ULAANBAATAR, Mangolia: Pope Francis arrived in Mongolia on Friday morning for a visit to encourage one of the smallest and newest Catholic communities in the world.
It is the first time a pope has visited the landlocked Asian country and comes at a time when the Vatican’s relations with Mongolia’s two powerful neighbors, Russia and China, are strained again.
Francis arrived in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar after an overnight flight through Chinese airspace, giving the pope a rare opportunity to send his greetings to President Xi Jinping. Vatican protocol calls for the pope to send such greetings whenever he flies over a foreign country.
In his message to Xi Jinping, Francis expressed “greetings of good wishes to Your Excellency and the people of China.”
“I assure you of my prayers for the well-being of the nation and call upon all of you for the divine blessings of unity and peace,” Francis said.
Speaking to reporters en route to Mongolia on Thursday, Francis said he was looking forward to visiting a country with only a few people but a culture you need to understand.
“There are only a few inhabitants – a small people but a big culture,” he said aboard an ITA charter plane. “I think it will do us good to try to understand that long, great silence, to understand what it means, but not intellectually, but with the senses.” He added, “Mongolia, you understand with your senses.”
On tap are official meetings with Mongolia’s president and prime minister and an address to Mongolian government, cultural and business leaders, followed by Francis’ first meeting with the bishops, priests and nuns who form the backbone of the small Catholic community of 1,450 people. there is only one generation.
While Christianity has been present in the region for hundreds of years, the Catholic Church has only been allowed a presence in Mongolia since 1992, after the country threw out a communist government aligned with the Soviet Union and enshrined religious freedom in its constitution.
The Holy See and Mongolia have had diplomatic relations ever since, and several missionary religious orders, including the Missionaries of Charity of Mother Teresa, cared for the small community during its first three decades.
Four Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity — Jeanne Francoise of Rwanda; Chanmi from South Korea; Viera from Slovakia and Suder from India — run a nursing home on the northern edge of Ulaanbaatar with a capacity of 30 beds. There they care for the elderly with mental or physical disabilities or the homeless, undocumented or otherwise ostracized by their families.
Sister Jeanne Francoise said she was honored that Francis was coming to Mongolia and said she had seen him once before when she lived in Rome, but it was never as “close” as it was in Mongolia.
Francis has long praised the work of missionaries and tried to revive the missionary focus of the church as a whole by visiting them and encouraging them in their work. One of his first events in Mongolia is to preside over a meeting with missionaries at the capital’s Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul on Saturday afternoon, and he will end his visit with the opening of a new church charity house that will care for Mongolia’s poorest.
“I want people to know that the Catholic religion, the Catholic Church and the Catholic faithful also exist in Mongolia,” Reverend Sanjaajav Tserenkhand, a Mongolian priest, said outside the cathedral. He said he hoped Francis’ visit would also show the Mongols that Christianity was not a “foreign religion” but that it also had roots in the country.
The Argentine pope has long favored visiting Catholic communities in what he calls the peripheries, staying away from the global centers of Catholicism to instead minister to small churches where Catholics are often a minority. He made their leaders cardinals to show the universal reach of the 1.3 billion strong Catholic Church, including the head of the Mongolian church, Cardinal Giorgio Marengo.
“His heart burns with love for the universal Church and especially for the Church where he lives in a minority context,” Marengo told reporters during a recent visit to Rome. “And that is the wonderful meaning of his journey all the way to Mongolia.
Another main goal of Francis’ four-day visit is to highlight the long tradition of inter-religious coexistence in Mongolia. The Mongol empire under its famous founder Genghis Khan was known for tolerating people of different faiths among those it conquered, and Francis is likely to highlight that tradition when he chairs an interfaith gathering on Sunday.
Mongolian Buddhists, who make up the majority in the nation of 3.3 million, are invited, as are representatives of Jews, Muslims and Shinto, and members of Christian churches that have settled in Mongolia over the past 30 years, including the Russian Orthodox Church.
The meeting could allow Francis to once again salute the Moscow Patriarchate, which strongly supports the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. Francis tried to walk a diplomatic tightrope so as not to antagonize Moscow, which is in line with the Vatican’s tradition of diplomatic neutrality in conflicts.
Days before his visit, he sparked outrage in Ukraine over his praise of Russia’s imperial past, comments which the Vatican insisted were in no way an endorsement of Moscow’s current war of aggression in Ukraine.
While the Vatican has insisted that Francis is going to Mongolia — not China or Russia — the China question will be looming large: A group of both Chinese Catholics and Russian Catholics are expected to attend Francis’ Mass at the Steppe Arena on Sunday. , but the backdrop of the trip remains Beijing’s crackdown on religious minorities.
In addition, Chinese opposition to the Dalai Lama could come to the fore, as Mongolian Buddhism is closely linked to Tibetan tensions and traditionally venerates the Dalai Lama. Francis has met with religious leaders from around the world, but has so far refrained from meeting the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader for fear of antagonizing Beijing.
