ROME – Religion, like politics, is basically local. Faith isn’t forged in the HQs of spiritual bureaucracies and their political battles, however riveting those conflicts may be for journalists, bloggers and posters on social media.
Belief instead is won or lost in the trenches, one person, one heart and mind, at a time.
In that spirit, I’d like to suggest that my wife, Elise, and I experienced the Christmas season this year in an ideal setting to taste the local nature of the faith, almost entirely untainted by ecclesiastical politics – literally on the other side of the world, in the tiny mission church of Mongolia, with a total Catholic flock of roughly 1,450 souls.
