The 12-day marathon trip through Asia and the South Pacific, fully packed with daily schedules, was certainly ambitious, considering all concerns about the 87-year-old Catholic leader’s immobility issues and deteriorating health. Just the same, Pope Francis embarked on the 45th and longest overseas trip of his papacy, which comprised Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore.
He, being Christ’s Vicar on Earth, brought God’s loving presence to the margins of the world, in the literal and spiritual sense. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is literally at “the edge of the world,” while Indonesia and Singapore are spiritually on the periphery.
When the Jesuit pontiff presided over an open-air Sunday Mass for 35,000 people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), he told them: “Brothers and sisters, you who live on this large island in the Pacific Ocean may sometimes have thought of yourselves as a faraway and distant land, situated at the edge of the world.”
THE LAST FRONTIER
In many research-based studies, PNG is known as “the last frontier” of the world, comprising about 600 main islands, 600 tribes, and more than 600 languages. In the tiny Southeast Asian nation of East Timor, one of the world’s most Catholic countries, almost half the population, about 600,000, turned out for an open-air Mass.
The last stop was Singapore, where only one-third of the 20% of the population is Catholic, and 20% of its citizens profess to have no religion, atheism, or agnostic–hence, in the periphery in the spiritual sense. “Today,” the Holy Father assured them, “the Lord wants to draw near to you, to break down distances.”
From day one of this Spirit-inspired pilgrimage to the “edge of the Earth,” every event was a picture of a sea of enthusiastic people carrying yellow and white umbrellas, the colors of the Vatican. At the same time, groups performed a traditional and cultural dance for the Pope. Every encounter was packed with cheering crowds, from elderly believers to people with disabilities to babies in strollers, hoping to catch a glimpse of His Holiness.
Many friends did ask: Why travel so far from Rome and so extensively? Why choose a grueling trip, exhausting and backbreaking for any healthy person, let alone for a nearly 88-year-old man who is breathing with one healthy lung and therefore vulnerable to respiratory problems, who has had three major surgeries since he was elected in 2013, and now suffers from a debilitating nerve pain called sciatica and a knee ailment that impairs mobility?
Every day is packed with meetings with various groups and engagements with excited people. His strength comes from the Lord. Fr. Anthony Chantry, the UK director of the Pope’s mission charity and recently appointed to the Vatican Dicastery for Evangelization, said that the Pope is “driven by his absolute passion for the mission.”
ACT OF HUMILITY
Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, the pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, explains that the long trip is “an act of humility” before God and “a sign of his paternal closeness to what he calls ‘existential peripheries.’”
Our Holy Father makes his longest journey to visit the four Asia-Pacific nations because of the following three reasons, to wit:
- He is the Pope of synodality. This trip is a realization of a vision, a fulfillment of his dream of synodality, of inclusiveness, of listening to diverse people, and of “walking together” with them. In this grueling journey, Pope Francis fulfills his dream of reaching out to the world’s most remote “existential peripheries” and of embracing the non-Christian people.
- This trip proves that he walks his talk. He always talks about the mission of every baptized Christian, a mission that comes from the mission of Christ. Well, he is a doer and sets an example. Witnessing emanates from a soul filled with God–through divine indwelling–and his witnessing is better than preaching.
- He is the embodiment of Fratelli Tutti, “brothers and sisters all.” Yes, the mission is the very nature of the Church and this mission includes everyone, everyone, everyone! It was a historic moment that he was warmly welcomed by Catholics and non-Catholics in the largest Muslim nation on the planet, Indonesia–and embraced and kissed by its Grand Imam.
On this pilgrimage, he burns like a candle to give light to others. Jesus Christ is lumen gentium and so is His Vicar on Earth.
Papa Francesco is the Pope of Synodality who travels across oceans and continents, overly exhausted, worn out, and melting like a Paschal candle at the end of the Easter Season, and who, with the fragrance of holiness, gives a living testimony to the existence of YHWH God, One Father of all!
José Mario Bautista Maximiano was a former visiting professor at the University of Papua New Guinea and lead convenor of the Love Our Pope Movement International. He is also the author of the three-volume work on Church Reforms (Claretian Publication, 2023, 2024, 2025).
