Pope of the peripheries
By Derwin Pereira
It lies to the credit of Asia and Oceania that Pope Francis decided to make it the object of his longest foreign tour yet. The 87-year-old Pontiff’s 12-day tour of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Singapore, his 45th Apostolic Journey abroad, covered the economic topography of the region, stretching from remote jungles to towering skyscrapers. The head of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics naturally reached out to Catholics – I am one of them – on his visit but his message of inclusive tolerance, peace and love was for everyone.
Numbers do not always matter: The reach of the papal presence does.
For example, Catholics account for 96 per cent of the population of Timor Leste, where the Pontiff addressed nearly half the population. More than 90 per cent of Papua New Guinea’s residents call themselves Christians, and about a quarter of Papua New Guineans are Catholic.
However, Indonesia’s eight million Catholics represent less than 3 per cent of the population, compared with the 87 per cent who are Muslim. In that secular nation, though, the Pope met leaders of Indonesia’s six official religion – Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism – at Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque, South-east Asia’s largest. He and Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar signed a declaration warning against using religion to stoke conflict.
Given that there are only 395,000 Catholics in Singapore’s population of about 5.9 million, the Republic can be considered a “numerical periphery” – a reference to the Pontiff’s reputation as the “Pope of the Peripheries”.
That reputation has seen the Argentine Francis, history’s first Latin American Pope, expand the geographical ambit of his calling beyond the traditional preserves of Europe and the Americas by visiting areas that might not have felt central to the universal agency of the Church.
In Papua New Guinea, the Pope visited remote Vanimo, on the north-western tip of the country, where there was no running water and little electricity. According to the National Catholic Reporter, the Pope heard of the challenges of ministering in an area where Catholics wait weeks or months to see a priest or receive the sacraments.
The Church hardly gets more peripheral than that. The Pope’s Vanimo experience must have confirmed him in the belief that he had manifested when elected Pontiff. He had said that the cardinals had chosen someone from the “ends of the Earth”. In Vanimo, he found perhaps the periphery of the peripheries.
Papal Message
His message during his Asia-Oceania trip was not peripheral, however. Social justice, a familiar papal theme, was the uniting motif of his pronouncements during his journey.
In Indonesia, he highlighted how a lack of commitment to social justice resulted in violence. In Papua New Guinea, whose natural resources have attracted large corporations, he emphasised the need for these companies to share their profits with citizens. The need for social justice is a raw wound in Timor Leste, where abuse and alcoholism deprive children and adolescents of the dignity of being young.
Singapore falls into an entirely different category of socio-economic development, but there is room for improvement even here. In the gentlest of ways, the Pope suggested that economic prosperity is not an end in itself, but an instrument for the greater good, that good consisting in making love the yardstick of human self-recognition, achievement and worth. Even as he commended Singapore for its inclusiveness and support for the vulnerable, he hoped for special attention to be paid to the poor, the elderly and to the protection of the dignity of migrant workers.
I find this emphasis on social justice to be a firm foundation of faith. Faith is often elevated to the pursuit of a metaphysical good which, as its intensity grows, develops into a near-mystical closeness to God. Of course that is true. But that is not all that is true.
To live in faith one must first live. The body is not the enemy of the soul but its vessel. If a human body is wracked by hunger and disease, if the mind is overcome by desperation and despair, the soul cannot possibly have an easy time moving beyond the contingent to the eternal. That is why to live at all is to live in society, in political communion with fellow-citizens of different genders, different ethnicities, different classes and various creeds (or none).
What makes society inhabitable is the capacity of different people to imagine the same end-goal: justice. Social justice is not an optional add-on to the quest for the hereafter: It is the very “here” in the hereafter. How can one prepare for the hereafter except in the here, and how can anyone prepare if he or she is immune to the suffering of fellow-citizens, suffering being the signature of the human condition? It is out of the material that the metaphysical must emerge.
Such teachings belong to all great religions. What the Pope did was to proclaim them from within Catholicism, the global reach of whose Church gives it immense power to bring about change within the flock and impress on followers of other faiths the need for common platforms and policies of ameliorative change.
What lent credibility to the Pope’s message was what I would call the charisma of his humility. The Pontiff is known for the unaffected simplicity with which he conducts the affairs of his office. His choice of an everyday car over the kind of exclusive limousine preferred by visiting dignitaries signified his rejection of pomp and glamour. The ease with which he conferred with the young, including in Singapore, revealed an ageing man of faith who was still young at heart. His ability to treat others as his equals, be they princes or paupers, creates a kind of charisma that can be born only out of humility.
So, the people’s Pope, the Pope of the peripheries came and went. What he left behind was the reaffirmed knowledge that the peripheries of the Earth are as pleasing to the Creator as its prosperous and powerful centre. Social justice gathers up the globe in seamless unity.
The writer is Founder and CEO of Pereira International, a Singapore-based political and strategic advisory consulting firm. An award-winning journalist and graduate alumnus of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, he is also a member of the Board of International Councillors at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. This article reflects the writer’s personal views.
