IVANOVKA, Kazakhstan (UCAN) Sister Vladislava Veslavska, 73, has spent the past 30 years here, but few if any other residents besides her sister know she is a Catholic nun.

Wearing a simple blue dress with a white kerchief around her head, she looks like any other elderly woman in Ivanovka, about 1,000 kilometers south of Astana, the Kazakh capital.

The 30 years she has spent apart from her Sacred Heart of Mary community in Ukraine followed an almost equal span of time during which she and the other nuns could meet only furtively and did not live together.

Now, close to 60 years since she took her vows as a Religious, Sister Veslavska has an opportunity to live in a convent for the first time.

"I'm a Catholic nun, but I've never lived in a convent because the communists didn't allow me to do it," she told UCA News in May. "Only now, when Incarnate Word nuns are to open a community (in Kazakhstan), do I have a chance to openly join a Religious congregation."

Sister Veslavska was born in Ukraine but was deported to Kazakhstan in 1936 as a youngster with her ethnic Polish parents and sister. Many of the 250,000 Catholics in Kazakhstan trace their roots to deportations in the 1930s and 1940s under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

In 1948, she and her parents returned to Ukraine and she entered the Sacred Heart of Mary congregation, founded in Poland in the 19th century. "But it wasn't a real convent," she said.

"Together with 18 other girls, I was a member of the community, but we lived in our houses and met in the house of our mother superior for a couple of hours of spiritual conversations or prayer," she recounted. "Everything was very secret. We had to wear ordinary clothes and find work, because the communists didn't allow us to organize an official convent. We had to hide our real calling from others."

After 29 years of "underground" Religious life, Sister Veslavska became sick in 1977 and decided to move back to Kazakhstan and live with her sister. She said the local bishop gave his permission, despite her superior's reservations.

In Ivanovka, Sister Veslavska continued to pray daily, but she admits the lack of priests made it difficult for her and her sister, Gerolina Somber, now 81 and a widow, to live a full spiritual life. The closest parish was in Taraz, 130 kilometers away.

"First we visited this parish on Sundays," Somber told UCA News. "But when we got older, it became more difficult for us, and we attended Holy Mass only occasionally, when our German neighbors invited priests," she continued. "After the Soviet Union broke up and most of the Germans left, we couldn't attend Mass at all."

Likewise, ethnic Poles, Russians and Ukrainians, who had also populated settlements in the area, emigrated after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Kazakhstan became independent.

In 1998, Spanish missioners established Saint Therese of Lisieux Parish in Chimkent, 80 kilometers west of Ivanovka. Sister Veslavska asked neighbors to go and ask the priests to visit her house. They began visiting regularly.

The Institute of the Incarnate Word took charge of the parish in 2006, and two priests from Argentina, where the institute is based, took up residence. Plans call for the Servants of the Lord and Holy Virgin of Matara, the women's Religious congregation in the Incarnate Word family, to establish a community in Chimkent and help the priests expand pastoral care.

Father Ezequiel Ayala, temporarily stationed in Chimkent, told UCA News Sister Veslavska and Somber will come and live with the Incarnate Word nuns after the nuns arrive in Chimkent, probably in July. Not only do the two elderly Catholic women need people to take care of them, he said, but Sister Veslavska will have a chance "to live in a real Religious community, something she has never experienced."

Nearing the 60th anniversary of her vows as a Religious, Sister Veslavska is looking forward to her first experience of convent life. "I want to live with sisters very much, because I'm a nun and I'm also very old," she said.


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