Pastoral letter 2025
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. Actually, we have a new beginning to connect to: we are in fact at Tsagaan Sar, a very ancient Mongolian tradition that contains many useful hints to consider this moment as a real starting point. On the other hand, it is precisely around the first moon of spring that the special season of Lent begins, which every year sees us committed to the profound renewal of our lives.
We wish to live this favorable moment by letting ourselves be inspired by the Word of God, our daily food, in the hope that this meditation may in some way serve as a pastoral aid for this Jubilee year.
On that day, as evening drew on, he said to them, “Let us cross to the other side.”
Leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat just as he was. And other boats were with him.
A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” The wind ceased and there was great calm. Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”
They were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”
(Mk 4:35-41).
Jesus' invitation to his followers is to “cross to the other shore”. That crossing of the Sea of Galilee is an eloquent image of our adventure as men and women on a pilgrimage on earth. Our life is in fact a journey, a passing through the sometimes calm, almost always agitated waters of existence. This is true on a personal level, but it also applies to our experience as a Church: 33 years have passed since that 1992 when the first three CICM Missionaries arrived in Ulaanbaatar. God's plan is inscrutable and in His infinite wisdom He had always chosen us. However, there is also a concrete moment, linked to particular circumstances, people, places and times, when God's call becomes more explicit.
From those first encounters with our beloved Bishop Wens and his brothers Gilbert Sales and Robert Goessens began our journey as a seed sown in the ground and slowly growing, as chapter 4 of Mark's Gospel reminds us: ‘The kingdom of God is like a man who sows seed in the earth; whether he sleeps or wakes, night or day, the seed germinates and grows; how, he himself does not know’ (Mk 4:26-27). A seed that has grown, becoming a plant that bears fruit, destined to develop even more.
Today we are called to take a further step: to take Jesus ‘as he is’ in our boat. As the disciples did that day. Not the Jesus we imagine, perhaps not even the one we were drawn to all those years ago, but the real one, the one who calls us today, the one we have learned to discover every day and with whom we are living a story of salvation. There are also other boats moored to the shore, reminding us that the options are different, we remain free to make our fundamental choice. Do we wish to take Jesus with us, to rediscover him every day, to reappropriate again and again the faith we have received, or do we prefer to follow someone else? Jesus does not force us, he invites us. And he does so as a beggar of love. The Jubilee is meant to be a favorable opportunity to make the fundamental choice to take Jesus with us in the boat of life with greater awareness.
In this crossing of the lake - the image of life - not everything goes smoothly. Soon the storm arrives: wind that crushes us from above and waters that seem to want to swallow us from below. Having taken Jesus into our boat does not exempt us from experiencing the fear, disappointments and contradictions of life. Choosing to become a Christian, a disciple of Jesus in the Catholic Church, does not prevent the strong winds of life from hitting us too. The waves roll over our boat as well as others, sometimes we feel as if we are sinking... We think of the dark times we had to go through when Bishop Wens left us suddenly. Five years later, Fr Kim also abruptly ended his earthly pilgrimage. In those moments, we felt as if we were drowning, no longer finding any footholds other than the very faith they had taught us to practice by their example. Each one of us also went through, and perhaps even now goes through, moments of difficulty, illness, discouragement. We are no different from others.
And where is Jesus? He is here with us, in that very boat that is treading water on all sides. The thing that shocks us most is that he is asleep. We also react like the disciples: ‘Don't you care that we are lost?’. In those times of trouble, when we have water at our throats, we wish we had a superhero who would magically pluck us out of the waves, who would take us to safety at once. Instead, Jesus is there with us and we do not notice. It almost seems to us that he ignores our difficulties, as he sleeps. In reality, he has chosen the lowest point of the boat: he has become one of us, becoming man, and has gone all the way down, even experiencing the death that so distresses us. That sleep is both an image of the immobility that will be his on the cross and a sign of his imperturbable serenity, of his victory over the agitation and the tearing anguish that inhabit us while the storm rages around and within us.
The powerful voice of Jesus calls us to confront our fears. Only in this way do we reach the heart of faith. Faith is not life insurance, it does not prevent us from the risks and contradictions of existence; we, like everyone else, go through rough waters, we feel ourselves sinking, we are tossed about by the wind. But crying out to the Lord, we realize that He is there with us and that He is always able to silence the wind and the sea and make the calm return. ‘Why are we still afraid?’ In this jubilee year, we should ask ourselves this question. What is it that blocks me, that frightens me, to the point of not being able to put faith into action? Perhaps I enthusiastically embarked on the path proposed to me by the Church when I was younger. Then life comes to ‘hold you to account’ and that germinal faith, if it has not grown, if it has not deepened, fails to give you adequate answers to the constant challenges you face.
The Jubilee offers us the opportunity to return to what is essential, to rediscover the profound dimension of faith and to allow ourselves to be reconciled with God and with others. The meaning of the Jubilee indulgence is precisely this: the Church, Mother and Teacher, proposes to us a path of awakening, of conversion, and offers us the treasure she guards with humility and care. By showing us some penitential practices, she assures us that - by fulfilling the conditions laid down - we can receive a special grace, that of a deeper liberation from the bonds of sin and evil, in order to rise again as children of light. While it is true that going to Rome on pilgrimage is almost prohibitively expensive for most of us, it is equally true that this is only one of the forms provided for obtaining the Jubilee grace. The Church's official documents state that especially works of mercy, as well as participation in prayer and formation events, are of great help in preparing us to receive this special gift of full reconciliation with God and with each other. We have the ‘House of Mercy’ at our disposal: let us take advantage of it more frequently, going there to offer some of our time to serve food to people in need, accompany them while they take a shower or wait to be visited in the outpatient clinic. In May, we will have our usual appointment with the ‘Pastoral Week’: that too will be a not-to-be-missed opportunity to grow in faith awareness and increase communion among us. We are invited by our parish priests and other pastoral workers to actively participate in these initiatives of the Prefecture.
In general, it will be very important to make room for penitential liturgies, where the opportunity to receive sacramental absolution and participate in Holy Mass is offered with greater abundance. Praying for the Holy Father is always associated with the conditions for receiving a Jubilee indulgence.
After the fear that grips the disciples, a question arises: ‘What is this then?’ It is as if the disciples realize that they must learn anew who it is that Jesus who called them and drew them to Himself, to send them into the world. Faith is always restarting. It is never a purely intellectual datum, fixed and immovable; instead, it accompanies us through the various stages of life, making it always and anew sprout in each of the different seasons. May this jubilee year help us to rediscover every day who Jesus really is for us. It is not enough to have met him once in one's life, to have committed oneself to following him and then expect life to remain always the same, without shocks, but also without true joys. Instead, we must rediscover every day the meaning of that life-changing encounter and nourish it with prayer and fraternal charity.
The Jubilee can help us in this rediscovery of faith. For the progressive rooting of the Church in Mongolia, it is fundamental that each one of us engage in the rediscovery of the faith this year. It may also be that the Apostolic See, having taken note of the ecclesial journey so far, invites us to give more concreteness and greater organization to our configuration in the territory. In any case, it is important that we walk together with awareness and in truth, leaving aside those motivations that do not stand up to the trials of life and instead cultivating the deep ones, capable of resisting even when there seems to be no direct ‘gain’ in following the Church.
Dear all, meditating together on this passage from Mark's Gospel will help us to interiorize the theme of the journey - personal and ecclesial - that we are called to make in this Jubilee year. The crossing of the stormy lake is a powerfully evocative image of existence as a pilgrimage. Let us help each other rediscover its beauty and fearlessly share the message of hope that comes to us from faith in Christ Jesus. We will then become authentic ‘pilgrims of hope’, as Pope Francis reminds us. Happy Jubilee Year to all!
Card. Giorgio Marengo, I.M.C.
