Pope Francis has praised Mongolia’s tradition of religious freedom dating to the times of its founder, Genghis Khan, during the first-ever papal visit to the Asian nation.
Pope Francis arrives in a car to meet with Mongolian President Ukhnaagin Khurelsukh, Saturday, Sept. 2, 2023, in Sukhbaatar Square in Ulaanbaatar. Pope Francis arrived in Mongolia on Friday morning for a four-day visit to encourage one of the world's smallest and newest Catholic communities.
Nowadays, the landlocked nation sandwiched between Russia and China is overwhelmingly Buddhist, with traditional links to Tibet’s leading lamas, including“The fact that the empire could embrace such distant and varied lands over the centuries bears witness to the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development,” Francis told the president, diplomats and...
Later in the day, Francis met with bishops and the missionaries who have cultivated the Catholic faith here for the past three decades, presiding over a prayer in the ger-shaped St. Peter and Paul cathedral in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. On the altar sat a delicate wooden statue of the Madonna, which was found by a Mongolese woman in a landfill and now is a symbol of the church in the country.
In the pews was one of the two Mongolese priests who have been ordained, the Rev. Peter Sanjaajav, who got a rousing applause from the crowd when he addressed Francis in Mongolian. In his remarks to government authorities, Francis also praised Mongolia’s efforts to care for the environment. The vast, landlocked country, historically afflicted by weather extremes, is considered to be. The country has already experienced a 2.1-degree Celsius increase in average temperatures over the past 70 years, and an estimated 77% of its land is degraded because of overgrazing and climate change, according to the United Nations Development Program.
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