Pope Goes to East Timor, Where Scandal Shadows His Church’s Heroic Past

Banners of Pope Francis had been unfurled across Dili, the capital of East Timor, its streets scrubbed and its walls freshly painted. Hundreds of thousands of people were expected to try to catch a glimpse of the man, who arrived on Monday. But in some corners of the city, the excitement had turned into misery.

Joana Fraga Ximenes stared at rubble in the district of Bidau that had been her home and a street stall, from which she sold sundries. Earlier this year, she said, the authorities had given her three days to move because the pope was going to be driven down her street. Eventually, they sent bulldozers.

“Why do we have to hide the poverty?” Ms. Ximenes, 42, said over the weekend. “This is reality. The pope is not coming to see good things in Timor-Leste. The pope is here to see our real lives.”

Francis’s two-day visit, the third stop on his Asia-Pacific tour, is a momentous occasion for East Timor, or Timor-Leste as it is known in Portuguese, one of two official languages. Nearly all of the 1.3 million people here are Catholic. The church played an important part in East Timor’s struggle for independence, but that history has been stained by its clergy abuse scandal. One of the heroes of the independence cause, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, has been accused of sexually abusing children decades ago.

East Timor is one of the world’s youngest nations — it became a sovereign state in 2002, after decades of occupation by Indonesia — and one of its poorest. More than two-fifths of its people live in poverty, and a large majority depend on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods. This is why critics are sharply questioning the stagecraft involved in welcoming the pope.