According to a study by the Pew Research Center in Washington, Indonesia is the “most religious” country in the world. 98 percent of its 280 million inhabitants attribute “great importance” to religion in their lives, and 95 percent pray at least once a day.
It would seem to be fertile ground, therefore, for an evangelizing expansion of the Church.
Yet as soon as he landed there, on the first and main stop on the journey he is making, Pope Francis immediately raised the warning that for him is indispensable: “Never proselytism!”
The warning was not written in the speech that the pope was reading on September 4 to the Indonesian authorities at the presidential palace in Jakarta. But the first spontaneous addition that he made to his first speech of the trip was precisely this.
Francis has spoken out against proselytism dozens and dozens of times over the years. It is a mantra of his preaching. To validate it, he loves to quote an expression of Benedict XVI from 2007 (“The Church does not conduct proselytism, but rather develops by attraction”) and a document of Paul VI from 1975, the apostolic exhortation “Evangelii nuntiandi,” in which he assigns a “primordial importance” to silent witness.
Without ever taking into account, however, that Paul VI continued as follows, immediately afterward:
“Nevertheless this always remains insufficient, because even the finest witness will prove ineffective in the long run if it is not explained, justified — what Peter called always having ‘your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you all have’ — and made explicit by a clear and unequivocal proclamation of the Lord Jesus. The Good News proclaimed by the witness of life sooner or later has to be proclaimed by the word of life. There is no true evangelization if the name, the teaching, the life, the promises, the kingdom and the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God are not proclaimed.”
But evidently, for Jorge Mario Bergoglio the disease that deforms the Church today is that of a missionary spirit driven to excess, forced, superficial, measured by the number of new adherents.
While if there is one uncontestable reality in the Church of the last half century, it is not the excess but the collapse of the missionary drive.
With rare exceptions, one of which is none other than Indonesia. One witness to this is the Verbite missionary Paulus Busi Kleden, for a few days now the new bishop of Ende, on the island of Flores, where Catholics are 80 percent of the population, while in the whole of Indonesia they are 3.5 percent. He said in an interview with “Asia News” on the eve of the pope’s trip:
“We can be proud as Indonesian Catholics that we have become a missionary sending country; for decades we were only a receiving country. From the SVD, there are more than 500 Indonesian missionaries working in 50 countries. Indonesian missionaries are characterised by their simplicity and readiness to work in remote places. Their experience of living together with other religions, especially with Muslims, is helpful for other local Churches.”
Another country in which missionary activity is flourishing is Papua New Guinea, the second stop on the papal trip. On Sunday September 8, in the afternoon, Francis took a five-hour trip on a military plane to and from Vanimo, a remote town on the northern coast between the jungle and the Pacific, to meet with a small community of Argentine missionaries from the Institute of the Incarnate Word.
A while ago one of these was visiting Rome and asked the pope to come visit him. Francis said yes, and now he has kept his promise. A few days before the meeting, Father Alejandro Diaz told “Vatican News” of what he calls a “heavenly adventure, an enormous gift from God”:
“It is a Church that is being born; we are sowing and are already seeing the fruits: many baptisms are being done, attendance at the Eucharistic liturgies is plentiful, especially by young people and children. Normally the visit to the villages takes place on the weekend: we go to two or three villages, traveling along muddy roads, with all kinds of obstacles. Sometimes we arrive late in the evening, but the people are waiting for us. We hear confessions, we celebrate Mass. The people come out of the village, cheering at seeing us arrive. They are so thirsty for God that it edifies our souls”.
Then there are the catechists: “They are the people who support the faith of the villages. They are well formed in the faith; on Sundays they distribute communion; they are the priest’s ‘right hand’.” And then again, “there is the birth of a good number of local vocations,” new future missionaries.
It remains an enigma how Francis should continue to sound the alarm against proselytism when the rare missionary expansions taking place in the Church today — almost everywhere not on the rise but in decline — are of this nature.
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Another key moment of Pope Francis’s trip was his visit to the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, where he signed a joint declaration with the Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar.
The declaration follows the “Document on Human Fraternity” signed in 2019 in Abu Dhabi by the pope and the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb. But in the years that followed, conflicts broke out in the world that posed serious difficulties for interreligious dialogue and a common path to peace. One need only think of the words of complete support for the terrorists of Hamas that Al-Tayyeb signed a few hours after the terrible massacre of defenseless citizens of Israel that they carried out on October 7, 2023.
The embrace between the pope and the grand imam of Jakarta indeed marked an important change of course. All the more significant because Indonesia is the country with the largest number of Muslims in the world.
It is true that there are regions, particularly in the north of the island of Sumatra, where “shari’a” law is in force and religious freedom is under threat, nor has there been a lack of explosions of violence and attacks on churches, but the major Islamic organizations in Indonesia are decidedly strangers to fundamentalism and extremism.
There was a stir over the news, in mid-July and in the thick of the war in Gaza, of a visit to Israel, complete with an official photo taken with Israeli head of state Isaac Herzog, by five representatives of Nahdlatul Ulama, the most important Muslim organization in Indonesia.
The controversy that erupted over this visit led the president of Nahdlatul Ulama, Yahya Cholil Staquf, to distance himself from it, declaring it “inappropriate.” But Staquf himself recalled that he too had made a trip to Israel in 2018, meeting on that occasion with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a “peaceful” climate and with the prior consent of Indonesian Muslim authorities.
Not to mention the good relations maintained with Israel by the Muslim intellectual and spiritual leader Abdurrahman Wahid (1940–2009), a past democratic opponent of Suharto who succeeded him as president of Indonesia between 1999 and 2001. Abdurrahman Wahid was also head of Nahdlatul Ulama and went to Israel in 1994. And in 2007 he organized an international conference on the Holocaust in Bali, with the participation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, in response to a conference held the year before in Tehran in support of denialist theses.
“Bhinneka tunggal ika,” united in diversity (literally: “many, but one”), is the national motto of Indonesia, understandably very dear to the vision of Pope Francis, as are the blessing of almighty God invoked in the preamble of the constitution, the five unifying principles of “Pancasila,” the official philosophy of the state, and the symbolic “tunnel of friendship” that links the Istiqlal Mosque with the nearby Catholic Cathedral of Jakarta.
Because this is the common ground on which Francis wants to advance the journey of religions and of humanity as a whole.
As proven by another of the most significant moments of this trip of his.
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With a preliminary note. Professor Giovanni Maria Vian, a scholar of early Christian literature and former director of “L’Osservatore Romano,” has called the agenda of papal trips “a formula that has become repetitive,” “including the press conferences on the way back that end up overshadowing the trips themselves in the media.”
But with Francis there is more. To the final press conference he added on this trip three closed-door conversations with Jesuits from three different regions: conversations that are to be transcribed and published in “La Civiltà Cattolica.” And then there is the emphasis given to moments of the trip featuring people or groups he favors.
This was the case, in Indonesia, with the meeting with the movement “Scholas occurrentes,” at its new headquarters in central Jakarta, the first in Southeast Asia.
Bergoglio founded this movement in Argentina when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, and today it is a network of half a million schools on the five continents, elevated in 2015 to a pious foundation of pontifical right with headquarters in Vatican City.
Of the “pious,” however, it has little or nothing. In the numerous speeches that Francis has addressed to the “Scholas,” the silence on the Christian God, on Jesus and the Gospel, is almost sepulchral. The dominant formula is “new humanism,” with its accompaniments of “common home,” “universal solidarity,” “fraternity,” “convergence,” “welcome.” The religions are also lumped together and neutralized in an indistinct dialogue. Those invited to the events are stars of entertainment and sports, from George Clooney to Lionel Messi.
All this is represented well by the name Francis gave to a new university he created in 2023 and entrusted to “Scholas occurrentes”: “Universidad del sentido,” university of meaning, in which “what is taught is not a thing but life itself.”
In Jakarta, to symbolize this sense of brotherhood, the students had set up a “polyhedron of the heart,” assembling hundreds of personal objects brought by each one, to which the pope also added his own: a reproduction of the protagonist of the Argentine comic strip Mafalda (in the photo).
Of course, it is not surprising that a pope like Jorge Mario Bergoglio should have so near to heart the education and formation of the new generations, he who is part of the Society of Jesus, for centuries a great educator of the ruling classes.
But what is striking is the absence, in this ambitious educational project of his, of anything specifically Christian.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
