East Timor bishops prepare for first-ever Ad Limina visit

(Vatican Radio) The bishops of East Timor are preparing for their first-ever Ad Limina visit to Rome and for their first meeting with Pope Francis, set to begin on Monday. The Democratic Republic of East Timor, which gained independence from Indonesia 14 years ago, has the second-largest Catholic population in Asia.

Bishop Basilio Do Nascimento of Bacau and president of the East Timorese episcopal conference told Vatican Radio that he and his brother-bishops plan to discuss the current challenges in East Timor.

“The main problem for us is the formation (of the faithful),” he said. In an Italian-language interview the bishop said while the majority of Timorese were baptized during the 24-year war for independence, there was little time and resources for formation in the faith. The Timorese Church is also in need of resources for priestly formation.

However, the bishop said, the Church plays an important role in both formal and popular education. “Democracy, for example, is a new thing for East Timor,” he said. “We’ve gone from a traditional system to a modern system that the population needs to learn about and I believe that the role of the Church today is to educate for democracy.”

“The Timorese Church still has a great influence in our society (after independence),” he said in English, “but we are now facing a new reality, so we are trying to find the way to prepare our people to live in this new situation.”

During their visit to Rome, the bishops also intend to invite the Pope to visit East Timor in 2015, which mark 500 years of evangelization in the country. “Both the bishops and the Government of East Timor, all of us, would like to extend the invitation to the Pope to come and celebrate with us next year,” he said.

Bishop Do Nascimento said he would employ the Pope’s own words to describe East Timor as a country in the “periphery”, both in terms of development and geography in that it is at “the end of the world”.

The population of East Timor is nearly 1.8 million. The two official languages are Portuguese and Tetum. More than 40 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Listen to Bishop Basilio Do Nascimento in English:

Interview by Rafael Belincanta; report by Laura Ieraci