Pope urges Indonesian Catholics to live out Gospel love, spread hope

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNS) — Even members of the most remote, smallest and poorest Christian communities are called to share the Gospel and to do so, first, by the way they live, Pope Francis told the Catholics of Indonesia.

With tens of thousands of people gathered in Jakarta’s Gelora Bung Karno Stadium Sept. 5 — and thousands more watching on screens from Madya Stadium, a smaller venue nearby — Pope Francis presided over his only public Mass in Indonesia. He was scheduled to fly to Papua New Guinea the next morning.

Seated together wearing the bright green, yellow, white, blue, red or black t-shirts designating the parish, diocese or Catholic organization they belong to, the crowd made the main stadium look like it was built with Lego bricks. The people arrived at the stadium hours early, visiting with each other, singing hymns and lively modern Christian songs and praying the rosary.

Pope Francis greets a child while riding the popemobile around the Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta, Indonesia, for Mass Sept. 5, 2023. (CNS photo/Lola Gomez)

Father Zepto Trifon Polii, from Barat on the Indonesian island of Papua, traveled to Jakarta for the Mass with seven of his parishioners — “we had no more tickets,” he said.

“Although we are little,” he said, “we dream (of playing) important roles not only in the church but in the community. And we have important roles in government and daily life” on the island.

Like many of the priests at the Mass, Father Polii was wearing a brightly colored, decorated shirt with a collar. The birds of paradise and the drums — tifa — printed on his shirt are religious symbols for his people, he said.

Before the Mass, Pope Francis drove around both stadiums in the popemobile.

In one sign of the official welcome granted to Pope Francis in the mostly Muslim nation, the Ministry of Communication and Information asked Indonesian television stations not to interrupt their broadcasts of the pope’s Mass with the Muslim call to prayer at sunset, but rather to run a reminder of the prayer time on a banner at the bottom of the screen.

In his homily, Pope Francis urged Indonesian Catholics “to sow seeds of love, confidently tread the path of dialogue, continue to show your goodness and kindness with your characteristic smile and be builders of unity and peace.”

“In this way,” he said, “you will spread the fragrance of hope around you.”

Pope Francis asked the crowd not to forget that “the first task of the disciple is not to clothe ourselves with an outwardly perfect religiosity, do extraordinary things or engage in grandiose undertakings. The first step, instead, is to know how to listen to the only word that saves, the word of Jesus.”

Jesus’ example and teaching, he said, “cannot remain as a fine abstract idea or stir up only a passing emotion.”

Instead, the pope said, “it asks us to change our gaze and allow our hearts to be transformed into the image of Christ’s heart. It calls us to cast courageously the nets of the Gospel into the sea of the world, running the risk of living the love that he first lived and in turn taught us to live.”

Putting out to sea, he said, also means to “break away from the stagnant shores of bad habits, fears and mediocrity and dare to live a new life.”