
On September 9-11, Pope Francis is visiting the tiny Southeast Asian nation of East Timor. Thirty-five years earlier, in 1989, that nation–then amidst a military occupation by Indonesia that many scholars consider it to be genocidal–Pope St. John Paul II became the first head of state to pay an official visit to the tiny nation. Now is an appropriate time to recall this heroic visit, which helped the East Timorese gain independence in 2002.
East Timor under the colonial thumb
When I commonly hear people say that the Philippines is the only Christian-majority nation in Asia, I protest, noting that there is an Asian nation with an even higher (96 percent) proportion of its population identifying with the Catholic Church: East Timor. “Where?” I usually hear (unless, of course, I am talking to a genocide scholar).
East Timor (also known as Timor Leste) has deep Catholic roots, stretching back to 1515. During Europe’s overseas colonial expansion, the western half of the island of Timor was colonized by the Dutch, while the Portuguese seized the eastern half. When Indonesia gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1945, West Timor became part of the newly independent Muslim-majority nation.
Between 1932 and 1974, Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, who died in 1968 (although the regime he established persisted for six more years until it was overthrown in the military coup known as the Carnation Revolution).
Ideologically, Salazar’s regime was very peculiar. Salazar was a devout Catholic and tried to model his policies on Catholic social teaching. Fearing that consumerism would impoverish the souls of the Portuguese, he opposed economic modernization. Like General Francisco Franco in neighboring Spain, Salazar was a right-wing authoritarian ruler who was officially neutral during World War II; whereas technically neutral Spain was closer to the Axis, Salazar was repulsed by Hitler and Mussolini and instead favored cooperation with the Allies.
Salazar’s distaste for Nazi racism, however, did not make him sympathetic to the brown and black peoples colonized by Europeans, and considered Portugal’s presence in parts of Africa and Asia to be a civilizing mission. This led to clashes with the Vatican: in 1967, Pope St. Paul VI, the first pontiff to make official pilgrimages outside Italy, visited Fatima to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Marian apparitions. The pope, however, did not visit other parts of Portugal to protest against Salazar’s opposition to decolonization. Meanwhile, in 1970 Portugal (as arch-Catholic a state as the Habsburg Empire in a previous era) recalled its ambassador to the Holy See when Paul VI granted audiences to national liberation activists from Portugal’s colonies of Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique.
A genocidal occupation and a pilgrim of peace
Whereas Western Europe’s African and Asian colonies had gained their independence mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization came late to Portugal’s overseas domains, proceeding only in 1974 after the Carnation Revolution.
One year later, Indonesia invaded East Timor, hoping to have control over the entire island. Under Indonesian occupation, partisan warfare flourished, which led to brutal retaliations. In total, the Indonesians killed nearly a quarter of East Timor’s 800,000 people.
On October 12, 1989, as part of his visit to Indonesia, St. John Paul II decided to visit East Timor. Given some of the pontiff’s earlier actions, this is surprising. During the Siege of Sarajevo by Serbian troops from 1992 to 1996 in John Paul’s own Slavic Europe, the pope refused to visit the city until it was liberated. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, John Paul II joined the opprobrium of many at South Africa’s apartheid regime and boycotted entering the country, although he visited many of its neighbors.
When John Paul arrived at the airport in Dili, the capital of East Timor, he was faced with a diplomatic quandary. Had he repeated his traditional gesture of kissing the ground in East Timor, that would suggest the nation was sovereign and spark the ire of the Indonesians, who could then increase their repression. Thus, a cross was placed on a pillow touching the ground, and John Paul kissed the cross. Current East Timorese President José Manuel Ramos-Horta has since called the gesture “diplomatic genius.”
The pope’s Mass was celebrated at Tasitolu on the outskirts of Dili, the site of the killings of many Timorese. Thus, this was just as symbolic as John Paul II’s Mass at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1979, except that the latter took place more than three decades after the end of the war, while East Timor was still under occupation.
In his homily, John Paul condemned human rights abuses and told the East Timorese to be “firm in their faith” as they are the “salt and light of the world,” acknowledging that their people had been “the victims of hatred and struggle” in which “many innocent people have died while others have been prey to retaliation and revenge.” Peaceful protests for independence followed the visit.
During the Mass, participants waved flags of the Marxist Fretilin movement. Yet after the pope’s visit, the Church took the lead in defending East Timorese freedom. Many priests and nuns helped victims of Indonesian violence. The Church’s biggest promoter of East Timor’s independence was Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, who gave sanctuary to those escaping persecution and lobbied the international community for a referendum on independence; in 1996, he and President Ramos-Horta shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. Unfortunately, it later surfaced that Bishop Belo was a sexual predator sanctioned by the Vatican, which is a blow to the Church’s positive legacy in East Timor.
In his recently published memoir, the late Joaquín Navarro-Valls claims to have cautiously approached the press when asked about the Vatican and East Timorese independence: “I explain[ed] to them that the Pope’s mission is genuinely pastoral: he did not come to solve local political problems.” Yet, back in Jakarta, John Paul II directly pressed Indonesian President (read: ruthless, bloody dictator) Suharto to not “disregard human rights in a misguided search for political unity.”
The papal visit had another important political consequence: it caused journalists from all over the world to become interested in the suffering nation, which increased international awareness of its plight.
In 1999, the United Nations sponsored a referendum on East Timorese independence; the people overwhelmingly voted for freedom from Indonesia, and in 2002 East Timor became one of the world’s youngest nations.
The East Timorese remember St. John Paul II well. In 2008, a massive six-meter (almost twenty-foot) statue of the pontiff was erected. In 2021, meanwhile, the first Catholic university in the country was named after St. John Paul II.
Although St. John Paul II’s visit to East Timor has become somewhat forgotten, it is worth recalling it as evidence that Christ’s message can defeat the seemingly stronger forces of hatred and oppression.
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