Bishop in Mongolia will be the youngest cardinal – Catholic World Report

Vatican Metropolis, Jun 2, 2022 / 14:15 pm (CNA).

An Italian who has served as a missionary in Mongolia for almost 20 years will quickly develop into the world’s youngest cardinal.

At 47 years previous, Bishop Giorgio Marengo is similar age that Karol Wojtyła was when Paul VI introduced that he had been chosen to hitch the School of Cardinals.

Marengo will obtain a crimson hat together with 20 different new cardinals at a consistory on Aug. 27, simply two years after his episcopal consecration.

“It is a enormous shock for me,” Marengo instructed Vatican Information the day after the pope’s announcement.

“For me, residing this new vocation will imply persevering with on the trail of littleness, humility and dialogue,” he stated.

Initially from northern Italy’s Piedmont area, Marengo has spent the previous 19 years serving as a Consolata missionary priest in Mongolia.

Pope Francis named him the Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s apostolic prefecture, in 2020. After a assembly with the pontiff, Marengo stated that Pope Francis was “very within the … the Church in Mongolia and of the Mongolian folks generally.”

“We all know how a lot the pope cares about your entire Church, even these areas the place there usually are not giant numbers, certainly exactly the place the Church is extra within the minority,” he stated.

Mongolia has a inhabitants of about 1,300 Catholics in a rustic of greater than 3 million folks. The Prefecture Apostolic of Ulaanbaatar serves your entire nation.

Whereas serving as a Consolata missionary in Mongolia, Marengo established a brand new catechesis program. He instructed CNA in 2014 that this system sought to type younger adults into future catechists by offering classes in theology and the Church and its mission.

“I consider being a bishop in Mongolia is similar to the episcopal ministry of the early Church,” Marengo stated.

“The Church is a really small actuality, it’s a minority however there may be this group of Mongolian trustworthy who’ve chosen, with nice braveness and in addition a way of duty, to observe the Lord and develop into a part of the Catholic Church.”

The primary fashionable mission to Mongolia was in 1922 and was entrusted to the Congregation of the Immaculate Coronary heart of Mary. However below a communist authorities, non secular expression was quickly thereafter suppressed, till 1992.

In 2002, the Ulaanbaatar mission was elevated to the current apostolic prefecture. The mission’s superior, the late Fr. Wenceslao Padilla, a priest of the Immaculate Coronary heart congregation, was appointed prefect, and was consecrated a bishop the next 12 months. Padilla died in September 2018. Mongolia’s first native priest was ordained in 2016.

Marengo instructed Vatican Information in 2020 that as a result of Mongolia’s Catholic neighborhood is so small it’s particularly essential to concentrate to interreligious dialogue and the cultural traditions of the Mongolian folks.

“It means dedicating time to know and examine the language, to refine these instruments that permit us to enter into a real dialogue with folks, to grasp their factors of reference, their historical past, their cultural and spiritual roots,” he stated.

“And on the similar time, in all this, to be trustworthy to the Gospel itself … to supply with nice humility, with nice sincerity this valuable pearl we’ve acquired which is the Gospel of the Lord.”

Marengo grew up in Turin, Italy, studied theology on the Pontifical Gregorian College in Rome, and later obtained a license and doctorate from the Pontifical Urbaniana College.

He selected “Respicite advert eum et illuminamini” as his episcopal motto, which suggests “Look to him and you may be radiant.”

Till the consistory in August, the present youngest cardinal is 55-year-old Cardinal Dieudonné Nzapalainga of Bangui.

Marengo will flip 48 on June 7.