Some 600, 000 people are expected to accumulate in a niche outside Timor-Leste’s capital Dili on Tuesday evening, for what is set to be one of the biggest people of Pope Francis’s church.
The smaller Southeast Asian nation, which is one of the most reformed places on Earth and the only one with a Catholic majority, will have a congregation that is open to the public and will have a congregation that is almost half as large as the pontiff is.
At least one regional telecoms company informed customers that their sign at the event would be impacted in anticipation of the masses.
Tuesday’s mass is being held on disputed ground in Tasitolu, where authorities recently demolished homes and evicted nearly 90 people.
Zerita Correia recently reported to BBC News that” they also destroyed our stuff inside the house.” Because my kids are still attending school in this area, we now need to book near.
Local residents, thousands of whom had relocated there over the past ten from rural areas of the country, were furious about the move. Some people emigrated from the cash and constructed standard homes in the area.
The state claims that they are squatting and have no place to live on the property. A state minister told the BBC that people were informed of plans to evacuate the area in September 2023.
Another controversy is the case of a popular East Timorese priest, hailed as an freedom warrior, who was accused of sexually abusing young kids in the nation during the 1980s and 1990s.
The Church was informed of the case against Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo in 2019, according to a Vatican official, and in 2020, the Vatican implemented punitive measures, including a ban on deliberate contact with juveniles.
Some had wondered, however, whether the Pope would solve the incident during his day in Timor-Leste.
Pope Francis made the call in his Monday talk, saying,” Let us not forget the many children and adolescents whose respect has been violated,” without mentioning that or any other case especially.
Finally, he urged people to perform “everything possible to prevent every kind of misuse and ensure a healthier and peaceful youth for all young folks.”
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Clergy in Oceania wrote in an opened letter that there had” still not been remedy for the sufferers” and requested that Pope Francis use Church funds to pay them payment. The Pope has not yet met with any of the subjects.
Timor-Leste, formerly known as East Timor, was also praised in his discourse by the pope for its new age of “peace and freedom” more than 20 years after it gained independence from Indonesia’s neighbor.
We thank the Lord because you never lost hope during a time of such serious proportions of your background, and after agonizing and difficult times, a new dawn of peace and freedom has finally come to pass,” he said.
Pope Francis, who landed in Dili on Monday evening, may have spent less than 48 hours in Timor-Leste when he flies to Singapore on Wednesday for the last foot of his 12-day journey.