{"id":324,"date":"2024-09-09T03:54:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-09T03:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=324"},"modified":"2025-09-28T01:22:19","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T01:22:19","slug":"pope-visits-indonesia-catholic-seminary-is-packed-priests-are-heading-overseas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=324","title":{"rendered":"Pope visits Indonesia; Catholic seminary is packed, priests are heading overseas."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the NY Times so there shouldn’t be a paywall. Only 3% of Indonesia, which is the 4th most populous country in the world – is Catholic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The men are training to become Catholic priests. While probably only a fraction of them will go on to be ordained, Indonesia \u2014 the world\u2019s largest Muslim-majority country \u2014 is producing so many priests now that many of them head overseas to serve the faithful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For centuries, this traffic flowed in the opposite direction, with Catholic missionaries from Europe heading to the islands of Indonesia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cwe will go to some island of Indonesia.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Those who enroll in Ledalero come with two years\u2019 experience as novices and are still under probation for admission into priesthood. They study philosophy for four years, followed by theology for two years, and serve about one to two years of pastoral duty before they are ordained. At any point, they can drop out and obtain a bachelor\u2019s degree from the Ledalero Catholic School of Philosophy, which is considered by many in Flores to be prestigious. Laypeople enroll in the school, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Catholicism first arrived in Flores in the 16th century, when the Portuguese, in search of spices, sailed east, bringing traders and missionaries. Roughly 200 years later, the Dutch colonized large parts of the archipelago, which came to be known as the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch were Protestants and forbade Catholicism, but adopted a hands-off policy in places like Flores because of its distance from the main island of Java.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The priests from Ledalero bring with them a sense of mission to fight injustice and a broad understanding of religious tolerance. This includes discussing a sinister period in Indonesian history: the state-sponsored slaughter in the 1960s of an estimated half million people or more under the guise of a Communist purge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Aurelio Morghan, 32, is one of the 48 seminarians at Ledalero scheduled to be ordained in October. He has at least 16 relatives who are priests or nuns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the NY Times so there shouldn’t be a paywall. Only 3% of Indonesia, which is the 4th most populous country in the world – is Catholic. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11221,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/11221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}