A man kneeling before the pontiff before his departure at the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Indonesia. — AP
POPE Francis left the island republic for Rome yesterday after a demanding trip across South-East Asia and Oceania in which he urged action on climate change, pressed for interfaith dialogue and reinforced the Catholic Church’s presence in a region where it is a small minority.
The Singapore Airlines flight carrying the Catholic pontiff and his entourage took off around 12.25pm local time, bound for touchdown in Rome in the evening after a 12-hour flight through six time zones.
Francis visited Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore over a span of 12 days.
The 87-year-old pontiff, who in recent years has suffered bouts of ill health, appeared in good form throughout the trip, maintaining a packed schedule and headlining more than 40 events.
Highlights of the journey included a trip to a township of some 12,000 people on the edge of the Papua New Guinean jungle, in which the pope brought hundreds of kilogrammes of items to help support the local population, including medicines, clothing and toys for children.
Francis also celebrated a Mass in Timor-Leste with a crowd of some 600,000 people, nearly half the country’s population of 1.3 million, in one of the largest ever turnouts as a proportion of a country’s population for a Mass during a papal visit.
Timor-Leste, which is 96% Catholic, was the only Catholic-majority country of the pope’s tour.
Blessed visit: Pope Francis arriving at the Holy Trinity Humanistic School in Baro, near Vanimo, in Papua New Guinea.-AP
Francis’s 12-day trip was the longest yet of his papacy and among the longest in papal history. Upon landing in Rome, Francis will have clocked nearly 33,000km.
The pope, who suffers from knee and back pain, used a wheelchair throughout the trip. He kept all his scheduled appointments.
In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, Francis issued a joint declaration with Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar calling for global climate action.
In Singapore, he urged the government in one of the world’s leading financial hubs to seek fair wages for the country’s million-plus lower-paid foreign workers.
Francis has prioritised trips to places never visited by a pope or where Catholics are a small minority.
He was only the second pope to visit three of the four countries on his itinerary.
In Papua New Guinea, Francis offered a small insight into how he thinks of the task of leading the 1.4-billion-member global Catholic Church and visiting Catholics around the world.
In a spontaneous comment to a group of young people, he made a usual request that they pray for him.
And then, emphasising his need for prayers, Francis added: “This job is not easy.” — Reuters
