The Holy Father’s trip to Far East reflected both his mission and reluctance to slow down
When 87-year-old Pope Francis boarded ITA Airways flight AZ4001 – that, by the way, is always the designation for a pope’s outbound flight – to travel to Asia and Oceania on 2 September, he became the oldest pontiff ever to venture outside Rome, affording him yet another chance to demonstrate that rumours of his impending demise The post The Holy Father’s trip to Far East reflected both his mission and reluctance to slow down appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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When 87-year-old Pope Francis boarded ITA Airways flight AZ4001 – that, by the way, is always the designation for a pope’s outbound flight – to travel to Asia and Oceania on 2 September, he became the oldest pontiff ever to venture outside Rome, affording him yet another chance to demonstrate that rumours of his impending demise have been greatly exaggerated.
As one papal intimate put it recently after spending time with the Pope at his residence in the Casa Santa Marta, “This pope has absolutely no intention of dying anytime soon”.
Francis visited Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea and Singapore in a 12-day outing that was not only the longest journey of his papacy, but in some ways perhaps the most adventurous. Each country captured a compelling, but also controversial, aspect of the Francis papacy.
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation, the the Pope’s list there casting a spotlight not only on Francis’s inter-faith approach but also on his broader geo-political agenda of reorientating the Vatican away from the West and towards the developing world.
East Timor, an overwhelmingly Catholic country, captured the lingering tensions regarding Francis’s management of the clerical abuse crisis – especially the question of how to enforce accountability in a culture in which some abusers are also regarded as national icons.
Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s most remote destinations, expressed the passion for the peripheries of history’s first pope from the global south, with all its unknown and essentially unpredictable consequences, including for the choice of Francis’s successor.
Finally, Singapore, one of Asia’s economic powerhouses with a reputation for efficiency and legality in financial oversight, invited reflection on the financial reform efforts of another of the world’s smallest states – ie, the Vatican under Francis.
The 12-day journey signified a remarkable return to form for a pope who, not so long ago, was himself hinting that such outings might no longer be possible. Two years ago, on the way back to Rome from a summer trip to Canada, Francis suggested that arduous international expeditions might be a thing of the past.
“I don’t think I can continue with the same pace of the trips as before,” he told reporters. “I think that at my age and with this limitation, I have to spare myself a bit, to be able to serve the Church.”
That was then, however, and this is now.
By all accounts, Francis has learned to manage the physical limits imposed by his sciatica and arthritis, the digestive issues resulting from his intestinal surgeries, and the respiratory difficulties created by age and occasional bouts of cold and flu. Not only did he pull off his Asia and Oceania trip, but he then managed an outing to Belgium just two weeks after his return.
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While the Pope’s zeal for such typically forgotten places and peoples that he visited on his Far East trip reflects a commendable pastoral instinct, and also an understandable one for a Jesuit who once dreamed of being a missionary himself, it also has unsettling and potentially destabilising implications for Church governance, perhaps especially the next conclave when cardinals have to choose a successor.
The truth is that a strong share of the Princes of the Church named by Francis are ciphers, whose positions and vision for the Church are familiar only to themselves. They have precious little formation in Rome and the Vatican, and sometimes scant personal experience of the broader global Church.
How such prelates might vote in a conclave, and whose advice they’d be inclined to take, is anyone’s guess. The way in which Francis handles the on-the-job training of this coterie of surprise cardinals could be critical to the future.
Finally, as signified by the trip to Singapore, there is the mixed bag of the Pope’s reform campaign to close an era of scandal in the Vatican’s finances.
The much-ballyhooed “trial of the century” at the Vatican, which resulted in convictions of nine defendants, including Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, for various financial crimes, has not only drawn strong criticism from jurists for alleged defects in due process and criminal procedure, but has also been seen by critics as an exercise in scapegoating intended to shield higher-ups, potentially including the Pope himself, from blame.
Nevertheless, the Asia and Oceania outing will likely be remembered not only as a mark of Pope Francis’s resilience, but also of his resolve.
This article, which has been edited for online, appears in full in the September 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.
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