When the Vatican acknowledged in 2022 that the Nobel Peace Prize-winning, East Timorese independence hero Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo had sexually abused young boys, it appeared that the worldwide clergy sexual abuse scandal that has compromised the Catholic Church’s credibility around the globe had finally arrived in Asia’s newest country.
And yet, the church in East Timor today is stronger than ever, with most downplaying, doubting or dismissing the claims against Belo and people against a preferred American missionary who confessed to molesting young girls. Many as an alternative give attention to their roles saving lives throughout the country’s bloody struggle against Indonesia for independence.
Pope Francis will come head to head with the Timorese faithful on his first trip to the country, a former Portuguese colony that makes up half of the island of Timor off the northern coast of Australia. But to date, there isn’t a word if he’ll meet with victims and even mention the sex abuse directly, as he has in other countries where the rank-and-file faithful have demanded an accounting from the hierarchy for the way it did not protect their children.
Even without pressure from inside East Timor to handle the scandals, it will be deeply meaningful to the victims if Francis did, said Tjiyske Lingsma, the Dutch journalist who helped bring each abuse cases to light.
“I feel that is the time for the pope to say some words to the victims, to apologize,” she said in an interview from Amsterdam.
The day after Lingsma detailed the Belo case in a September 2022 report in De Groene Amsterdammer magazine, the Vatican confirmed that Belo had been sanctioned secretly two years earlier.
In Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni’s statement, he said the church had been aware of the case since 2019 and had imposed disciplinary measures in 2020, including restrictions on Belo’s movements and a ban on voluntary contact with minors.
Despite the official acknowledgement, many in East Timor still don’t think it, like Dili university student Martinha Goveia, who remains to be expecting Belo will show as much as be at Francis’ side during his upcoming visit.
If he isn’t there, she said, “that just isn’t good for my part,” because it would confirm he’s being sanctioned by the Vatican.
Vegetable trader Alfredo Ximenes said the allegations and the Vatican’s acknowledged sanctions were merely rumors, and that he hoped Belo would come to welcome the pope and refute the claims in person.
“Our political leaders should immediately meet him to finish the issue and persuade him to return, because in any case he has contributed greatly to national independence,” Ximenes said.
Timorese officials refused to reply questions on the Belo case, but there’s been no try to avoid mentioning him, with a large billboard in Dili welcoming Pope Francis, whose visit starts Sept. 9, placed right above a mural honoring Belo and three others as national heroes.
Only about 20% of East Timor’s people were Catholic when Indonesia invaded in 1975, shortly after Portugal abandoned it as a colony.
Today, some 98% of East Timor’s 1.3 million individuals are Catholic, making it probably the most Catholic country on this planet outside the Vatican.
A law imposed by Indonesia requiring people to decide on a faith, combined with the church’s opposition to the military occupation and support for the resistance over years of bloody fighting that saw as many as 200,000 people killed, helped bring about that flood of recent members.
Belo won the Nobel Peace Prize for his bravery in drawing international attention to Indonesian human rights abuses throughout the conflict, and American missionary Richard Daschbach was widely celebrated for his role in helping save lives within the struggle for independence.
Their heroic status, and societal aspects in Asia, where the culture tends to confer much power on adults and authority figures, helps explain why the boys are still revered while elsewhere on this planet such cases are met with outrage, said Anne Barrett Doyle, of the web resource Bishop Accountability.
“Bishops are powerful, and in developing countries where the church is dominant, they’re inordinately powerful,” Barrett Doyle said.
“But no case we’ve studied exhibits as extreme an influence differential as that which exists between Belo and his victims. When a baby is raped in a rustic that’s devoutly Catholic, and the sexual predator just isn’t only a bishop but a legendary national hero, there is sort of no hope that justice shall be done.”
In 2018, as rumors built against Daschbach, the priest confessed in a letter to church authorities to abusing young girls from no less than 1991 to 2012.
“It is not possible for me to recollect even the faces of lots of them, let alone the names,” he wrote.
The 87-year-old was defrocked by the Vatican and criminally charged in East Timor, where he was convicted in 2021 and is now serving 12 years in prison.
But despite his confession and court testimony from victims that detailed the abuse, Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, an independence hero himself, has visited Daschbach in prison — hand-feeding him cake and serving him wine on his birthday — and has said winning the ex-priest’s early release is a priority for him.
In Belo’s case, six years after winning the Nobel Prize, which he shared with current East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta, he suddenly retired as the pinnacle of the church in East Timor in 2002, citing health reasons and stress.
Not long after his retirement, Belo, today 76, was sent by the Vatican and his Salesian missionary order to a different former Portuguese colony, Mozambique, to work as a missionary priest.
There, he has said, he spent his time “teaching catechism to children, giving retreats to young people.” Today he lives in Portugal.
Suspicion arose that Belo, like others before him, had been allowed to quietly retire moderately than face any reckoning, given the reputational harm to the church that might have caused.
In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Pope Francis suggested that indeed was the case, reasoning that was how such matters were handled previously.
“This is a really old thing where this awareness of today didn’t exist,” Francis said. “And when it got here out in regards to the bishop of East Timor, I said, ‘Yes, let it go within the open.’ … I’m not going to cover it up. But these were decisions made 25 years ago when there wasn’t this awareness.”
Lingsma said she first heard allegations against Belo in 2002, the identical 12 months East Timor, also often called Timor-Leste, won its formal independence after the Indonesian occupation led to 1999. She said she wasn’t able to analyze the case and construct enough evidence to publish her story on him until 20 years later.
Her story garnered international attention, in addition to the Vatican’s acknowledgement of the case, but in East Timor was primarily met with skepticism and negative reactions toward her reporting. Her 2019 story exposing the Daschbach case eventually prompted authorities to charge him, but additionally didn’t result in the outpouring of anger that she had anticipated.
“The response was silence,” she recalled.
During the fight for independence, priests, nuns and missionaries put themselves at great risk to assist people, like “parents wanting to avoid wasting their children,” helping form today’s deep connection between the church and folks of East Timor, said Timorese historian Luciano Valentim da Conceixao.
The church’s role is even enshrined within the preamble to the young country’s structure, which says that the Catholic Church “has all the time been in a position to tackle the suffering of all of the individuals with dignity, placing itself on their side within the defense of their most fundamental rights.”
Because so many remember the church’s significant role during those dark days, it has fostered an environment where it’s difficult for victims of abuse to talk out for fear of being labeled anti-church, and where men like Belo and Daschbach proceed to receive support from all walks of society.
“Pedophilia and sexual violence are common enemies in East Timor, and we should always not mix them up with the struggle for independence,” said Valentim da Costa Pinto, executive director of The Timor-Leste NGO Forum, an umbrella organization for some 270 NGOs.
The chancellor of the Dili Diocese today, Father Ludgerio Martins da Silva, said the cases of Belo and Daschbach were the Vatican’s jurisdiction, and that almost all people consider the sex abuse scandals a thing of the past.
“We don’t hear lots of people ask about bishop Belo because he left the country… twenty years ago,” da Silva said.
Still, Lingsma said she knew of ongoing allegations against “4 or five” other priests, including two who were now dead, “and if I do know them, I’m the last person to know.”
“That also shows that this whole reporting system doesn’t work in any respect,” she said.
Da Conceixao, the historian, said he didn’t know enough in regards to the cases against Daschbach or Belo to comment on them, but that he was well acquainted with their role within the independence struggle and called them “fearless freedom fighters and clergymen.”
“Clergymen will not be free from mistakes,” da Conceixao conceded. “But we, the Timorese, need to look with a transparent mind on the mistakes they made and the great they did for the country, for the liberty of 1,000,000 people, and in fact the worth just isn’t the identical.”
Because of that prevailing attitude, Barrett Doyle said “the victims of those two men need to be probably the most isolated and least supported clergy sex abuse victims on this planet straight away. ”
For that reason, Francis’ visit to East Timor could possibly be a landmark moment in his papacy, she said, if he were to denounce Daschbach and Belo by name and praise the courage of the victims, sending a message that might resonate globally.
“Given the exalted status of the Catholic Church in East Timor, just imagine the impact of papal fury directed at Belo, Daschbach and the yet unknown variety of other predatory clergy in that country,” she said.
“Francis could even address the country’s hidden victims, promising his support and urging them to contact him directly about their abuse — he literally could save lives.”
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Rising reported from Bangkok and Winfield from Rome.
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