Why Pope Francis’ Asia visit is important for the region and the Church

Pope Francis is heading to Asia.

The 87-year-old pontiff is set to embark on the longest, and perhaps most challenging trip of his papacy.

Francis, during his trip which is slated to begin from today (September 2) to September 13, to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, will clock 32,814 kilometers by air.

But what does the trip to Asia signify?

Let’s take a closer look:

Tilt to Asia

As per CNN, Francis’ trip to Asia reflects the region’s growing importance to the Catholic Church.

Francis, who took over from Benedict after he resigned in 2013 due to declining health, has already been to the Asia-Pacific region several times, with visits to countries including South Korea, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

In his 2017 visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, Francis famously met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically-elected leader who was ousted in the military in 2021, which has given rise to today’s civil war.

Francis’ visit also reflects the underlying fact that the church is no longer a Eurocentric or western institution, as per CNN.

The piece noted that dioses in Asia, Africa and Latin America have more say within the church and that Francis himself has spoken about the church needing more voices – male and female – from outside Europe.

“Asia has always been among Francis’ priorities,” Father Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican official and close adviser to the pope, told CNN.

“The pope is interested not so much in the number of Catholics as the vibrancy,” Spadaro added.

He said the church tries to serve as a the common good as a “leaven.”

Asia “represents the future at this time in the world.”

A long, long trip

The trip far surpasses any of his previous 44 foreign trips and notching 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 foreign trip at the last minute (to Dubai in November to participate in the UN climate conference) on doctors’ orders.

Francis is slated to headline more than 40 events on the tour.

It is a show of strength for Pope Francis,” Massimo Faggioli, an Italian academic, told Reuters.

But Francis is pushing ahead with this trip, originally planned for 2020 but postponed because of COVID-19.

He’s bringing along his medical team of a doctor and two nurses and taking the usual health precautions on the ground.

But in a novelty, he’s adding his personal secretaries into the traditional Vatican delegation of cardinals, bishops and security.

Shihoko Goto, the director of the Indo-Pacific Program at Washington’s Wilson Center, told The Guardian  the visit in the backdrop of the health issues “speaks volumes about the strategic importance of Asia for the church.”

In the footsteps of John Paul II

The long trip recalls the globetrotting travels of St John Paul II, who visited all four destinations during his quarter-century pontificate, though East Timor was an occupied part of Indonesia at 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, since it’s one of the few places where the church is growing in terms of baptised faithful and religious vocations.

And he is highlighting that the complex region also embodies some of his core priorities as pope – an emphasis on interreligious and intercultural dialogue, care for the environment and insistence on the spiritual component of economic development.

Indonesia

Indonesia, home to nearly 9 million Catholics, is an important destination for Francis, as per DW.com

Francis loves gestures of interfaith fraternity and harmony, and there could be no better symbol of religious tolerance at the start of his trip than the underground “Tunnel of Friendship” linking 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 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 promote his agenda of committing religious leaders to work for peace and tolerance, and renounce violence in God’s name.

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 for the broader world.

“If we are able to create a kind of collaboration between each other, that could be a great strength of the Indonesian nation,” the imam said in an interview.

“Indonesia and Singapore are countries where the need to negotiate a harmonious co-existence with other religions and with the wider community is an ongoing concern,” Christina Kheng, a Catholic theologian from Singapore who teaches at the East Asian Pastoral Institute, told CNN.

“What stands out is the dialogue of daily life that Catholics have with people of all faiths.”

“The pulse of the churches here is quite different from say, those in Europe or US where issues like polarisation, secularisation and abuse have dominated the headlines,” Kheng added.

Spadaro told CNN the “pope wants to give a signal about dialogue with Islam.”

Papua New Guinea

Francis was elected pope in 2013 largely on the strength of an extemporaneous speech he delivered to his fellow cardinals in which he said the Catholic Church needed to go to the “peripheries” to reach those who need God’s comfort the most.

When Francis travels deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he will be fulfilling one of the marching orders he set out for the future pope on the eve of his own election.

Few places are as remote, peripheral and poverty-wracked 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 Fides missionary news agency.

Francis will likely reflect on the environmental threats to vulnerable and poor places like Papua New Guinea, such as deep sea mining and climate change, while also pointing to the diversity of its estimated 10 million people who speak some 800 languages but are prone 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 many years now, you have experienced destruction and death as a result 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 who have responsibility for life in East Timor will act with wisdom and good will towards all, as they search for a just and peaceful resolution of present difficulties,” he said then in a direct challenge to Indonesia.

It would take another decade for the United Nations to organize a referendum on Timor’s independence, after which Indonesia responded with a scorched-earth campaign that left the former 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 a quarter of the population.

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

“That Mass with the pope was a very strong, very important moment for Timor’s identity,” said Giorgio Bernardelli, editor of AsiaNews, the missionary news agency. “It also in many ways put the spotlight on the drama that Timor was living for the international community.”

Another legacy that will 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 is no word on whether Francis will refer to Belo, who is still revered in East Timor but has been barred by the Vatican from ever returning.

Spadaro told CNN that the government of Timor has approved a text signed by both Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb as a national document.

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 yet another opportunity to reach out to Beijing as the Vatican seeks improved ties for the sake of China’s estimated 12 million Catholics.

“It’s a faithful people, who lived through 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 is set 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 as far as the Vatican is concerned 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 over the years between the Holy See and the Chinese government.”

But by arriving in Singapore, a regional economic powerhouse which maintains good relations with both China and the United States, Francis is also stepping into a protracted maritime dispute as China has grown increasingly assertive with its presence in the South China Sea.

With inputs from agencies