Worthy Christian News > World News > Pope’s Asia Trip Closely Watched By Persecuted Christians (Worthy News In-Depth)

Pope’s Asia Trip Closely Watched By Persecuted Christians (Worthy News In-Depth)

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

JAKARTA (Worthy News) – Pope Francis will begin Monday one of the longest papal trips ever, both in terms of days on the road and distances traveled, in a region where many devoted Christians face persecution for their faith.

The frail pontiff, who turns 88 in December, will face challenges during his September 2-13 trip to four nations in Asia and Oceania, including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore.

Francis 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 United Nations climate conference) on doctors’ orders.

Despite physical ailments, he will clock 32,814 kilometers (20,390 miles) by air, backed by medical staff and personal secretaries. While his trip is meant to encourage the Catholic Church, at least some evangelical Christians are skeptical about his focus on “interreligious dialogue.”

In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Francis will go to the underground “Tunnel of Friendship” linking Indonesia’s main Istiqlal mosque to the country’s Catholic cathedral.

He will visit thet underpass in central Jakarta with the grand imam, Nasaruddin Umar, before partaking in an “interfaith gathering” and signing a joint declaration.

Francis has made “improving Christian-Muslim relations” a priority and 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.

Yet Pastor Johannis ‘John’ Hus Lumenta, the late secretary general of Indonesia’s 3-million-strong main Pentecostal denomination Gereja Pantekosta di Indonesia’ (GPdI), would question these initiatives.

DIALOGUE CONTROVERSIAL

Before he passed away last week, Lumenta wondered why the Dutch royal couple’s 2020 program included the “interreligious dialogue” preached by Pope Francis, among other issues with religious and political leaders.

“To me personally, talking about interreligious dialogue is nonsense,” Lumenta told a Worthy News reporter at the time.

“It sounds like making a compromise. As a man of faith in Christ, I believe in the Truth. Interreligious dialogue is more about politics. It has nothing to do with growing our faith. Or making us more and more vibrant or victorious for Christ. That’s my view.”

He said that many Bible-believing Christians face harassment or even death for their faith.

Up to 20 Christians, including members of GPdI, are killed annually amid rising Muslim extremism in Indonesia, church sources say, but the actual figure may be higher.

Christians struggle, too, in daily life. One Christian entrepreneur told Worthy News she was not allowed to join a crucial professional association because she was a Christian. “But my faith in Jesus Lord is more important to me.”

The entrepreneur sees a disconnect between Indonesia‘s enshrined religious freedom in its constitution, which officially recognizes “six religions”—Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Protestantism, and Catholicism—and reality.

CHURCHES RAIDED

Churches, especially non-Catholic services, have been raided or prevented from gathering by angry Muslims. Born-again Christian believers also argue that true Christianity has nothing to do with religion but with a personal choice for and life with Christ. “God has no grandchildren,” a Christian told Worthy News.

Meeting the leader of an underground church movement working among Muslims in Indonesia was also omitted from Francis’s visit.

In addition to Indonesia, Francis will visit Papua New Guinea, where he will travel deep into the jungles to fulfill one of the marching orders he set out for the future pope on the eve of his own election.

Church needed to go to the “peripheries” to reach those who needed God’s comfort the most. When Francis travels deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he will fulfill one of the marching orders he set out for the future pope on the eve of his election in 2013.

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 working to bring Christianity to largely tribal people who still practice pagan traditions alongside the Catholic faith.

Francis was to reflect on the environmental threats to vulnerable and poor places like Papua New Guinea, such as deep sea mining and what he believes is climate change. He was also due to discuss the diversity of its estimated 10 million people who speak some 800 languages but are prone to tribal conflicts.

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

DESTRUCTION, DEATH

“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, observers noted.

“That Mass with the pope was a very strong, very important moment for Timor’s identity,” recalled 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.

The Vatican has barred him from ever returning.

SINGAPORE VISIT

Francis also visits Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is ethnically Chinese, and Mandarin is an official language.

Analysts say it will give him another opportunity to reach out to Beijing as the Vatican seeks improved ties for the sake of China’s estimated 12 million Catholics.

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

While flying over China, he was due to deliver a customary telegram to its leadership, also realizing the delicate situation of Christians in the Communist-run nation.

Ahead of his trip, Vatican Radio and the Vatican News website have avoided issues related to China during diplomatic talks on the Vatican’s say over the nomination of bishops and government pressure on churches.

The papal visit comes a month before the Vatican renews a landmark 2018 agreement governing bishop nominations.