Pope Francis, always concerned about the peripheries of Catholicism, has become the first pontiff to travel to remote Mongolia, a land of great extension, but with just 3.3 million inhabitants. And of them, only 1,400 are Catholics, one of the smallest communities in the world, in a country with a Buddhist majority. A large part of its inhabitants (30%) are still nomads and many have never heard of this Pope, who, on the other hand, has not yet visited major European capitals such as Madrid or Paris.
The Catholic presence in Mongolia is so small that it does not even have a nunciature – a Vatican embassy – so Francis went to the residence of the prefect of Ulaanbaatar, Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, a 49-year-old Italian missionary who was the surprise of the last consistory to be created cardinal. There the Argentine pope spent his first day resting after the grueling nine-and-a-half-hour flight he took at age 86, months after undergoing an operation in June for an intestinal hernia.
The Pontiff will begin his official activities today in the land of Genghis Khan, beginning with a reception with the authorities, in which he could send a message to Russia or China, Mongolia's two neighboring giants. The Jesuit pope has expressed on several occasions his desire to visit Moscow and Beijing, but instead he has gone to Ulaanbaatar. The papal plane flew over China and, as is tradition, sent a telegram to the head of state, President Xi Jinping, to whom he conveyed good wishes to the Chinese people and conveyed his prayers for the "well-being" of the nation.
The message had an impact given the Vatican's difficult relations with Beijing, with whom it does not maintain diplomatic relations because it does with Taiwan, which China claims as its own. With a controversial agreement for the appointment of bishops signed in 2018, Bergoglio is trying to end the division of Catholics between the official, state-supported Church and the underground, which obeys Rome. China responded to the Pope through a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang Wenbin, who assured that the blessing reflected friendship and goodwill, and underlined the communication maintained in recent years between the Asian giant and the Holy See.
Francis' trip to "a small town but with a great culture", as he himself told the journalists who flew with him to Ulaanbaatar, will also allow him to address other concerns of his pontificate, such as interreligious dialogue or climatic emergency, in a country where floods, drought or intense cold have forced many nomads to leave the steppes and migrate to the country's capital.
