In today’s Catholic News podcast, we are joined by His Eminence Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The Cardinal has been visiting the UK this week with Missio, the Pope’s charity for world mission.
The Jubilee of Hope has come to an end. It has been an intense year, rich in opportunities to grow in faith and discipleship, and therefore in mission. With this treasure of experience of God and fraternity, we face a new year of grace, reflecting as the Church in Mongolia on our identity and mission.
EWTN interviews Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, one of the world’s youngest cardinals, about serving as a missionary in Mongolia, where Catholics make up less than 1% of the population.
The Good Newsroom sat down with the Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, to hear about his lifelong work as a missionary and the work that is just beginning in this Central Asian country.
A 50-year-old Piedmontese, pastor of a community of just 1,400 Catholics in an immense land where the Gospel was proclaimed only 30 years ago, brings to the conclave the breath of the most extreme missionary frontiers of the Catholic Church.
The pastoral letter with which I usually address you, dear brothers and sisters, priests, religious men and women of the Apostolic Prefecture of Ulaanbaatar, comes this time with the year already begun. However, I would like to reach all of you to reflect with you on the time we are living, from a missionary perspective.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
As we prepare to live a new year of grace in the Lord, we still have in our eyes and hearts the days of Pope Francis’ visit to our country. How blessed we have been by this rare and important event! It is precisely so that his words – as well as his gestures – may descend deeply into our consciences and inform our pastoral and missionary choices that I propose not my own personal reflection, but to return to what the Successor of St Peter said to us on 2 September 2023.
The verse from Psalm 34 was chosen as the episcopal motto by Bishop Giorgio Marengo, Consolata missionary and Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, who was created Cardinal by Pope Francis in the Consistory of August 27, 2022.
Amid the country’s modest religious revival, Cardinal Marengo shares his missionary predecessor’s dream and thinks that the establishment of the first contemplative Catholic monastery in Mongolia “would be the way to evangelize more effectively.”
“Mary, for her part, kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (cf. Lk 2:51). In Luke’s Gospel, the Mother of the Lord is presented to us in this way, as the guardian of all that was happening in the life of her Son Jesus. We too would like to start from this inner attitude of attention to the Lord present in our lives, as we begin a new pastoral year. The year 2022 has given us the gift of gratitude for the ecclesial journey that began thirty years ago, thanks to the sacrifice of the first CICM missionaries, especially our first, beloved bishop, Bishop Wenceslao Padilla.
