ULAANBAATAR (UCAN): Pope Francis appointed Italian Father Giorgio Marengo of the Consolata Missionaries or the Institutum Missionum a Consolata (IMC), as head of the Apostolic Prefecture of Ulaanbaatar covering the whole of Mongolia.
The 45-year-old priest has been working in Mongolia since 2003.
He is the first IMC missionary in Mongolia and the first European to head the young missionary Church in Mongolia, a country of mostly nomadic people.
The April 2 appointment also elevated Father Marengo to the episcopacy, naming him bishop of the titular Diocese of Castra Severiana.
The bishop-elect was his congregation’s regional counsellor for Asia and superior for Mongolia.
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He was also the parish priest of Mary Mother of Mercy in Arvaiheer, the central city of Mongolia, known for traditional crafts, goat herding and equestrian sports.
Father Marengo takes up the position of the late Bishop Wenceslao Padilla of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary who died in September 2018 (Sunday Examiner, 7 October 2018).
Bishop Padilla, a Filipino, is credited with laying the foundation for the modern Church in Mongolia, where he arrived in 1992 with two confrères to open a mission in the country, which then had no church or members of its own.
Historically, the Church began in Mongolia during the time of the Mongol empire in the 13th century but ended almost together with the Yuan Dynasty in 1368. Successive regimes then prohibited Christianity.
After Mongolia became a democratic nation in 1991, Catholic missionaries came back to work in the area, which resulted in the establishment of the Apostolic Prefecture of Ulaanbaatar in 2002.
The lead missionary of the area, then-Father Padilla, was appointed prefect of the prefecture in July 2002.
The mission area of Mongolia has some three million people, but barely 1,500 Catholics. The prefecture has six parishes and some 70 missionaries, including 45 nuns and lay volunteers.
