Ulaanbaatar, December 8, 2021
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Holy Mary

Very dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
I turn to you with trepidation. I am sending you this letter on the day of Mary, the Immaculate Conception. She is our guide, our beacon, our most tender Mother who knows all our anxieties and our desires. I entrust these reflections to her, so that she may be the one to help us in our faith.

It has been a year and a half since Pope Francis appointed me as your bishop and I have not yet been able to meet with many of you personally. I hope this meeting may happen soon. The restrictions of the pandemic have kept our contacts to a minimum, but I assure you that you are in my daily prayer. I often try to imagine you in your homes, at work, while you pray; who knows what and how many sufferings you are enduring… Within all of this dwells the Grace of God, which dwells in you from the day of your baptism. It is nourished by daily prayer and by the commitment to live love in everything, just as Jesus teaches us. The holy Catholic Church to which you belong is your home, where the fire of faith burns. Beyond and despite its many infidelities – sometimes personified by us its ministers and who humbly ask your forgiveness – it remains the guardian of the immeasurable treasure of the sacraments, which are the gushing source of divine life that Jesus made accessible to all.

This year the Holy Father asks us to stop and reflect, as God’s holy people, on our life as missionary disciples. We are in fact on the path towards the Synod, which represents a particular occasion for renewal and revitalization of the entire Church. The word synod derives from the Greek language and literally means “journey made together”. Pope Francis wants it to be not only an event reserved to a certain number of bishops (and which will be held in 2023), but a true path of discernment involving all the faithful, from every part of the earth. For us this moment corresponds to the thirtieth anniversary of the Catholic Church since its official recognition in Mongolia in 1992. It is therefore even more significant for us to give ourselves this time of common reflection, as a family gathered by the Holy Spirit.

DEPTH
Let us enter into a profound listening to the Word of God. In it we meet the living Christ, who speaks to us every day to direct our life to the achievement of a full joy. He, the Lord, compares the Word to a seed that God sows abundantly, but which needs good and deep soil to grow.

«Listen. Behold, the sower went out to sow. As he sowed, some seed fell along the road but the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell among the stones, where there was not much earth, and immediately it sprang up because there was no deep ground; but when the sun rose, it was burned and, having no root, it withered away. Some other seed fell among the thorns; the thorns grew, choked it, and thus it gave no fruit. But some other seed fell on the good earth, it gave fruit that came up and grew; some of it yielded thirty, some other sixty, and still some other yielded one hundred for one». (see: Mk. 4, 1-20).

We can imagine our history as a Church in Mongolia as this seed that has entered the soil and is already bearing fruit, but which above all needs depth. This is the first key word on which I invite you to reflect this year. The first beginnings of the Church in Mongolia, linked to the heroism and sacrifice of the CICM Missionaries and in particular of the beloved first bishop prefect, Mons. Wenceslao Padilla, took place in an atmosphere of surprising speed: in 1991 the Mongolian government asked to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See; just a year after these relations were officially sanctioned, the first CICM missionaries arrived; shortly thereafter, other ministers of the Gospel were added, belonging to various Congregations and Dioceses and within a few years the nucleus of a local Catholic community was born, which today has 8 parishes, 2 quasi-parishes and many solidarity projects. It is amazing to recognize how this whole miracle of God took place in such a short time and we must sincerely thank the Lord for it. Now perhaps it is time to go deeper, letting the proclamation brought by the first courageous witnesses of the Gospel decant and bring it into life. Otherwise, we risk being like the seed that falls on shallow ground, which immediately sprouts, but soon dries up, precisely due to lack of depth. In these 30 years, great changes have taken place in the way of life of the people; this rapidity of development is often accompanied by a sense of disorientation, uncertainty and fear. Faith has in itself the energy to illuminate everyday life, to guide our decisions, to give meaning to everything we experience; but it must go deep. How much time and what resources do we dedicate to reflect together, missionaries and faithful, on the meaning of the faith we have received? How does this faith manage to express itself in the cultural categories of our Mongolian people? How much space do we give to in-depth study, training, mutual listening? What is our prayer life like? How important is it for us to stop in adoration of the Lord in the Eucharist and pray the Word, meditating on it daily? These questions, as you can see, all have to do with what we call “depth”, they are its concrete articulation. The lush stream that thirty years ago began to irrigate the steppe and cheer it up with fast and brilliant movements has now become a river, which by its nature flows slower, because it is deep. I believe, dear brothers and sisters, that we are called to this slower but constant pace, typical of long and abundant rivers, giving continuity to the enthusiasm of the beginnings and guaranteeing a solid future, precisely because it is profound.

“Deep waters flow slowly”, says an ancient Asian proverb. And it was the bishops of Asia, gathered in their ninth plenary assembly in 2009 focused on the theme of the Eucharist, who reaffirmed the typically Asian value of depth. One of them, the archbishop emeritus of Guwahati, Thomas Menamparampil, SDB, on that occasion was able to express this thought: «In this globalized world where ‘utilitarian values’ seem to count most, where people are caught into a network of superficial relationships, where achievement is measured in terms of possessions and success in mutual manipulation, where increasing number of people are only claiming their rights and are indifferent to their responsibilities, we eagerly look for ‘deeper persons’, persons society can count on. Such are the persons, who, through diligent self-cultivation in true Asian fashion, have come to represent the genius of this ancient continent, with an emphasis on a search for harmony, non-violence, religiosity and a strong sense of belonging; with pride in their past heritage and sturdy confidence in their ultimate destiny. They hold out hope. The future of human history depends on them».

FRATERNITY
By calling his disciples to himself, Jesus made them a stable body. They were very different from each other, but close around him they found their balance; dispersed at the moment of the cross, they found unity and communion in the risen Lord. This same communion is needed more than ever today also for ourselves, dear members of the Church in Mongolia. Fraternity is the second key word that I offer for your reflection in this thirtieth year of our family. The Lord entrusts us with his new code of life:

“I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, you also love one another. By this they will all know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another “(Jn 13: 34-35).

We too have been constituted as one body by the proclamation of the Gospel; by choosing to follow the Lord Jesus, we have become his brothers and sisters and constitute a single flock, even though we belong to different parishes. This also applies to our dear Missionaries, who, though they may come from different Congregations, dioceses and countries, form a single evangelizing body, together with the brothers and sisters of Mongolia with whom they have decided to spend their lives. Pope Francis never ceases to remind us how essential this dimension of the life of missionary disciples is. He even dedicated an encyclical letter to the theme of “universal fraternity”, inspired by the great saint of Assisi, whose name he bears. One day the Holy Father said: «Alone you risk having mirages, so you see what is not there; dreams are built together». And on another occasion he reiterated: « Today fraternity is the new frontier of humanity. Either we are brothers or we destroy each other. Today there is no time for indifference. We cannot wash our hands of it, with distance, with carelessness, with disinterest. Either we are brothers – allow me -, or everything collapses. It is the frontier. The frontier on which we must build; it is the challenge of our century; it is the challenge of our times. […] We are brothers, born of the same Father. With different cultures, traditions, but we are all brothers. And this fraternity must be built by respecting our different cultures and traditions, our different citizenships. Not by negotiating it. It is the moment of listening. It is time for sincere acceptance. It is the moment of certainty that a world without brothers is a world of enemies. I want to emphasize this. We cannot say: either brothers or not brothers. Let us state it well: either brothers or enemies. Because carelessness is a very subtle form of enmity. There is no need for a war to make enemies. Negligence is enough. Enough with this technique – it has become a technique -, enough with this attitude of looking some other way, not caring about the other, as if he did not exist».

At the heart of all our missionary commitment there should be the radical unity that holds us tightly around the one Lord whom we adore, serve and proclaim all together. The relatively modest size of our ecclesial structure should favour this fraternity: we are just 1380! There is really no reason to accentuate the differences; On the other hand, the conditions exist for us all to feel part of the same family, which, moreover, has chosen to place itself under the protection of the Family par excellence, that of Nazareth, where the Son of God created that perfect harmony with Mary, His Most Holy Mother and with Saint Joseph whom Divine Providence placed next to him to protect him and introduce him into the world as a true man. In Christ we are already brothers and sisters, we only have to be aware of this and put it into practice seriously. This also applies to the harmony among the Missionaries, who enrich the Church in Mongolia with their respective charisms and have chosen to place themselves at the service of the people of God already constituted in the Apostolic Prefecture, therefore recognized by the Successor of Peter with its own identity and originality. May this year of grace help us to rediscover the deep bonds of our communion and to transform them into true fraternity.

PROCLAMATION
The Church was born from the proclamation of the Apostles and from their living witness. The risen Lord explicitly asked his followers to make an encounter with him possible through their going and recounting what they had seen and experienced. Cornered by the authorities who wanted to prevent them from speaking of the Lord Jesus, the Apostles replied:

“We cannot be silent about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

Well, I believe that even in this precise historical moment, thirty years after the arrival of the first missionaries in Mongolia, it is more than ever necessary not to lose the ardour of the proclamation. This is the third and final word that I would like to deliver to you for this special year. It is true, the many works of human promotion that we are carrying out in the fields of education, health, assistance and culture are already a form of proclaiming the newness of the Gospel. However, there should also be an explicit proclamation of Christ’s lordship, of his power of healing and liberation from evil, of his victory over every form of withdrawal on ourselves. The modalities will be different, adapting to contexts and situations; our proclamation sometimes takes the form of a discreet whisper, which however reaches people’s hearts and brings them the consolation of Christ, the Son of God who came into the world to save us and give us the fullness of life. The Church teaches us that even in a minority context, in which we are mostly confronted with other religious traditions with which we engage in a profound dialogue of respect and friendship, the way of proclamation is always possible, as well as necessary. We feel called to do everything possible so that, thanks to our words and our actions, people may meet personally with the risen Lord, experience the depth of his consolations, love him more and more, because they are reached by his love which always comes first. This is also true for consecrated sisters and brothers, as for every baptized person who undertakes in his / her environment to reflect the light of Christ. If we look at Him, His light will envelop us and without even realizing it we will become luminous, so that the people around us feel attracted to that same light of Christ. Just as the Psalm says: “Look to him and you will be radiant” (cf. Ps 34).

We must not be afraid to proclaim the Lord Jesus with simplicity and humility, in all circumstances. This has always been the main content of apostolic preaching and continues to be confirmed by the Pope and by the bishops, without interruption. Pope Saint John Paul II, in his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Asia, clearly stated: «What distinguishes the Church from other religious communities is faith in Jesus Christ; and it cannot keep this precious light of faith for itself under a bushel (cf. Mt 5:15), since its mission is to share it with everyone. The new life that it has found in Jesus Christ, [the Church] wants to offer it to all the peoples of Asia who seek the fullness of life, so that they can establish the same communion with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit Holy. […] The faith of the Church in Jesus is a gift received and a gift to be shared; it is the greatest gift it can offer to Asia. Sharing the truth of Jesus Christ with others is the solemn duty of those who have received the gift of faith» (n. 10).

A few years ago, on the occasion of the first (and the only moment so far) Asian Missionary Congress, the Christians of Asia reaffirmed the centrality of Christ in the missionary proclamation, speaking of the need to continue “Telling the story of Jesus in Asia”. His story is worthy of being offered to all, with humility and discretion; it is embodied in our personal stories, which become a reflection of him.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I thank you for the time you accept to dedicate to reading this letter. It is a simple, but I hope profound, way of feeling in communion and reflecting together on the things that matter. Depth, fraternity and proclamation can be the background to the words chosen by Pope Francis for the Synod: communion, participation and mission. Over the course of 2022 we will find ways to meet, at various levels. We will probably organize a “pastoral week”, in the wake of the theological ones happily organized in the past, during which we will be called to make our contribution to the synodal journey and to enrich ourselves with the exchange of our respective experiences. We will certainly have strong moments throughout the year, in which we hope to be able to gather around the altar of the Lord to celebrate His mercy, which has been poured out on us in these thirty years. At the diplomatic level, there will also be opportunities to confirm (and possibly intensify) official relations between the Holy See and Mongolia. I also anticipate that we will have a strong Marian moment, in which we will renew the consecration of the Church in Mongolia to the Mother of God. The Commissions and the Pastoral Council will work on all these initiatives, with the coordination of the Mission Council. Your parish priests will keep you informed as the year’s program will take concrete shape.

Now I end with an invitation to prayer. It is the breath of the soul. No special techniques are required to pray, just come into the presence of the Lord and be ready to listen; you can also invoke him with simple words, such as “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me a sinner”, “Jesus, I trust in You!”, “Lord, increase my faith”, “My Lord and my God!”, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God”, “Your face, Lord, I seek”. If we are a praying people, we will also be a family united in proclamation. Let us rediscover the value of prayer, personal and community! I invite you to take it as a real daily habit, perhaps in the light of a small candle, in front of an image of Christ, alone or with your family. Let us invite the Mother of God, Mary Most Holy, to dwell in our homes, dedicating a space to one of her icons or other representations; let us pray to her intensely with the traditional prayer of the rosary, which even in the darkest times of the pandemic we have made resound through the online recitation. Let us entrust ourselves serenely to her, remembering the invitation that traditionally resounds in our Catholic Church: “To Jesus through Mary”. This will be the most precious gift we will offer to the Church as it celebrates its first thirty years in the land of the eternal blue sky.

May God bless you,

+ Giorgio Marengo, IMC
Bishop, Apostolic Prefect