass at St. Michael the ArchangelChurch in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. “He understood everyone,” she said, even those society has rejected.

Francis was one of the reasons Talipbek became one of the newest members of Kyrgyzstan’s tiny Roman Catholic community last Easter. The Monday following her baptism, Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, who was known for emphasis on mercy and concern for the poor, died at 88 in Rome. 

Talipbek was devastated. “I cried a lot,” she said. Members of the Church’s College of Cardinals who are under 80 will begin the process of selecting Francis’ successor on May 7.

Even in Central Asia, where most people are Muslim and most Christians are Orthodox, the Argentine pope has left a lasting legacy. He became the second pope to visit the region, making a 2022 visit to Astana, and constantly emphasized the importance of Catholics on the peripheries of the church, a message that made Central Asian Catholics feel a little less forgotten.

Kazakhstan is home to the largest Catholic population in Central Asia at somewhere around 1% of the population, many of them the descendants of Germans, Ukrainians and Poles resettled or deported there by communist leaders during the Soviet era. There are five Catholic churches in Uzbekistan, four in Kyrgyzstan and tiny communities in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. None of the cardinals who will elect the next pope are from Central Asia.

When Remigiusz Kalski, the parish priest at St. Michael’s, reflects on Francis’ legacy in Central Asia, the first word that comes to mind is “complicated.”

“On the one hand, Pope Francis had a policy not to abandon anyone in the church without care and especially to look after and help those who are somewhere on the edge, the margins of society,” Kalski said. “On the other hand, decrees by God … and the observance of the commandments do not change.”

Francis’ years on the Throne of Saint Peter saw intense debates over the more progressive direction in which the pope took the church; some loud voices of opposition came from Central Asia.

During Francis’ pontificate, Athanasius Schneider, an Astana auxiliary bishop born in Kyrgyzstan to a family of Black Sea Germans deported by the Soviets, became something of a hero among the pope’s conservative critics with his outspoken opposition to some of Francis’ reforms, and his warnings of the menace posed by “homosexual ideology” and migrants, whom Francis championed.

Schneider issued a 40-point declaration in 2019 with other clerics outlining a traditionalist view of church teaching. During Francis’ 2022 visit he called the pope’s participation in a multi-faith summit “dangerous.” And, along with Astana Archbishop Tomash Peta, strongly condemned Francis’ 2016 decision that allowed divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion under some circumstances.

In December 2023, the Vatican allowed priests to informally bless same-sex couples, without changing the church’s opposition to gay marriage. Peta and Schneider were among the first church leaders to ban priests in their archdiocese from performing such blessings, doing so the day after the Vatican guidance was published.

The clashes between the Astana bishops and Francis are emblematic of a wider rift within the church that will likely play out at the coming conclave between those who favor small adaptations in church practice to make it more dynamic and inclusive, and those who see the church’s resistance to modernity and strict adherence to doctrine as its strength.

Though the vast majority of clerics in Central Asia did not take the Astana bishops’ confrontational approach, questions about doctrine did come up.

St. Michael’s Kalski recalled that after the announcement about blessing same-sex couples, which Russian media portrayed as a full-throated endorsement of same-sex marriage, Kyrgyz protestant communities stopped inviting Catholics to inter-faith events, and government officials grumbled that the church was contradicting Kyrgyz traditional values.

For many Central Asian Catholics, it is Francis’ September 2022 visit to Astana that left the greatest impression of his pontificate. Kyrgyz Catholics, for instance, piled into a tour bus and made the 21-hour drive across the Kazakh steppe to attend, Kalski said.

Rinat Osmonaliev, a 34-year-old Kyrgyz Catholic from Bishkek, took turns at the wheel with a friend as they made the long journey. Authorities estimated 10,000 people turned out for the pope’s mass on the Expo grounds in Astana. Osmonaliev looked on from deep in the crowd. 

“There was a feeling of such unity,” he said. “People came from Kazakhstan, from Russia, from Kyrgyzstan, from Uzbekistan, and because Catholics are so few in Central Asia, we all met everyone we know.”

In addition to the mass, the pope participated in the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, met with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, met with the church’s leadership in the region and begged for an end to the “senseless” war in Ukraine.

The visit echoed Pope John Paul II’s 2001 visit to Astana when he called for inter-religious understanding.

Francis often directed his travel away from the traditional centers of Catholicism in Europe toward far-flung countries with small Catholic minorities like Romania, Iraq and Myanmar, mirroring his emphasis on those on the margins of society.

“We feel that we’re on the far periphery of the world, but all the same we felt like the pope remembers the little sprouts [of the church] that are on the other side of the world,” Osmonaliev said. 

He hopes the next pope “will, just like Pope Francis, help the little communities all over the world, because Christianity will develop where Christians are few.”