Once, Catholic Priests Came to Indonesia. Now, It Exports Them.

On an Indonesian island about 500 miles east of Bali, an open-air truck traversed up winding roads one recent Sunday. It was taking dozens of jovial men, some already in white robes, and their songbooks and guitars to the church on top of the hill.

The men are training to become Catholic priests. While probably only a fraction of them will go on to be ordained, Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim-majority country — is producing so many priests now that many of them head overseas to serve the faithful.

For centuries, this traffic flowed in the opposite direction, with Catholic missionaries from Europe heading to the islands of Indonesia.

The Roman Catholic Church knows how significant Indonesia and many countries in the Global South are to its future. Two years ago, Pope Francis declared that to find vocations “we will go to some island of Indonesia.” He did not specify the destination, but he almost certainly meant the island of Flores, where 70 percent of the roughly two million residents are Catholic.

This is where, on a remote hilltop called Ledalero, the St. Paul Major Seminary was established in 1937. This year, it expects to ordain nearly 50 priests of the Society of the Divine Word, a Catholic order that focuses on missionary work. Over the years, it has sent more than 500 of its graduates to different parts of the world, including the United States, Australia and Latin America.