Pope Francis is visiting Mongolia — a country with one of the world’s smallest Catholic populations but situated between two global giants that have long been on the pope’s bucket travel list: Communist China and Russia.

His Holiness landed in Mongolia on Friday, becoming the first pope to visit the Asian country. It is an “unprecedented” trip, the Vatican’s spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said. During the four-day visit, the pope will connect with the local 1,500-person Catholic community. 

The church in Mongolia is “small in numbers,” Pope Francis said on Sunday. Yet, this is a “much-desired visit” to engage with a community that is “vibrant in faith and great in charity,” he added.  

The Vatican’s decision to visit Mongolia is linked to several symbolic, geopolitical factors, a researcher of history, Christianity, and churches at the State University of Milan, Francesco Mores, tells the Sun. Due to Mongolia’s Catholic population, the pope “acquires even more value” than when he visits larger Catholic communities, Mr. Mores says. 

Mongolia borders China, a far vaster country with which Pope Francis is hoping to increase dialogue, Mr. Mores says. “In choosing Mongolia, the Vatican is opening an ‘Eurasian perspective’” toward China and Russia, he adds. 

On his way to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, Pope Francis flew over the airspace of China, a country that he hasn’t visited amid political and religious disagreements. Yet, as Vatican protocol demands, he sent a greeting message to President Xi and the people in China after flying over the country. 

“Assuring you of my prayers for the well being of the nation, I invoke upon all of you the divine blessings of unity and peace,” the pontiff said. On his way to South Korea in 2014, Pope Francis became the first pope Communist China permitted to fly over its airspace. 

Beijing is willing to continue working with the Vatican to “engage in constructive dialogue, strengthen mutual understanding and trust,” a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, Wang Wenbin, said in a press briefing on Friday, following the pope’s blessings.

The pope’s agenda in Mongolia is less intense than in past trips. After a nine-and-a-half-hour flight from Rome, the pontiff landed at Ulaanbaatar on Friday morning. Following a traditional greeting at Chinggis Khaan International Airport, the 86-year-old was to rest for the remainder of the day. He is currently in a wheelchair and has been hospitalized twice this year. 

On Saturday, the pope is scheduled to meet the prime minister of Mongolia, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai, and other government officials. He will also connect with Catholic charity groups and local clergy. In the afternoon, he will celebrate Mass with more than 2,500 followers, including people from nearby Russia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Kazakhstan.

More than 40 percent of Mongolia’s 3.3 million population say they don’t identify with any religion, according to government data. Two percent say they are Christians. 

“There is a clear policy of this pontificate of traveling to countries that are in the peripheries of the classical geography of Catholicism,” an Italian Church historian and professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, Massimo Faggioli, tells the Sun, referring to countries in which Catholics are a minority.

He chooses these countries because he wants to “globalize” Catholicism and expand it to Catholics who live as religious minorities, Mr. Faggioli adds. 

The Catholic Church established ties with Mongolia in 1992 after the country broke away from the Soviet Union. Last year, Pope Francis elevated an Italian missionary, Giorgio Marengo, who has been in Mongolia for several years, to the status of cardinal. 

“When you whisper, you whisper to an individual or a few people, you cannot whisper to many people at the same time because they simply will not hear you,” Mr. Marengo told reporters last month, on the eve of the pope’s trip. “And I think this visit will also somehow manifest the attention that the pope has for every individual, every person who embarks on this journey of faith.”

Pope Francis has long sought to improve the Vatican’s ties with China. Relations have been strained for years. In 2018, the Vatican signed a historic deal that gave Beijing added powers in the nomination process of bishops. Human rights groups protested the decision, claiming it gave the Chinese government more resources to control religious institutions. 

In a first for the Vatican, Pope Francis met in 2016 with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill I, at Cuba. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the pontiff accused Mr. Kirill of being President Putin’s “altar boy.”

Pope Francis was criticized this week after praising Russian imperial rulers during a conference with Russian Catholic youths. “Never forget this inheritance. You are the heirs of the great Mother Russia, go forward. Thank you. Thank you for your way of being, for your way of being Russian,” Pope Francis said. 

Yet, on Tuesday the Vatican made it clear that the trip was not about Moscow or Beijing. “The trip is Mongolia,” Mr. Bruni said. “Pope Francis will go principally to talk to them.”