Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul: a Catholic yurt for a country with barely 1,500 believers, host to the first papal visit in Mongolia’s history

In Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, a mission sui iuris of Outer Mongolia was established on 14 March 1922 and renamed the mission sui iuris of Urga in 1924, but all activity ceased almost at once with the arrival of the communist regime. After the democratisation of 1990 and the constitution of 1992, which guaranteed religious freedom, the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Mongolia on 4 April 1992. Three priests of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the CICM, also known as the Scheut Fathers, came to rebuild the mission: Father Wenceslao Padilla, a Filipino, Father Gilbert Sales and Father Robert Goessens, with Padilla appointed ecclesiastical administrator on 19 April 1992. The Consolata Missionaries, the order of the present prefect, arrived only later, in July 2003. The first Catholic church of modern Mongolia was dedicated in 1996. The present cathedral, designed by the Serbian architect Predrag Stupar in an eclectic style deliberately modelled on the shape of a ger, the traditional Mongolian tent, was completed around 2002 and consecrated on 30 August 2003 by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, one day after the episcopal ordination of Padilla himself, which took place in the cathedral on 29 August 2003. Thirty-six semicircular windows and a skylight, added by 2005 to a design by Brother Mark of the Community of Taizé, show the four evangelists in a local reinterpretation: an eagle, an angel, a yak and a snow leopard, in place of the traditional winged bull and lion. The building also holds a statue of the Virgin found among rubbish in 2013 and venerated ever since. Neither the funder nor the exact seating capacity of the cathedral is documented. Mongolia has no diocese in the proper sense: the only Catholic jurisdiction in the country is the apostolic prefecture of Ulaanbaatar, established on 8 July 2002, with this cathedral as its seat. Padilla was its first apostolic prefect until his death on 25 September 2018, and was succeeded by Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, IMC, prefect since 2 April 2020, made a cardinal by Pope Francis in the consistory of 27 August 2022. He thereby became the youngest member of the college of cardinals at the time of his elevation, not, as is sometimes written, the youngest cardinal in the history of the Church. The Mongolian Catholic community remains among the smallest in the world, with figures that vary, by year and by source, between about 900 and 1,500 faithful in the period 2014-2023, against a national population of more than three million people. From 31 August to 4 September 2023 Pope Francis made the first apostolic journey in history to Mongolia. On 2 September he met bishops, priests, missionaries, religious and pastoral workers in this very cathedral, before celebrating a mass at the Steppe Arena and opening, on 4 September, the «House of Mercy», a clinic and shelter run by the Church for homeless people and victims of domestic violence.