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Pope Francis arrived in East Timor on the penultimate leg of his Asia-Pacific tour amid a controversy over the hefty expense incurred on the trip by one of the world’s poorest countries.
Tens of thousands of people queued in the streets of the capital Dili as the pope landed on Monday and waved from his white popemobile.
President Jose Manuel Ramos-Horta welcomed the Vatican leader at the airport and offered him flowers and tais, a woven ceremonial scarf, which he briefly put on.
The pontiff’s three-day visit to one of the world’s poorest countries was marred by controversy over the expense of $12m (£9.1m) approved for it by the Council of Ministers in February.
At least $1m (£762,000) was spent on erecting a papal mass altar, allegedly after demolishing homes and evicting dozens of people, sparking public anger.
The expenditure was criticised as an exorbitant burden by activists who noted that nearly 42 per cent of Timorese lived in poverty, facing food insecurity while grappling with high inflation.
The open-air mass on Tuesday would be the highlight of the trip. It was expected to be attended by 700,000 people, more than half of the tiny Southeast Asian nation’s total population, 96 per cent of which is Catholic.
East Timor is the only majority Catholic nation the pope is visiting on his ambitious 12-day trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania, his longest and farthest overseas journey yet. His final stop is Singapore.
The country, officially known as Timor-Leste, gained independence from Indonesia in 2002, making it one of the world’s youngest nations.
Francis is the second Vatican head to visit following John Paul II, who came in 1989 on a trip that provided a historic boost to the country’s independence movement.
The latest visit also put a spotlight on the issue of sexual abuse within the church and whether Pope Francis would address it directly during his time in East Timor, as he did in other countries.
The Vatican admitted in 2022 that it had secretly sanctioned Timorese Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, a Nobel laureate, following allegations he sexually abused boys in the country in the 1990s.
A year before that, defrocked American priest Richard Daschbach was sentenced to 12 years in prison for sexually abusing girls under his care in Timor.
A leading abuse survivor advocacy group called on Francis to speak openly about the cases during his visit.
“The pope must denounce the two men by name,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of the BishopAccountability.org. “His words could have an enormous positive impact.”
Marino Fereira, a researcher at the Timor Leste Institute for Development Monitoring and Analysis, said the expense of $12m on the papal visit was excessive.
“The governments have ignored the poor in the country,” he said.
Tomas Cabral, the state administration minister who leads the visit organising committee, acknowledged the money was excessive but claimed that it was also being used for the development of roads and renovation of churches and public facilities.
“Don’t compare our country with neighbouring nations that have proper facilities and infrastructure to host international events or high-ranking state guests,“ Mr Cabral said. ”Here we have to build it from scratch.”
Adverse weather conditions reduced cereal production in Timor this year, leaving some 364,000 people, or 27 per cent of the population, facing acute food insecurity between May and September, according to the United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organisation.
The president hailed the visit as momentous for the nation. “The pope’s visit is the biggest, the best marketing anyone can aspire to promote the country, to put the country on the tourist map,” he said.
Francis will leave Dili for Singapore for the first papal visit to the island republic in 38 years before returning to Rome on 13 September.
