Pontiff’s itinerary including visits to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea reflects importance of Asia to Catholic church
Pope Francis, who has been struggling with health problems, is due to headline more than 40 events on the tour.Pope Francis, who has been struggling with health problems, is due to headline more than 40 events on the tour.
Shihoko Goto, the director of the Indo-Pacific Program at Washington’s Wilson Center, said the visit, coming as the pontiff struggles with a slew of health problems, “speaks volumes about the strategic importance of Asia for the church”., the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.
The pope is also scheduled to meet Indonesia’s outgoing president, Joko Widodo, and to hold mass for an estimated 80,000 people at a Jakarta stadium, an Indonesian church official told the Associated Press. He will then head to East Timor to celebrate mass on the same seaside esplanade where Pope John Paul II offered aHome to an overwhelmingly Catholic population, East Timor may force Francis to confront the clergy sexual abuse scandal. In 2022 the Vaticanthat it had imposed sanctions on the bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, an East Timor independence hero, after allegations that he sexually abused young boys during the 1990s.
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