A Nation With Few Catholics Gives Pope a Welcome Fit for an Emperor

In a lush valley within the huge Mongolian countryside, hulking wrestlers, equestrians doing bareback methods, throat singers and archers carried out for prime Vatican cardinals who snacked on dried yogurt delicacies underneath the shade of a ceremonial blue tent.

It was therapy worthy of an emperor for the prelates accompanying Pope Francis, who was again in Mongolia’s capital resting throughout his four-day journey to the nation, the primary ever by a Roman Catholic pontiff. However in a largely Buddhist and atheist nation with barely 1,400 Catholics, among the Mongolians on the Naadam pageant within the central province of Töv on Friday weren’t fairly clear why the Catholic clerics had been there, or what Catholics even had been.

“What are Catholics once more?” Anojin Enkh, 26, a caterer with the Grand Khaan Irish Pub, mentioned as she stocked a lamb and dumpling buffet for Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s second-in-command, and different prime cardinals, bishops, clergymen, nuns and Vaticanisti within the papal press corps. “I don’t know any Catholic folks.”

Francis has made visiting locations the place his flock is commonly forgotten an indicator of his papacy. However even by that measure, Mongolia is very off the radar, its Catholic inhabitants particularly minuscule.

The nation’s complete Catholic inhabitants may match right into a cathedral. It has a handful of church buildings and solely two native Mongolian clergymen. On Friday, when Francis arrived, horses and goats vastly outnumbered the folks standing on the street to see his motorcade move.

On Saturday, a few hundred pilgrims, most of whom had come from different nations, barely registered within the immense Sükhbaatar Sq. within the capital, Ulaanbaatar, the place Francis bowed earlier than an enormous statue of Ghengis Khan and reviewed a parade of cavalry troopers wearing historic Mongolian armor.

“I’m happy that this neighborhood, nevertheless small and discrete, shares with enthusiasm and dedication within the nation’s strategy of development,” Francis mentioned at an occasion quickly afterward with Mongolia’s president on the State Palace.

The pope additionally put his go to into the lengthy continuum of contact between Mongolians and the Catholic Church — a familiarity that Francis mentioned dated again not solely to the institution of diplomatic relations three a long time in the past, however to “a lot earlier in time.”

Historians have traced that historical past to the seventh century, when an Jap department of Christianity coexisted with shamanism. A few of the commanders within the empire of Genghis Khan, who unfold the Mongolian empire and his genes all through Asia, had been of the Christian religion. Francis mentioned on Saturday that he was giving Mongolia the present of an “authenticated copy” of a reply that Güyük, the third Mongol Emperor, had despatched in 1246 in response to a missive from Pope Harmless IV.

Francis didn’t point out that the correspondence was not precisely chummy.

Pope Harmless had been alarmed by the Mongol Empire’s incursions and its laying waste to Christian forces in Jap Europe. He questioned the emperor about his intentions to stretch out his “destroying hand,” beseeched him to desist, floated the thought of conversion and threatened that whereas God had let some nations fall earlier than the Mongolians, he may but punish them on this life or the subsequent.

The Mongolian chief responded in sort — which is to say, not kindly. He instructed the pope and his kings to come back to his court docket and undergo his rule. He expressed bewilderment on the pope’s suggestion of baptism, saying that God appeared to obviously be on the victorious Mongolia’s aspect, and warned that the pope risked changing into an enemy.

“All letters again then had been like that,” Odbayar Erdenetsogt, the overseas coverage adviser to Mongolia’s president, mentioned with a shrug on Friday as horsemen behind him rode the other way up, to the delight of Francis’ entourage. “As a result of we had been a giant empire.”

The sooner empire could also be notorious for rape and pillage. However in some respects, it was, for the time, fairly tolerant when it got here to faith. Within the Thirteenth and 14th centuries, when the Mongolians managed a lot of Eurasia, they fostered peaceable buying and selling alongside the Silk Street: Mongolian nomads desperate to do enterprise would assess the non secular affiliation of caravans crossing the Mongolian steppes after which extract from their coffers a Christian cross, a Quran or a Buddhist statue to facilitate commerce.

“It was a practical strategy,” mentioned Sumati Luvsandendev, a number one Mongolian political scientist who occurs to be the nominal president of the Jewish neighborhood of Mongolia, which he mentioned principally didn’t exist, however which the Vatican mentioned could be represented at an interreligious occasion led by Francis on Sunday.

(Mr. Luvsandendev mentioned he had not been requested to attend that gathering: “Perhaps they discovered someone else.”)

Maybe essentially the most well-known of the service provider guests to Mongolia, Marco Polo, wrote in his Thirteenth-century “Travels” about how Kublai Khan, a Mongolian emperor and grandson of Genghis Khan, put down a revolt by “a baptized Christian.” After having the insurgent rolled up in a carpet that “was dragged all over with such violence that he died,” the emperor made a peace providing to the Christians.

He instructed them, Marco Polo wrote, that the “the cross of your God did the suitable factor by not serving to” the insurgent and later recommended that the pope ship 100 sensible Christians to his land with the potential of his personal conversion, “so there shall be extra Christians right here than there are in your a part of the world.”

It didn’t shake out that method. Buddhism took maintain, and Catholicism struggled.

Centuries later, within the Twenties, the Vatican sought to determine mission buildings within the nation, however Mongolia fell underneath the Soviet sphere and Communism prevailed for the subsequent 70 years. As faith was suppressed, atheism grew.

Solely within the Nineties, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, did Catholics return, and even then they had been usually outnumbered by different Christian missionaries.

“Again then, there weren’t many Catholics right here,” Mr. Erdenetsogt mentioned after the wrestling finals on the pageant. The Mongolian official recalled that when he was in highschool at the moment, Christians had began coming in waves. “Lots of people from Salt Lake Metropolis,” he mentioned. “Numerous Mormons. Even had some Quakers.”

In 2003, Giorgio Marengo, a Catholic missionary, arrived after which spent three years studying the language and the lay of the land. In 2006, he and different missionaries began spreading to provinces the place, he mentioned in an interview, “there have been no Catholics in any respect” and the place there had “by no means been a church earlier than.”

They finally obtained some land from the federal government.

“That’s the place we put our two ger — one for prayer and one for actions,” he mentioned, referring to the transportable round dwellings, typically referred to as yurts, that dot the Mongolian panorama. That neighborhood, paying homage to the early church “like after the apostles,” he mentioned, had grown right into a small parish of about 50.

“The church remains to be a ger,” he mentioned. “A ger of massive dimensions or dimension, but it surely’s nonetheless a ger.”

Final 12 months, Francis shocked the Vatican by making Father Marengo, who’s 49, the youngest cardinal within the Roman Catholic Church.

On Saturday afternoon, Francis joined Cardinal Marengo, Catholic missionaries and among the few Mongolian Catholics in Ulaanbaatar on the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, itself formed like a colossal purple brick ger.

Within the pews, Uran Tuul, 35, a Catholic convert, mentioned that she had been the primary amongst her family and friends to develop into Catholic, however that “now there are extra.” She then listened as Francis inspired the congregation to “not be involved about small numbers, restricted success or obvious irrelevance.”

He added, “God loves littleness.”