If any evidence were needed to underscore that Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to Asia and Oceania is the longest, farthest and most difficult of his pontificate, it’s that he’s bringing along his secretaries to assist him navigate the four-country program while maintaining with work back home.
Francis will clock 32,814 kilometers (20,390 miles) by air during his Sept. 2-13 visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, far surpassing any of his previous 44 foreign trips and notching one in all the longest papal trips ever, each when it comes to days on the road and distances traveled.
That’s no small feat for a pope who turns 88 in December, uses a wheelchair, lost a part of a lung to a respiratory infection as a young man and needed to cancel his last foreign trip on the last minute (to Dubai in November to take part in the U.N. climate conference) on doctors’ orders.
But Francis is pushing ahead with this trip, originally planned for 2020 but postponed due to COVID-19. He’s bringing along his medical team of a health care provider and two nurses and taking the standard health precautions on the bottom. But in a novelty, he’s adding his personal secretaries into the normal Vatican delegation of cardinals, bishops and security.
The long trip recalls the globetrotting travels of St. John Paul II, who visited all 4 destinations during his quarter-century pontificate, though East Timor was an occupied a part of Indonesia on the time of his landmark 1989 trip.
By retracing John Paul’s steps, Francis is reinforcing the importance that Asia has for the Catholic Church, because it’s one in all the few places where the church is growing when it comes to baptized faithful and spiritual vocations. And he’s highlighting that the complex region also embodies a few of his core priorities as pope – an emphasis on interreligious and intercultural dialogue, take care of the environment and insistence on the spiritual component of economic development.
Here is a have a look at the trip and a few of the issues which are more likely to come up, with the Vatican’s relations with China ever-present within the background in a region where Beijing wields enormous influence.
Indonesia
Francis loves gestures of interfaith fraternity and harmony, and there may very well be no higher symbol of spiritual tolerance at the beginning of his trip than the underground “Tunnel of Friendship” linking Indonesia’s most important Istiqlal mosque to the country’s Catholic cathedral.
Francis will visit the underpass in central Jakarta with the grand imam, Nasaruddin Umar, before each partake in an interfaith gathering and sign a joint declaration.
Francis has made improving Christian-Muslim relations a priority, and has often used his foreign travels to advertise his agenda of committing religious leaders to work for peace and tolerance, and resign violence in God’s name.
Indonesia is home to the world’s largest Muslim population and has enshrined religious freedom in its structure, officially recognizing six religions — Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Protestantism and Catholicism. Francis is probably going to spotlight this tradition of spiritual tolerance and have fun it as a message for the broader world.
“If we’re capable of create a form of collaboration between one another, that may very well be an awesome strength of the Indonesian nation,” the imam said in an interview.
Papua New Guinea
Francis was elected pope in 2013 largely on the strength of an extemporaneous speech he delivered to his fellow cardinals during which he said the Catholic Church needed to go to the “peripheries” to succeed in those that need God’s comfort probably the most. When Francis travels deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he shall be fulfilling one in all the marching orders he set out for the longer term pope on the eve of his own election.
Few places are as distant, peripheral and poverty-wracked as Vanimo, a northern coastal town on the most important island of New Guinea. There Francis will meet with missionaries from his native Argentina who’re working to bring Christianity to a largely tribal individuals who still practice pagan traditions alongside the Catholic faith.
“If we suspend our preconceptions, even in tribal cultures we will find human values near Christian ideals,” Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who heads the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office and is an element of the Vatican delegation, told the Fides missionary news agency.
Francis will likely reflect on the environmental threats to vulnerable and poor places like Papua New Guinea, comparable to deep sea mining and climate change, while also pointing to the variety of its estimated 10 million individuals who speak some 800 languages but are liable to tribal conflicts.
East Timor
When John Paul visited East Timor in 1989, he sought to console its overwhelmingly Catholic population who had suffered under Indonesia’s brutal and bloody occupation for 15 years already.
“For a few years now, you may have experienced destruction and death in consequence of conflict; You have known what it means to be the victims of hatred and struggle,” John Paul told the faithful during a seaside Mass in Tasi-Toli, near Dili.
“I pray that those that have responsibility for all times in East Timor will act with wisdom and good will towards all, as they seek for a just and peaceful resolution of present difficulties,” he said then in a direct challenge to Indonesia.
It would take one other decade for the United Nations to prepare a referendum on Timor’s independence, after which Indonesia responded with a scorched-earth campaign that left the previous Portuguese colony devastated. East Timor emerged as an independent country in 2002, but still bears the trauma and scars of an occupation that left as many as 200,000 people dead — nearly 1 / 4 of the population.
Francis will literally walk in John Paul’s footsteps when he celebrates Mass on the identical seaside esplanade as that 1989 liturgy, which some see as a key date within the Timorese independence movement.
“That Mass with the pope was a really strong, very vital moment for Timor’s identity,” said Giorgio Bernardelli, editor of AsiaNews, the missionary news agency. “It also in some ways put the highlight on the drama that Timor was living for the international community.”
Another legacy that may confront Francis is that of the clergy sexual abuse scandal: Revered independence hero and Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo was secretly sanctioned by the Vatican in 2020 for sexually abusing young boys.
There isn’t any word on whether Francis will consult with Belo, who continues to be revered in East Timor but has been barred by the Vatican from ever returning.
Singapore
Francis has used several of his foreign trips to send messages to China, be they direct telegrams of greetings when he flies through Chinese airspace or more indirect gestures of esteem, friendship and fraternity to the Chinese people when nearby.
Francis’ visit to Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is ethnically Chinese and Mandarin is an official language, will give him one more opportunity to succeed in out to Beijing because the Vatican seeks improved ties for the sake of China’s estimated 12 million Catholics.
“It’s a faithful people, who lived through so much and remained faithful,” Francis told the Chinese province of his Jesuit order in a recent interview.
The trip comes a month before the Vatican is about to renew a landmark 2018 agreement governing bishop nominations.
Just last week, the Vatican reported its “satisfaction” that China had officially recognized Tianjin Bishop Melchior Shi Hongzhen, who so far as the Vatican is anxious had actually taken over as bishop in 2019. The Holy See said China’s official recognition of him under civil law now was “a positive fruit of the dialogue established through the years between the Holy See and the Chinese government.”
But by arriving in Singapore, a regional economic powerhouse which maintains good relations with each China and the United States, Francis can also be getting into a protracted maritime dispute as China has grown increasingly assertive with its presence within the South China Sea.
