By Joshua McElwee
DILI (Reuters) -Pope Francis arrived on Monday in East Timor, a predominantly Catholic nation in Southeast Asia, for a three-day go to that may embody an open-air celebration of Mass the Vatican says might embody greater than half the inhabitants of 1.3 million.
The 87-year-old pontiff is on an bold 12-day go to to 4 international locations throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania, his longest abroad journey but.
He got here to East Timor from Papua New Guinea, the place on Sunday he delivered medical provides to a small city situated on the fringe of an enormous jungle, in some of the distant areas of the world.
Francis landed in Dili, the Timorese capital, on Monday afternoon. He was met on the airport by President Jose Manuel Ramos-Horta and two younger girls wearing conventional outfits, who provided him flowers and a tais, a woven ceremonial scarf, which the pontiff briefly placed on.
Tens of hundreds of individuals stuffed complete metropolis blocks across the airport as Francis left in a white, open-top automobile. Many had been utilizing umbrellas adorned within the white and yellow colors of the Vatican flag to guard themselves from direct solar within the 31 levels Celsius (88 levels Fahrenheit) warmth.
East Timor, a half-island nation north of Australia, gained independence from Indonesia in 2002, after a brutal, decades-long occupation. Francis is the second pope to go to, following John Paul II, who got here in 1989, in a visit that gave the nation’s independence motion an historic increase.
The nation is probably going probably the most Catholic on the earth, with the Vatican saying some 96% of Timorese are adherents to the religion.
Organisers are getting ready for some 750,000 folks to attend a Mass with Francis on Tuesday on the Tasitolu, a large, dusty coastal space the place Indonesian forces had been identified to bury killed Timorese independence fighters.
Since independence, the nation has struggled with rebuilding its infrastructure and economic system. In 2014, the World Financial institution estimated that some 42% of Timorese dwell in poverty and that some 47% of kids are stunted due to malnutrition.
Though Timorese have remained overwhelmingly Catholic, the church within the nation has been affected not too long ago by abuse scandals.
In 2022, the Vatican confirmed it had sanctioned Timorese Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo following allegations he sexually abused boys in Timor within the Nineteen Nineties. Belo, who shared the 1996 Nobel peace prize with Ramos-Horta for his or her independence efforts, lives in Portugal.
A yr earlier, a defrocked American priest, Richard Daschbach, was sentenced to 12 years in jail for sexually abusing ladies underneath his care in Timor.
A number one abuse survivor advocacy group known as on Francis to talk overtly concerning the instances throughout his go to. “The pope must denounce the two men by name,” stated Anne Barrett Doyle, of the abuse monitoring group BishopAccountability.org. “His words could have an enormous positive impact.”
The pope’s first handle within the nation will come later Monday, when Francis is because of handle the political authorities.
Francis is visiting East Timor till Wednesday as a part of a tour that additionally included a cease in Indonesia. He travels subsequent to Singapore earlier than returning to Rome on Sept. 13.
