Pope embarks on the longest, furthest and most difficult journey in Asia, with China in the background

VATICAN CITY — If any proof was needed to point out that Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to Asia and Oceania is the longest, farthest and most challenging of his pontificate, it’s that he’s bringing his secretaries to help him navigate the schedule the four countries, while keeping work at home.

Francis will cover 32,814 kilometers (20,390 miles) by air during his Sept. 2-13 visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, far exceeding any of his previous 44 foreign trips and achieving one of the longest papal trips ever. both in terms of days on the road and distances traveled.

That’s no small feat for a pope who turns 88 in December, uses a wheelchair, lost part of a lung to a respiratory infection as a young man and had to cancel his last trip to abroad at the last minute (to Dubai in November to attend the UN climate conference) on doctors’ orders.

But Francis is moving forward with this trip, originally planned for 2020 but postponed due to COVID-19. He brings his medical team of a doctor and two nurses and takes his usual ground health precautions. But in a first, he is adding his personal secretaries to the Vatican’s traditional delegation of cardinals, bishops and security.

The long journey is reminiscent of the globetrotting of Saint John Paul II, who visited all four destinations during his quarter-century pontificate, although East Timor was an occupied part of Indonesia at the time of his landmark trip in 1989.

Following in the footsteps of John Paul, Francis reinforces the importance that Asia has for the Catholic Church, as it is one of the few places where the church is growing in terms of baptized believers and religious vocations. And he points out that the complex region also embodies some of his core priorities as pope — an emphasis on interreligious and intercultural dialogue, concern for the environment and an insistence on the spiritual component of economic development.

Here’s a look at the trip and some issues likely to arise, with the Vatican’s relations with China ever-present in the background in a region where Beijing wields enormous influence.

Indonesia

Francis loves gestures of interfaith brotherhood and harmony, and there could be no better symbol of religious tolerance at the start of his trip than the underground “Tunnel of Friendship” that connects Indonesia’s main Istiqlal mosque to the country’s Catholic cathedral.

Francis will visit the underpass in central Jakarta with the grand imam, Nasaruddin Umar, before both attend an interfaith gathering and sign a joint statement.

Francis has made improving Christian-Muslim relations a priority and has often used his trips abroad to promote his agenda of engaging religious leaders to work for peace and tolerance and renounce violence in the name of God.

Indonesia is home to the world’s largest Muslim population and has enshrined religious freedom in its constitution, officially recognizing six religions — Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Protestantism and Catholicism. Francis is likely to highlight this tradition of religious tolerance and celebrate it as a message to the whole world.

“If we are able to create some kind of collaboration between them, it could be a great 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 gave to his fellow cardinals, in which he said the Catholic Church must go to the “peripheries” to reach those most in need of comfort to God. When Francis travels deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he will fulfill one of the orders he proposed to the future pope on the eve of his own election.

Few places are as remote, peripheral and poverty-stricken as Vanimo, a northern coastal town on the main island of New Guinea. There Francis will meet with missionaries from his native Argentina who are working to bring Christianity to a largely tribal people who still practice pagan traditions alongside the Catholic faith.

“If we suspend our preconceptions, even in tribal cultures we can find human values ​​close to Christian ideals,” Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who heads the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office and is part of the Vatican delegation, told the missionary news agency Fides.

Francis is likely to reflect on environmental threats to vulnerable and poor places like Papua New Guinea, such as deep-sea mining and climate change, while also highlighting the diversity of the 10 million people who speak some 800 languages, but they are prone to tribal conflicts. .

East Timor

When John Paul visited East Timor in 1989, he sought to console its overwhelmingly Catholic population, which had already suffered for 15 years under Indonesia’s brutal and bloody occupation.

“For many years now, you have experienced destruction and death as a result of conflict; You knew what it means to be the victims of hatred and fighting,” John Paul told the faithful during a Mass by the sea in Tasi-Toli, near Dili.

“I pray that those who have the responsibility of life in East Timor will act with wisdom and benevolence towards all as they seek a just and peaceful solution to the present difficulties,” he said then in a direct challenge to Indonesia.

It would take another decade for the United Nations to hold a referendum on Timor’s independence, after which Indonesia responded with a scorched-earth campaign that left the former Portuguese colony devastated. East Timor became an independent country in 2002 but still bears the trauma and scars of an occupation that killed 200,000 people – almost a quarter of the population.

Francis will literally follow in John Paul’s footsteps when he celebrates Mass on the same seaside esplanade as that 1989 Mass, which some consider a key date in Timorese’s independence movement.

“That Mass with the Pope was a very powerful, very important moment for Timor’s identity,” said Giorgio Bernardelli, editor of AsiaNews, the missionary news agency. “It also, in many ways, brought into focus the drama that Timor was experiencing for the international community.”

Another legacy Francis will face is that of the clergy sex 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 boys.

There is no word on whether Francis will be referring to Belo, who is still revered in East Timor but has been banned by the Vatican from ever returning.

Singapore

Francis has used several of his trips abroad to send messages to China, whether direct telegrams of greetings when flying through Chinese airspace or more indirect gestures of esteem, friendship and brotherhood to the Chinese people when he is nearby.

Francis’ visit to Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is Chinese and Mandarin is an official language, will give him another opportunity to reach Beijing as the Vatican seeks improved ties for the sake of China’s 12 million Catholics.

“They are a faithful people who have lived a lot and remained faithful,” Francis told the Chinese province of his Jesuit order in a recent interview.

The trip comes a month before the Vatican renews 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, as far as the Vatican is concerned, actually took over as bishop in 2019. The Holy See said the recognition his official by China under civil. the law was now “a positive fruit of the dialogue established over the years between the Holy See and the Chinese government”.

But by arriving in Singapore, a regional economic powerhouse that maintains good relations with both China and the United States, Francis also enters a protracted maritime dispute as China has become increasingly assertive with its presence in the China Sea south.

___

AP writers Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia and David Rising in Bangkok contributed.