Watch: Pope Francis continues controversial Southeast Asia tour with visit to East Timor’s capital
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Your support makes all the difference.Watch as Pope Francis visits East Timor’s capital Dili on Monday 9 September, where he will attend a welcome ceremony, meet president José Ramos-Horta and other government officials, and members of the civil society and the diplomatic corps.
The 87-year-old pontiff is on an ambitious 12-day visit to four countries across Southeast Asia and Oceania, his longest overseas journey yet.
He came to East Timor from Papua New Guinea, where on Sunday he delivered medical supplies to a small town located at the edge of a vast jungle, in one of the most remote areas of the world.
Francis landed in Dili, the Timorese capital, on Monday afternoon.
He was met at the airport by the president and a group of school children dressed in traditional outfits, who offered him flowers and a tais, a woven ceremonial scarf.
East Timor, a half-island nation north of Australia, gained independence from Indonesia in 2002, after a brutal, decades-long occupation.
Francis is the second pope to visit, following John Paul II, who came in 1989, in a trip that gave the country's independence movement an historic boost.
The country is likely the most Catholic in the world, with the Vatican saying some 96 per cent of Timorese are adherents to the faith.
Although Timorese have remained overwhelmingly Catholic, the church in the country has been affected recently by abuse scandals.
In 2022, the Vatican confirmed it had sanctioned Timorese Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo following allegations he sexually abused boys in Timor in the 1990s.
Belo, who shared the 1996 Nobel peace prize with Ramos-Horta for their independence efforts, lives in Portugal.
A year earlier, a defrocked American priest, Richard Daschbach, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for sexually abusing girls under his care in Timor.
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