Pope Francis’s Triumph in East Timor

And that was nothing compared to the highlight of the papal visit: the papal Mass celebrated the following day on the Tasi Tolu esplanade, at the entrance to Dili. An enormous space designed to accommodate up to 750,000 people. 600,000 faithful gathered there for the celebration, or a little less than half of the country’s population.

As Jean-Marie Guénois noted in Le Figaro on September 10, 2024: “This Mass will remain one of the most attended of the pontificate. We have to go back to 2023 in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to find a celebration with a million people, the historical record having been broken during the Mass in Manila in the Philippines in 2015 where Francis celebrated in front of six million people.”

A flawless organization that owes much to the measures decreed by the executive. The unsanitary streets through which the papal procession was to pass were simply razed and the inhabitants relocated manu militari: “Why should we hide our poverty? That’s the reality. The Pope does not come to see beautiful things in Timor Leste, he is there for our real lives,” declared Joana Fraga Ximenes, interviewed by Sui-Lee Wee in the columns of the New York Times.

The Roman Pontiff’s visit was a real triumph. It must be said that almost all of the country’s 1.3 million inhabitants are Catholic and that the Church has played a leading role in the struggle for the independence of East Timor, one of the youngest countries in the world – becoming a sovereign state in 2002, after decades of occupation by Indonesia – and one of the poorest.

Half of the population lives below the poverty line and a large majority of the Timorese depend on agriculture to survive. This is why some voices were raised to criticize the pomp deployed on the occasion of the Pope’s visit: the government spent almost 11 million euros, three times the annual budget allocated to increasing food production.

This apostolic journey was expected: the local Church was shaken a few years ago by abuses committed by members of the clergy, including a bishop who was a venerated figure among the Timorese people. Rome reacted quickly and firmly, and the Pope’s visit is part of this context where the Church wants to turn a painful page, and in this respect, the mission seems to have been perfectly successful.

In 2024, as Sui-Lee Wee points out, “the Church still plays a major role in society and politics. The government budget provides millions of dollars for the three Catholic dioceses in the country. Family conflicts are generally resolved first by priests.”

For Fernanda de Jesus, a young woman who sums up the feelings of the Timorese very well for the NYT: “Francis’s visit is a blessing, even if it is the second visit of a pope. We had never felt this, because now we are an independent country. This time, it is different.”