Pope Francis will depart by plane from Rome for Indonesia on the afternoon of Sept. 2 for the 45th international journey of his papacy. Over the following 12 days, he will travel 44 hours by plane, cover 20,000 miles and visit four countries: Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore.
The pope will be accompanied on the longest journey of his pontificate by two Vatican cardinals: Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, and Luis Antonio Tagle, the pro-prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Evangelization.
His entourage will also include Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the chief of staff of the secretariat of state, and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the secretary for relations with states, the Vatican’s foreign minister, and the pope’s three private secretaries.
He will be escorted by a security detail from the Swiss Guard and Vatican Gendarmerie and his medical team, and will be accompanied by some 75 journalists, including America’s Vatican correspondent.
On his arrival at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on the morning of Sept. 3, Francis will be given an official welcome and then driven to the nunciature in the capital city where he will rest for the remainder of the day.
Francis, who is 87 and uses a wheelchair, will remain in Jakarta, a city of 11 million people on the northwest coast of Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, until departing for Papua New Guinea on Friday, Sept. 6.
The motto for the pope’s visit is “Faith, Fraternity, Compassion,” and during his stay, Francis is scheduled to give three talks and a homily encompassing these concepts. He begins his visit on the morning of Sept. 4 by traveling to the Istana Merdeka Presidential Palace, where he will be welcomed with an official ceremony before engaging in a private conversation with Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, 63, who is Muslim. It will be their first meeting.
Afterward, accompanied by the president, he will deliver his first major address when he greets an audience of 300 representatives of the Indonesian government, civil society and the diplomatic corps.
Later that morning, Francis will have a private Q&A session with some 100 of the more than 300 members of the Society of Jesus in Indonesia at the Vatican’s embassy.
In the afternoon, the first pope from the Global South will address the country’s bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated persons, seminarians and catechists at the neo-Gothic cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, designed by a Jesuit architect, Antonius Dijkmans, and opened in 1901.
He will conclude the day when he meets 200 young people of Scholas Occurrentes in the “Grha Pemuda” youth center. Scholas Occurrentes is an education movement, started in Buenos Aires when Francis was archbishop, that promotes a culture of encounter and peace.
On Sept. 5, he will begin the day with an important address to an interreligious gathering at the Istiqlal (Independence) Mosque. It is the largest mosque in Southeast Asia, with a capacity to hold 120,000 people; it was opened in February 1978 to commemorate the country’s independence. The mosque is connected to the nearby Catholic cathedral by an underground tunnel, “the tunnel of tolerance,” and on Fridays (the Muslim prayer day) and Sundays (for Mass), Catholics and Muslims share their respective parking lots. At the mosque, he will be welcomed by the grand imam, Nasaruddin Umar, who on the eve of his visit revealed that Francis will sign there a historic document on “humanitarian, tolerance, and environmental issues.”
After the visit to the mosque, Francis will go to the headquarters of the Bishops’ Conference of Indonesia for a meeting with beneficiaries of charitable organizations.
That evening, he will preside at Mass for 86,000 faithful from all the 37 dioceses of Indonesia in Gelora Bung Karno Stadium. The decision was made not to hold the Mass in an open public space for security reasons.
Indonesia, located in southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans, is the world’s largest archipelago, with over 17,000 islands. It has 400 ethnic groups that speak different languages, but the main language is Indonesian Bahasa. The country is an emerging economy with huge resources of oil, natural gas and precious tropical wood, as well as reserves of coal, nickel, bauxite, gold, tin and copper that attract foreign investment.
Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, with some 280 million people, and has the world’s largest Muslim population. Although 87 percent of its people are Muslim, mostly Sunni Muslim, Indonesia recognizes six main religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. More than 10 percent of the population is Christian, with 20 million Protestants and eight million Catholics.
In 1945, the nation’s founding fathers agreed that Indonesia would be neither a secular nor a theocratic state, and the preamble to the 1945 constitution affirms that “Pancasila” is the official state philosophy. Pancasila consists of five principles: 1) belief in the one and only God; 2) a just and civilized humanity; 3) the unity of Indonesia; 4) democracy, led by the wisdom of the representatives of the people; and 5) social justice for all Indonesian people.
Religion in Indonesia
Before the arrival of the major world religions, the inhabitants of Indonesia were followers of animism and dynamism. Hinduism came in the second century C.E. and Buddhism in the sixth century; these two religions shaped the culture and religiosity of Indonesia until the arrival of Islam in the 13th century.
While Nestorian Christians are said to have lived in Northern Sumatra in the seventh century, and centuries later Christians of the Syro-Chaldean rite arrived, Christianity was only brought in a fuller way in the 16th century by colonizers and their respective missionaries: Catholicism by the Portuguese and Protestantism by the Dutch.
The Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier worked in the Maluku Islands for a short time (1546 to 1547), but 100 years later, the Dutch East India Company expelled all Catholic missionaries. In 1859, however, Dutch Jesuits returned to Java and started the first Catholic parishes. By 1900, there were 50,000 Catholics in Indonesia.
In May 1940, Pope Pius XII appointed Albert Soegijapranata, a Jesuit, as apostolic vicar of Semarang in central Java, the first Indigenous priest in Indonesia to become a bishop.
On Aug. 17, 1945, two days after the initial announcement of the Japanese surrender in World War II, the nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared the independence of Indonesia. Many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, sided with these leaders, who wanted to implement the Pancasila ideology and build a religiously pluralistic society, as distinct from Islamic groups who wanted an Islamic state, as Georg Evers documents in his book The Churches in Asia.
The Catholic Church was active in the fight for independence, encouraged by Bishop Soegijapranata, and the Holy See opened its diplomatic mission in Jakarta at the level of “apostolic delegate” in 1947. Indonesia gained its independence from the Netherlands on Dec. 27, 1949, and became a republic in 1950.
The Holy See was one of the first European countries to recognize the independence of Indonesia, and official diplomatic relations between Indonesia and the Holy See were established on May 25, 1950. The country’s first president, Sukarno, made three official visits to the Vatican, meeting Pius XII in 1956, John XXIII in 1959 and Paul VI in 1964.
In 1959, President Sukarno changed the constitution, ending the multi-party system and giving the president special powers. In 1960, “the national front” was created in which the three most influential powers in the country—nationalism, religion and communism—were made to work together for the good of the nation. Catholics supported the president as a bulwark against communism.
In 1961, John XXIII erected the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Indonesia, which then had six archdioceses and 19 dioceses. In 1967, Paul VI created the first Indonesian cardinal, Justinus Daarmojuwono, the archbishop of Semarang, a convert to Catholicism from Islam.
On Sept. 30, 1965, the Communist Party attempted a coup d’etat, but the army crushed it. The Christian churches condemned the coup and welcomed the government’s action. Two years later, however, in March 1967, General Suharto overthrew the Sukarno government, took control of the country and engaged in massive repression.
Suharto was elected president in March 1968 and governed the country in an authoritarian manner until 1998. Mr. Evers writes that his “New Order” program demanded that every Indonesian declare adherence to one of the recognized religions. But since the state did not recognize traditional religion, most of its followers joined Islam because its religious customs and tenets were closest to their former beliefs.
At that time, too, the Christian churches also experienced unprecedented growth. In 1964, the number of Catholics in the country was 1.85 million; by 1980, it was over four million. In response, Cardinal Daarmojuwono proposed a three-part pastoral plan of action: achieve greater financial independence, give lay people more responsibility and foster Indigenous vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
In the years after the Second Vatican Council, the Indonesian bishops began to implement the council’s new orientations toward the liturgy and the social apostolate. In 1970, they published “Guidelines for Catholic Indonesians,” promoting interreligious dialogue and responsibility in social and political issues. In the 1970s, the Catholic Church ran many schools, three universities and 121 hospitals, but, Mr. Evers writes, “it was not strong when it came to defending human rights and social evils,” such as Suharto’s persecution of communists and the Indonesian military invasion of East Timor (now known as Timor-Leste) in December 1975 and subsequent repression. The Protestant churches also kept silent.
President Suharto first used the principles of Pancasila against the communists and in the 1980s to curb Islamic fundamentalists who wanted to make Indonesia a Muslim state. He later used them against any opposition, including, in the 1990s, against the Jesuit director of the Catholic Social Institute in Jakarta, accusing him of being a sympathizer of Marxism.
Between 1960 and 1990 the number of Catholics in Indonesia grew from 1.3 million to five million. There was a priest shortage, and in the 1980s the Indonesian bishops asked John Paul II during ad limina visits for permission to ordain qualified catechists as priests, but the pope refused.
Ecumenical dialogue
In the period from 1960 to 1990, Mr. Evers explains, Catholics, though less than 3 percent of the population, put great effort into ecumenical cooperation with the Protestants, who counted for 7 percent of the population. Their implementation of Vatican II’s teachings helped to change the relations between Protestants and Catholics and made it easier in the area of mixed marriages, cooperation in education and health care, Bible translation and ecumenical prayer services. Since 1973, the Catholic bishops’ conference and Protestant National Council of Churches have issued a common Christmas message and also stood together on critical national issues.
Christian-Muslim dialogue
People in Indonesia long lived together in peace and harmony despite ethnic, cultural and religious plurality. And for many decades after independence, Christians and Muslims lived together in amicable relations.
During Suharto’s rule (1967-1998), tensions between the different ethnic groups, between Christians and Muslims and between rich and poor were kept hidden due to government regulations. Nevertheless, during the 1970s, tensions between Christians and Muslims grew because of the aggressive missionary methods of some Christian sects, including Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Since 1972, in reaction to growing tensions between religions, the government’s Department for Religions has organized regular meetings between all the recognized religions. The Catholic bishops’ conference set up a commission for interreligious dialogue, and in 1995, the Society for Interreligious Dialogue was founded by the Catholic and Protestant churches, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucianists and members of the Brahma Kumaris spiritual movement.
The Asian economic crisis that started in Thailand in 1997 hit foreign investors in Indonesia and hastened the end of Suharto’s corrupt regime. It also marked the beginning of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, and starting in the early 1990s the style of Islam propagated by Saudi Arabia attempted to “purge” Indonesian Islam from deviations and to introduce its version of orthodox Islam in its place.
In the post-Suharto era, radical conservative Islamic groups, drawing on ideas from the Middle East, sought to impose Shariah as a solution to Indonesia’s multiple crises.
But the Muslim mainstream in Indonesia, encompassing about 80 percent of the Muslim population, is moderate and inclusive and considers the radical conservative groups as counterproductive and even dangerous for the future of Indonesia. Most moderate Muslims belong to the country’s two biggest Islamic Organizations: Nahdlatul Ulama (known as N.U., meaning “Awakening of the Ulama”), which was founded in 1926 and represents traditionalist orthodox Sunni Islam; and Muhammadiyah (followers of Muhammad), which was founded in 1912 to eliminate syncretism, enhance people’s moral responsibility and purify the faith.
Although these two organizations have different visions on several issues, their leaders publicly proclaim interreligious dialogue, condemn injustice in society and seek to incorporate moderate Islam in Indonesia by being open to plurality, peace and interfaith harmony, while rejecting any kind of radicalism and terrorism. The groups have stated that the introduction of Shariah in the Indonesian constitution is not compatible with socio-cultural conditions of Indonesia. Francis is expected to meet the current leaders of these two major Muslim organizations during his visit to the mosque.
In 1999, Abdurrahman Wahid, the leader of N.U. was elected president of Indonesia; he was respected for his integrity and his gift as a mediator between the religious groups. He visited John Paul II in the Vatican in the spring of 2000 and said the conflict in the country was “not a battle between Christians and Muslims” but between individuals and groups, some linked to Suharto’s bloc. During the Christmas season of 2000, however, the terrorist groups Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah orchestrated a series of bombings of churches in Jakarta. Christian and Muslim religious leaders successfully called for peace, and Christians did not attack Muslims during the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Fitr soon after Christmas.
In September 2005, Thomas Michel, S.J., a top expert on Islam, a former Vatican official and a member of the Indonesian province of the Jesuits, told a Rome seminar on cooperation on harmony and peacebuilding in Indonesia and Southeast Asia that “[p]erhaps the biggest winner in the events of the democratization movement that shook Indonesia in 1998 and the following years was civil society. After more than 30 years of strict dictatorial control, Indonesian society freed itself to pursue its own goals and to shape the nation in the direction of people’s desires.”
He recalled, however, that this new freedom also resulted “in communal violence that broke out in several regions of the country” due to many factors, with “economic failure and high unemployment being the main ones.” Between 1998 and 2001, he said, “Indonesia saw outbreaks of communal violence in various parts of the country” and “sometimes the parties broke down along ethnic or linguistic lines, and elsewhere religion was the factor which identified the sides to the conflict.”
He emphasized, however, that “Indonesians themselves were horrified by the societal tensions which threatened the long tradition of living in peace together (‘convivenza’) that had characterized the country. As a consequence, one of the most prominent phenomena of civil society that has grown up in Indonesia since 1998 is the large number of peace-making and peace-building organizations.”
Since those years, Islamic fundamentalism has grown and counts now for an estimated four million Muslims in the western part of the country. Markus Solo, S.V.D., the only Indonesian working in the Vatican, told America: “Indonesia is increasingly facing religious intolerance and religiously motivated hatred, particularly during such political events as elections. Religion is often used then to incite hatred, intolerance and polarization. Religions are also often instrumentalized and politicized for personal purposes or to gain power and victory.” Father Solo emphasized the vital importance of promoting interreligious dialogue in Indonesia today and the importance of Pope Francis’ visit in those efforts.
The Indonesian government, for its part, has become increasingly aware of the importance of interreligious dialogue and interreligious cooperation. The ministries of religious, internal and external affairs have declared interfaith dialogue as a priority. The Indonesian embassy to the Holy See has collaborated with the Vatican dicastery for interreligious dialogue for many years.
Pope Francis said in his first meeting with the leaders of the different religions on March 20, 2013, one week after his election as pope, “The Catholic Church is aware of the importance of the promotion of friendship and respect between men and women of different religious traditions.” That has been his constant message ever since, and it is one that he is bringing to Indonesia on his visit as he seeks to encourage dialogue and harmony between Christians and Muslims.
Correction, Sept. 1, 2024: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, converted from Christianity to Islam.
