ASIA/MONGOLIA – The Apostolic Prefect: the mission is nourished by the depth of faith

Ulan Bator (Agenzia Fides) – Moving from “speed” to a dimension of greater “depth”. This is the need for the near future of the Church in Mongolia, according to what was underlined by Msgr. Giorgio Marengo, Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, in the recent webinar “The mission of evangelization in Central Asia in the time of Evangelii Gaudium”, promoted by the Pontifical Missionary Union.
Taking stock and illustrating the prospects for the mission in Mongolia, the Bishop declared: “In trying to retrace these first thirty years of formal presence of the Catholic Church in Mongolia, the feeling is that everything began in a providential conjuncture of favorable events, which led one of the most closed countries in the world to suddenly open up to missionary work. As Father Jeroom Heyndrickx, one of the first missionaries to come here in 1991, said, “For some reason it seemed like everything had to be done fast and it all happened fast.” In the wake of this rapid start, the number of works set up by the missionaries who joined the first group is equally surprising. If the speed of the beginnings had its undeniable advantages, it is perhaps now time to go deeper, thinking above all of the life of faith which must be able to be nourished by contents adapted to reality and by a practice which reflects them and continue to inspire them.
According to Msgr. Marengo, “depth is long periods of adequate inclusion, a slow effort to learn the local language and above all to get in tune with the beating heart of this culture, which is embodied in the people you meet. It also means accompanying the journey of each brother and sister who, touched by Grace, begin to reread their personal and collective history in the light of the Gospel”. This renewed “rhythm” can represent, according to the prelate, an effective response to the new needs of Mongolian society, which, like the Church in this region, has experienced extremely rapid development: “Rapid economic growth is accompanied by ‘a proportionate complexity growth of society. If already at the time of socialism there were two Mongols, the urban one of Ulaanbaatar and the rest of the country, still marked by the old rhythms of nomadism, the difference today is partly even more striking, but with a greater complexity, because the ways of life mix and compare with the tendencies of the globalized world”.
Priority, specifies Mgr. Marengo, is to promote an announcement and a ministry attentive to the specificities of the Mongolian people and their infinite nuances: “Today’s Mongolia probably does not ‘need’ the Catholic Church to make up for the shortcomings of its system of social protection and not as “our noble initiatives. The commitment to human promotion will always continue, because it belongs to the very nature of the mission, but it must not make us lose sight of the authentic tension towards formation of Christian life and its ethico-liturgical dimension”. The risk is to get lost a little in the multiple projects and to let the freshness of the testimony of faith fade away”.
According to the Bishop, the proclamation of the Gospel in Mongolia must be “whispered”: “It is an expression of the Archbishop Emeritus of Guwahati, Thomas Menamparampi, SDB, who applied it to the Asian continent in general. the Soul of Asia” is for him a synthetic way of indicating the beauty of the perennial Christian proclamation, in the delicacy of its incarnation in the land of Asia. The mission thus understood reflects well its deeply relational and spiritual dimension. , while remaining embodied in each culture,” he concluded.
In Mongolia, Christianity has deep roots of Syriac origin present in the region since the 10th century and then frozen by the epic of the Mongol Empire and by the atheism imposed during the 20th century. In 1991, the day after the peaceful democratic revolution, a group of Mongolian diplomats asked to establish relations with the Holy See: this was the start of a very rapid process which, in a few months, would lead first to the establishment of relations and then the arrival of the first three Missionaries of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The local Catholic community now has just over 1,300 baptized people, compared to nearly 63,000 Christians of other denominations (which in any case does not exceed 2% of the entire population), according to a recent census. Protestant. There are 64 Catholic missionaries, including 22 priests (17 religious and 5 diocesan), 35 nuns, 3 non-religious priests, 3 lay missionaries and 1 bishop, belonging to 10 religious congregations and 2 dioceses, with 24 nationalities represented. The local clergy has only one priest and one deacon, close to priestly ordination. (LF-PA) (Agenzia Fides, 20/10/2021)

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