Catholic-Majority Province Hoping for Papal Visit in 2014

Jakarta Globe, Yoseph Kellen, November 26, 2013

Pope Francis has been asked to pay a visit
 to Indonesia next year by the governor of East
Nusa Tenggara. (EPA Photo/Claudio Peri)

Kupang. The governor of the mainly Christian province of East Nusa Tenggara on Monday announced a plan to invite Pope Francis to visit the region.

“On behalf of our province, I have invited Pope Francis to visit and I have conveyed the request to Cardinal Stanislaw, asking him to relay the message to the pontiff, and we will also send an official written invitation,” Governor Frans Lebu Raya said in Kupang, the provincial capital.

He was referring to Stanislaw Rylko, a Polish cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who currently serves as president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

“We hope we can bring the pope here next year,” Rylko said.

Rylko is currently in Kupang on a visit where he was scheduled to officiate at the Oebelo pilgrimage site.

If Pope Francis agrees to visit the province, commonly known by its Indonesian initials NTT, he will be the third pontiff to visit in the last 50 years.

Pope Paul VI visited the island of Flores in NTT in 1967 and he was followed by Pope John Paul II who visited Maumere district in 1989.

During his visit to NTT, Rylko cautioned people not to misuse the pilgrimage site.

“If you commit indecent conduct you will be condemned for generations,’ he said. He added that the site was not only built for Catholics, but for anyone to bring their family and relatives to pray.

Thousands of Catholics attended the ceremony at the Oebelo pilgrimage site. The site features a chapel named Santo Yohannes Paulus II after the region’s last papal visitor.

Rylko was welcomed with an official ceremony conducted by province officials.

Pope Francis himself is the first non-European Pope elected in 1,300 years, and inherits from his German predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, a church rocked by sex-abuse scandals amid a waning profile in an increasingly secular West.

His biggest challenge is to restore the reputation of the millennia-old institution and attract believers to a faith outstripped by Islam in terms of global numbers.

Additional reporting from Reuters