In view of the apostolic journey in September, a second video-report on the Asian country has been published with a focus on the beginnings and current relevance of the experience of the apostolic prefect
Alessandro De Carolis – Vatican City
An arrival on tiptoe, at the age of 27, one July in the early 2000s. The Mongolian-speaking hostesses on the plane that is taking off from Seoul for the land of Genghis Khan make him and the group of missionaries say that that adventure is about to begin “who knows if one day we too will be able to learn this language”. Many years later, that hope is the reality that is measured in a small and dynamic ecclesial community of 1,500 baptized people, with an inculturation that took place fully within a social fabric endowed with a propensity for the “spiritual fact”, to read life with eyes that go beyond everyday life to question the “profound aspect of things”.
“nomadic” faith
With his calm voice, Cardinal Giorgio Marengo is the protagonist of the second video-report produced for Agenzia Fides by Teresa Tseng Kuang yi in view of Pope Francis’ trip to Mongolia from 1 to 4 September. As in the first video with the one to Cardinal Sepe, also in this second episode the interview with the apostolic prefect of Ulanbaataf alternates with images of the immense expanses of Mongolian land. Cardinal Marengo recalls the first Mass celebrated in a Gerthe traditional local tent, and at a certain point highlights a difference between the culture of origin and the one in which he is rooted, for which – he says – being “nomadic” and not sedentary, everything must be “transportable, light, temporary unlike the sedentary lifestyle of Western culture”.
Small Church in the big Church
Yet, he continues, this does not condition minds open to transcendence as demonstrated by the vitality of a small community which, through the inclusion of the cardinal in the college of cardinals, allows “to offer the universal Church what the experience of a missionary Church so small and so new can have”. And basically, reflects Cardinal Marengo, the very nature of the Church is to be “pilgrim” and therefore “nomadic, like the people of Mongolia with their tents, always on the way towards the fulfillment of the times”.
