Pope Francis will set off on Monday for a visit to four island nations in Southeast Asia, an ambitious trip to call for global action on climate change that could test the strength of the 87-year-old head of the global Catholic Church.
In 12 days, from September 2 to 13, Francisco will travel almost 33,000 km to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. It is the longest journey ever undertaken by the pontiff, who now regularly uses a wheelchair due to pain in his knees and back.
Francis pushed hard for the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and aides say he wants to follow through on his calls to address the dangers of a rapidly warming world and especially to support the most vulnerable. In the countries he is touring, those dangers include rising sea levels and increasingly violent and unpredictable heatwaves and typhoons.
Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, where the journey begins, has suffered disastrous floods in recent years and is slowly sinking, prompting the government to build a new $32 billion capital in Borneo.
Francis is expected to headline more than 40 events during the trip, and some observers say that beyond his specific itinerary, he wants to demonstrate that he is still capable of leading a Church of 1.4 billion members despite his age and health problems.
“It’s a show of strength for Pope Francis,” said Massimo Faggioli, an Italian academic who closely follows the papacy.
WHAT DOES THE POPE HOPE TO ACHIEVE?
Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia, noted that no pope has ever toured abroad at that age. Benedict XVI, Francis’s immediate predecessor, resigned at age 85. João Paulo II, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, made his last foreign visit at age 84.
The tour will be Francis’s 45th trip abroad since his election in March 2013. He often speaks of reaching people or groups on the margins of society and has prioritized trips to places never before visited by a pope or where Catholics are a small minority.
“Francisco has almost drawn a new map of the Church,” Faggioli said. “Now it’s global Catholicism, a Church that is not only more globally inclusive, but truly globalized.”
Also on the agenda is a new push for Catholic-Muslim dialogue, long a priority for Francis, who in 2019 became the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, has about 280 million people, only about 3 percent of whom are Catholic. Francis will attend a meeting at Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque, the largest in Southeast Asia.
Jeremy Menchik, a political science professor at Boston University who has written extensively on Indonesian politics, said the country is in a “golden age” of interfaith dialogue, noting that the mosque is across the street from Jakarta’s Catholic cathedral.
“This is a time when there is pluralism rather than controversy,” he said.
Francisco lands in Jakarta around noon on Tuesday and leaves for Papua New Guinea three days later. In order to rest after a night flight that lasted more than 13 hours, he will have no public activities on Tuesday, except for a short official reception at the airport.
Source: Terra
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