VATICAN CITY — If proof were needed that Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to Asia and Oceania is the longest, most distant and most difficult of his pontificate, it’s that he is bringing along his secretaries to help him navigate the four-country schedule while continuing his work at home.
Francis will travel 20,390 miles by air during his Sept. 2-13 visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, far surpassing all of his previous 44 foreign trips and making it one of the longest papal journeys ever, both in terms of days on the road and distance traveled.
It’s no small feat for a pope who turns 88 in December, who uses a wheelchair, who lost part of a lung to a respiratory infection when he was young and who had to cancel his last trip abroad at the last minute (to Dubai in November to attend the U.N. climate conference) on doctors’ orders.
But Francis is continuing his trip, originally planned for 2020 but postponed because of Covid-19. He is taking with him his medical team, made up of a doctor and two nurses, and is taking the usual health precautions on site. But, in a new development, he is adding his personal secretaries to the traditional Vatican delegation, made up of cardinals, bishops and security personnel.
The long journey recalls the world travels of St. 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 historic 1989 trip.
Following in the footsteps of John Paul II, Francis emphasizes the importance of Asia for the Catholic Church, as one of the few places where the Church is growing in terms of baptized faithful and religious vocations. He also points out that this complex region also embodies some of his main priorities as pope: the emphasis on interreligious and intercultural dialogue, the protection of the environment and the insistence on the spiritual component of economic development.
Here’s a look at the trip and some of the issues likely to be discussed, 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 fraternity and interfaith harmony, and there could be no better symbol of religious tolerance at the start of his trip than the underground “Friendship Tunnel” linking Indonesia’s main Istiqlal mosque to the country’s Catholic cathedral.
Francis will visit the central Jakarta underpass with the grand imam, Nasaruddin Umar, before the two take part in an interfaith gathering and sign a joint declaration.
Francis has made improving Christian-Muslim relations a priority and has often used his foreign trips to promote his agenda of urging religious leaders to work for peace and tolerance and to 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. Pope Francis is expected to highlight this tradition of religious tolerance and celebrate it as a message to the rest of the world.
“If we are able to create some kind of collaboration between us, 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 impromptu 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 God’s comfort. When Francis travels deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he will be fulfilling one of the marching orders he gave the future pope on the eve of his own election.
Few places are as isolated, peripheral and impoverished as Vanimo, a coastal town in the north of the main island of New Guinea. There Francis will meet missionaries from his native Argentina who are trying to bring Christianity to a largely tribal population that still practices pagan traditions alongside the Catholic faith.
“If we put aside our preconceptions, even in tribal cultures we can find human values close to Christian ideals,” Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who heads the Vatican’s Office for Missionary Evangelization and is part of the Vatican delegation, told the missionary agency Fides.
Francis is likely to reflect on environmental threats to vulnerable and poor regions like Papua New Guinea, such as deep-sea mining and climate change, while highlighting the diversity of its roughly 10 million people who speak some 800 languages but are prone to tribal conflict.
East Timor
When John Paul II visited East Timor in 1989, he sought to console its population, the vast majority of whom were Catholic, who had already suffered for 15 years under Indonesia’s brutal and bloody occupation.
“For many years you have known destruction and death because of conflicts; you have known what it means to be victims of hatred and strife,” John Paul II told the faithful at a seaside Mass in Tasi-Toli, near Dili.
“I pray that those who have responsibility for life in East Timor will act with wisdom and goodwill towards all, in their search for a just and peaceful solution to the current difficulties,” he said then, in a direct challenge to Indonesia.
It took another decade for the United Nations to hold a referendum on Timorese independence, after which Indonesia responded with a scorched-earth policy that devastated the former Portuguese colony. East Timor became an independent country in 2002, but still bears the trauma and scars of an occupation that killed up to 200,000 people, nearly a quarter of the population.
Francis will literally be walking in the footsteps of John Paul II when he celebrates Mass on the same seaside esplanade as that 1989 liturgy, which some consider a key date in East Timor’s independence movement.
“This Mass with the Pope was a very strong moment, very important for the identity of Timor,” said Giorgio Bernardelli, editor-in-chief of AsiaNews, the missionary news agency. “It also, in many ways, highlighted the drama that Timor was experiencing for the international community.”
Another legacy Francis will have to contend with is 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 young boys.
It is not yet clear whether Francis will refer to Belo, who is still venerated in East Timor but has been banned from returning by the Vatican.
Singapore
Francis has taken advantage of several of his trips abroad to send messages to China, whether direct telegrams of greetings when he flies over Chinese airspace or more indirect gestures of esteem, friendship and fraternity to the Chinese people when he is nearby.
Pope Francis’ visit to Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is ethnic Chinese and Mandarin is the official language, will give him another opportunity to reach out to Beijing as the Vatican seeks to improve relations for the benefit of China’s estimated 12 million Catholics.
“They are a faithful people, who have experienced many things and have remained faithful,” Francis told his Jesuit order’s Chinese province in a recent interview.
The trip comes a month before the Vatican renews a landmark 2018 agreement governing bishop appointments.
Last week, the Vatican expressed “satisfaction” that China had officially recognized Tianjin Bishop Melchior Shi Hongzhen, who the Vatican said had actually taken office as bishop in 2019. The Holy See said China’s official recognition of Bishop Melchior Shi Hongzhen under civil law was now “the positive fruit of the dialogue established over the years between the Holy See and the Chinese government.”
But in arriving in Singapore, a regional economic powerhouse that has good relations with China and the United States, Francis is also stepping into a long-running maritime conflict as China becomes increasingly assertive in its presence in the South China Sea.
AP writers Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, and David Rising in Bangkok contributed.
