A first papal visit to Mongolia

Pope Francis is preparing to spend four days in Mongolia, a landlocked country surrounded by Russia to the north and China to the south. That geographical fact is arguably the primary reason for the pope’s Sept. 1-4 visit.

The country is home to only 1,500 Catholics – one of the smallest Catholic communities to ever receive a papal visit. But officials in China, and to a lesser degree Russia, will be watching and listening closely to the pope’s events.

Asia is considered by many Vatican officials as the church’s next great evangelizing opportunity. The number of Catholics in Asia has more than tripled over the last century, but still represents only about 3 percent of the total population.

China, of course, offers the biggest prospects for growth. But Pope Francis is unlikely to knock too loudly on China’s door while visiting Mongolia. Instead, he’s expected to deliver a low-key explanation of the church’s role in Asian societies. As he said last year in Kazakhstan – another country that borders Russia and China – Christians are called to immerse themselves “in the joyful and sorrowful events of the society in which we live, in order to serve it from within.”

The message is that Catholics are good citizens, at home in every culture, and do not operate as representatives of a foreign power. The theme will be compatibility, not competition.

The papal visit comes at a delicate time in China-Vatican relations. A 2018 agreement between the two states foresaw a new level of cooperation in the naming of bishops, but China has at times continued to act unilaterally – most recently when the government transferred a bishop to Shanghai without Vatican agreement, prompting the Vatican to issue a statement of regret.

The Vatican’s China policy has prompted internal church debate, with critics arguing that Vatican diplomats have conceded too much and gained too little. It’s not a new criticism, however; both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict were at times accused of diplomatic moves that betrayed the “underground” Catholic community in China.

A homecoming in 2024?

Shortly after his election in 2013, Pope Francis remarked that he didn’t expect to travel much. That was accurate for his first year in office, when he made just one foreign trip, to Brazil for World Youth Day.

But since then, the pope has been adding mileage at a rate not seen since the barnstorming days of Pope John Paul II. He’s made 42 trips outside of Italy to 60 countries. That’s about five trips per year, excluding time off for Covid in 2020.

Pope Francis has also traveled to countries where no pope had ever been: Myanmar, North Macedonia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Bahrain and South Sudan. He’ll add to that list when he visits Mongolia in early September.

Yet one country, surprisingly, has been omitted from papal itineraries to date: his native Argentina. For reasons that have never been fully explained, Pope Francis has held off on the kind of “homecoming” visit that would surely ignite enthusiasm in the predominantly Catholic country.

One factor appears to be Argentina’s volatile political scene. Pope Francis has said he doesn’t want a papal visit to play into local politics. Most recently, he has hinted that he would like to visit his homeland in 2024, after this year’s election battles are over.

In that regard, Francis is very much unlike his two recent predecessors. Pope Benedict made three trips to his native Germany, addressing Parliament and raising uncomfortable issues for legislators. John Paul II visited Poland nine times, and became a protagonist in Poland’s political evolution in the 1980s and ‘90s.

The latest reports from Argentina indicate March-May 2024 as the most likely time slot for a papal visit. As always, planning is contingent on the pope's health, but so far Pope Francis has managed mobility issues with a cane or wheelchair, and he seems fine with that.

Nuclear weapons revisited

Throughout his 10-year pontificate, Pope Francis has made headlines on topics ranging from immigration to sexual abuse to the risks of modern technology. But one issue that has mostly flown under the media radar is the pope’s shift in church teaching on nuclear weapons.

In a nutshell, this pope has moved beyond the church’s provisional acceptance of nuclear deterrence as a morally acceptable strategy. Instead, he has repeatedly condemned the possession itself of nuclear weapons as immoral – perhaps most notably at a 2017 conference on nuclear disarmament, but on many occasions since then.

In a message last year, he summarized the church’s position:

Nuclear weapons are a costly and dangerous liability. They represent a “risk multiplier” that provides only an illusion of a “peace of sorts”. Here, I wish to reaffirm that the use of nuclear weapons, as well as their mere possession, is immoral. Trying to defend and ensure stability and peace through a false sense of security and a “balance of terror”, sustained by a mentality of fear and mistrust inevitably ends up poisoning relationships between peoples and obstructing any possible form of real dialogue. Possession leads easily to threats of their use, becoming a sort of “blackmail” that should be repugnant to the consciences of humanity.

Against the backdrop of the Ukraine-Russia war, these words garnered some attention in the global press. For the most part, however, the church’s changing position on nuclear disarmament has been ignored, both by governments and the media.

With this week’s commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester and Seattle Archbishop Paul Etienne are making a “pilgrimage of peace” to Japan, hoping to raise the issue of disarmament in light of the pope’s recent statements.

As Archbishop Wester said in a recent interview with National Catholic Reporter, it’s important for people to realize that nuclear deterrence is not an effective strategy, but a “dangerous game.”

Clearly the church is moving away from the position, expressed by Pope John Paul II in 1982, that nuclear deterrence is morally acceptable “not as an end in itself, but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament.” At that time, John Paul described this teaching as an “interim ethic.” Forty years later, as more nations are developing such weapons and major powers are upgrading theirs, it appears the interim is over. The church’s experts now view the strategy of nuclear “balance” as a major impediment to real disarmament.