Angelus News | September 6, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 18

ing physical limits, he remains very much alert, engaged, and
on the job.
Of course, a pope doesn’t have to stand for reelection, and,
unlike American presidents, the usual understanding is that
he’s elected for life, the resignation of Benedict XVI notwithstanding.
Nonetheless, popes do still have to lead, and it’s
always destabilizing for a papacy when the popular belief
is that someone else — or, more often, a shadowy cabal of
someone elses — is actually running the show in the name of
an ailing and withdrawn figurehead.
On this outing, Francis will have the chance to make it
clear to the world, including members of his own flock, that
at least for right now, nobody’s
pulling his strings.
Beyond that obvious motive,
there are exigencies both political
and pastoral behind this 45th
foreign trip of Francis’ papacy,
which will take him, respectively,
to the 62nd, 63rd, 64th, and 65th
nations he will have visited while
in office.
The political agenda of the trip
is bookended at the beginning
and the end, with Indonesia and
Singapore, which gives Francis
the opportunity to polish relations
with the Islamic world and
with Asia, including Singapore’s
most important regional ally and
trading partner in China.
From the beginning, the
overarching geostrategic aim
of the Francis papacy has been
to shift the Vatican’s historical
identity as a Western institution
and the chaplain of NATO to a
more globalist and nonaligned
position. Two-thirds of the 1.3
billion Catholics in the world
today live outside the confines of
Western culture, a share that will
be three-quarters by mid-century.
As part of this effort, Francis has
A woman carries a
large wooden cross
during a Palm Sunday
procession in Dili, East
Timor, in this 2011 file
photo. | CNS/LIRIO
DA FONSECA, REUTERS
pursued an aggressive program of outreach to Islam, knowing
that at 1.9 billion global followers it’s inevitably a major
driver of contemporary history. Yet to date that campaign has
focused largely on Islam in the Middle East and the Persian
Gulf, while the reality is that only about one-quarter of the
Muslims in the world are Arabs and the majority are found in
settings such as Asia and Africa.
In Indonesia, Francis will have the chance to road test his
brand of globalist Vatican diplomacy and statesmanship in
a Muslim country which, on principle, should prove a good
market for it, given the national commitment to religious tolerance
expressed in Sukarno’s famous ideology of Pancasila.
Singapore, meanwhile, is the classic illustration that big
things come in small packages. It features the second-highest
GDP in the world per capita, trailing only Luxembourg, and
its economy is consistently ranked as among the most open,
least corrupt, and most business-friendly on the planet.
Increasingly, Singapore’s long-term economic strategy is
premised on ever-closer ties with China, symbolized by
the 2021 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership,
which Singapore was the first nation to ratify. When Francis
meets Singapore’s leadership, he’ll also be opening another
backchannel avenue of communication with China, at a
time when relations between Rome and Beijing appear to be
lumbering toward the Vatican’s long-sought goal of normalization.
Pastoral imperatives, meanwhile, loom largest in the middle
portion of the trip, which will
take Francis to East Timor and
Papua New Guinea.
Officially speaking, a whopping
97% of East Timor’s small
population of 1.34 million is
Catholic, and Francis faces the
challenge of reassuring them that
his campaign to make nice with
their former masters in Jakarta
won’t come at their expense.
He’ll also confront the unfinished
business of the sexual
abuse crisis, especially regarding
Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the
Nobel Prize winner who’s still a
national hero for helping to lead
the country’s independence, but
who was also sanctioned by the
Vatican in 2020 over allegations
of abusing minor boys in the
1980s. It remains unclear if a
canonical investigation of Belo is
still underway, and whether further
penalties envisioned by the
Church’s new anti-abuse norms
might be imposed.
In the eyes of critics, such a
lack of clarity stands at odds with
the pope’s repeated pledges of
transparency.
The stop in Papua New Guinea
offers the pope a chance to rekindle his dreams as a young
Jesuit of serving as a missionary himself, and to give a shot
in the arm to Catholic missionary efforts in far-flung locales
all over the world. It also affords him a platform to deepen
his ongoing reflections on the checkered history of relations
between Christian evangelism and Western colonialism, a
past he has been laboring to overcome.
Only time will tell, of course, to what extent Francis succeeds
in rising to the challenges such a grueling trip presents.
The mere fact he’s taking a shot, however, would seem to
suggest that the “Biden moment” of this papacy, the time
when it becomes inescapably clear the leader simply can’t go
on, isn’t quite upon us yet.
John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux.
September 6, 2024 • ANGELUS • 23