Pope heads to Mongolia to minister to its few Catholics and complete centuries-old East-West mission

Pope Francis is travelling to Mongolia this week to minister to one of the world's tiniest and newest Catholic communities, the first-ever visit by a Roman pontiff to the East Asian country. In some ways, he will be completing a mission begun by the 13th- century Pope Innocent IV, who dispatched a series of emissaries east with letters to ascertain the intentions of the expanding Mongol Empire. Some 800 years later, Francis won’t be testing new diplomatic waters or seeking to proselytize Mongolia’s mostly Buddhist people. His trip is still a historic meeting of East and West. Officially, there are only 1,450 Catholics in Mongolia and the Catholic Church has only had a sanctioned presence since 1992, after Mongolia shrugged off its Soviet-allied communist government.