ROME – During a trip seemingly to the ends of the world to visit one of the remotest flocks in the Catholic Church, Pope Francis found a small, but warm welcome, with many praising his visit as not only reaching out to the peripheries, but as expanding the Church’s own perspective.
Father Ambrose Mong, a priest accompanying a group of Catholics from Hong Kong for the papal trip, said he saw the pope’s visit to Mongolia as a “move to the peripheries, to the margins”. and as a step away from a “Eurocentric” view of the faith.
Pope Francis traveled to the former Mongol Empire from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4, holding several appointments in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar.
He met privately with Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh and Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai Saturday and held a public meeting with national authorities that same morning. He later met with missionaries in Mongolia and bishops from the region who traveled to Ulaanbaatar to attend papal events.
Francis also met with ecumenical and interfaith leaders and celebrated Mass for the country’s roughly 1,450 Catholics, as well as groups of faithful who come from other countries, including China and Russia, and he inaugurated a new charitable centre, the largest yet in Ulaanbaatar.
His visit marked the first time a pope has ever set foot in Mongolia, despite historic contact dating back to the 13th century. It was also the closest any pontiff has come to Mongolia’s powerful neighbors, China and Russia.
Throughout his four days in Ulaanbaatar, the pope advertised the church’s various social and charitable initiatives, pointing to them as proof of the church’s benefit to society given its assistance to the poor and needy, and its promotion of global fraternity and solidarity.
From his speeches, the pope’s objective in making the trip was clear: to showcase the teachings of the church and its social works as both an argument in favor of its societal benefits, and an assurance to regional leaders, including national authorities in China, that the church is not a political entity, and thus, it is not a threat or a rival center of power.
He sought to encourage the local church and the missionaries who lead it in bringing the “joy of the Gospel” to places unfamiliar with Christianity, and to assure regional authorities that they have nothing to fear.
However, the people themselves who came out to see the pope at his various also perceived a clear message, and that message was not only that Pope Francis loves the peripheries, but that in visiting, the pope had shed light on the globality of the church in an until-now remote area of the world that is also unknown to much of the Catholic world.
Mong in his remarks insisted that “Mongolia is as far as you can go, and this is the closest to China he can get so far, so I think it opens the door”.
“The pope is concerned not just about the center of Catholicism, but also outside of the Eurocentric understanding that we have of Christianity, that Christianity is a universal religion, reaching out to the minorities,” he said.
Traveling such a long way to visit less than 2,000 Catholics, Mong said, illustrates the pontiff’s “concern for the minorities, that the Gospel has to be universal”.
There was also a sense with Mong and among others who attended papal events that there was a degree of closeness with Pope Francis, history’s first non-European pope, that had not been present with previous papacies from the so-called “old continent”.
In general, Francis was seen by locals as someone who, given his background, better understood their reality and the challenges of Asia, and the global south generally, and they felt closer to him because of it.
Mong voiced his belief that the Francis’s South American roots have given him “a very strong concern for us who are non-European who are Catholics”.
Similarly, Tushin, a 38-year-old Mongolian Baptist living in Ulaanbaatar, told journalists at the pope’s official welcome ceremony that the broader Christian community in Mongolia has “a lot of respect for the pope, especially because he is the first non-European pope”.
“He’s from Argentina and he’s more relatable, he’s more common to the people, relatable, more global,” he said.
Cardinal-designate Stephen Chow of Hong Kong, who will get a red hat from Pope Francis Sept. 30 and remain in Rome for the month-long first part of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality in October, had similar reflections.
Speaking to journalists at the pope’s meeting with missionaries and regional bishops, Chow said that the Church in Asia generally is “a growing Church”.
It is not growing “as fast as Africa, Africa is growing fast, but the Asian Church also has a very important role to play now in the universal Church,” he said, saying the bishops and cardinals present for the papal trip in Mongolia are “here representing the Asian voice”.
“We need to understand each other more, and that’s why we have more bishops from Asia, and cardinals, is to help the universal Church to understand Asia,” he said, saying that for them, “this is a small Church, and that the pope really makes the trouble to travel here, to tell people, to tell Mongolian Catholics and Mongolian people, (that) the Church extending to the periphery.”
“The Church is not a Church of Rome, it’s a Church of the world, especially for the margins. I think that’s meaningful,” he said.
Italian Father Ernesto Viscardi, a Consolata missionary who has been in Mongolia for 19 years, also told journalists at the same event Francis as head of the global universal church “brings us Catholicity”.
The Church in Mongolia might be small, he said, but with the arrival of Pope Francis, “We look at each other and we say, the pope brings the Church here, and from here he will speak of the Church, imagine!”
Pope Francis’s visit to Mongolia, Viscardi said, “gives visibility to our Church”.
Since his election, Francis has often accused the Church of being overly “Eurocentric” and has spoken bluntly to European leaders about their waning influence on the global stage.
He gave back-to-back speeches to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe during a visit to Strasbourg in November 2014, telling some 750 members of the European parliament that today’s world is becoming “less and less Eurocentric”, that Europe often comes off as “elderly and haggard”.
Europe, he said at the time, is less and less a “protagonist” in global affairs, while the rest of the world at times sees it “with mistrust and even suspicion”.
Complaints about the church being overly Eurocentric are not new to Francis, but have been a longstanding issue in the church, however, they have gained steam under Francis as history’s first non-European pope.
In 1998, St. Pope John Paul II convened a Synod of Bishops for Asia, and the gathering became an echo-chamber for widespread complaints among Asian prelates that the Vatican was both excessively Eurocentric in its thinking and overly centralised in its administrative procedures, essentially ignoring the judgments of local bishops.
Among the most vocal proponents of this opinion were the bishops of Japan, where Pope Francis visited in 2019.
Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was himself often accused of being “Eurocentric”, in the sense of focusing excessively on European culture.
This criticism of an overly Eurocentric focus on the church was acutely felt during Pope Francis’s 2014-2015 Synods of Bishops on the Family, during which African prelates complained that their perspective was routinely ignored and that their contributions were not being taken seriously by their European counterparts.
So far in his decade-long reign, Pope Francis has faced the opposite charge, often seen as being as neglectful of Europe in favour of bolstering regions of greater growth and vivacity for the Catholic Church today, such as Asia and Africa.
Pope Francis’s visit to Mongolia, one of several visits he has made to Asia as pontiff, can certainly be seen as evidence of this criticism.
However, it is also equally and undeniably true that regardless of those who might feel slighted by this pope, there are throngs of faithful in one of the Catholic Church’s largest, youngest and fastest-growing flocks who seem to feel for the first time that they have a pope who truly understands them, and that is also a voice well worth paying attention to.
(Pope Francis attends Holy Mass at the Steppe Arena in Ulaanbaatar on September 3, 2023 | Photo by PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)
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