Inside the Pope’s Visit to Indonesia

Pope Francis began his 11-day tour of four island nations across Southeast Asia and Oceania on Tuesday, an ambitious endeavor that will bring him to faraway corners of the Roman Catholic world.

His first stop was Indonesia, a country made up of thousands of islands with the largest Muslim population in the world, as well as millions of people following other religions. There, Pope Francis talked about interfaith dialogue and coexistence, praising Indonesia for nurturing harmony between its different ethnicities, languages and religions, which he compared to the country’s rich ecological biodiversity.

After Indonesia, the pope was set to travel to Papua New Guinea, a largely Christian Pacific island, East Timor and Singapore.