VATICAN CITY: When Pope Francis was a young Jesuit, he wanted to follow in the great Jesuit tradition and become a missionary in Asia. Health problems kept him home, but he is finally getting his chance, traveling to Asia as the world’s most visible and popular Catholic missionary.
During his visit to South Korea this week, he’ll bring a message of peace and reconciliation to the divided Korean peninsula and a call for young Catholics to take up the missionary charge themselves, spreading the faith on a continent where the Catholic Church is small but growing. Asia’s Christians have endured dramatic persecutions over history that echo attacks against Christians today in parts of the Middle East and Africa.
While the pope is expected to reach out to Pyongyang during the visit, no North Koreans are expected to attend. The archdiocese of Seoul invited a delegation of Northern Christians, but Pyongyang authorities informed organizers last week that they wouldn’t come, the Vatican said.
The Wednesday-to-Monday trip marks the first time a pope has been on the Korean peninsula in a quarter-century, and the trip kicks off what is expected to be a very Asian-focused year for the 77-year-old pontiff: He will travel to Sri Lanka and the Philippines in January and there are rumors of a trip to Japan next year as well.
Why Asia? Francis himself has said he must go because Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI never managed to get there during his eight-year pontificate. But more to the point, Asia is the future of the Catholic Church.
Despite being a minority religion in every Asian nation except the Philippines, the Catholic Church baptizes more Catholics in Asia every year than in traditionally Christian Europe, according to Vatican statistics. In 2001, there were 44,446 priests in Asia; by 2012 the number had soared to 60,042. While Africa saw a similar surge in vocations, the number of Europe’s priests shrank from 206,761 to 186,489. St. John Paul II said that while Christianity was sowed in Europe in the first millennium and in the Americas and Africa in the second, the third belonged to Asia.