Pope urged to address child sex abuse scandal during East Timor visit

She said if he wasn’t there, “I don’t think it would be good” because it would confirm that he was sanctioned by the Vatican.

Vegetable merchant Alfredo Ximenes said the accusations and the sanctions acknowledged by the Vatican were just rumors and he hoped Bello would come to greet the pope and refute the charges in person.

“Our political leaders should meet with him immediately to resolve this issue and convince him to return home because after all he has made a great contribution to the country’s independence,” Ximenes said.

East Timorese officials declined to answer questions about Bello’s case but did not try to avoid mentioning him. A large billboard in Dili features a mural honoring Bello and three others as national heroes and a welcome to Pope Francis, who will begin a visit to East Timor on Sept. 9.

Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, shortly after Portugal abandoned its colony of East Timor. At the time, only about 20% of the population was Catholic.

Today, about 98% of the country’s 1.3 million people are Catholic, making it the most Catholic country in the world outside the Vatican.

An Indonesian law requiring people to choose a religion, combined with the church’s opposition to military occupation and support for the resistance movement, which left as many as 200,000 people dead during years of bloody fighting, have contributed to the influx of new believers.

Bello won the Nobel Peace Prize for his courageous work in drawing international attention to human rights violations during the Indonesian conflict, while Daschbach was widely praised for his role in helping save lives during the struggle for independence.

loading

Anne Barrett Doyle of the online resource Episcopal Accountability said their heroic status and social factors in Asia, where culture tends to give a lot of power to adults and authority figures, help explain why these men remain revered while in other parts of the world such cases are met with outrage.

“Bishops are very powerful, and they are particularly powerful in developing countries where the church is dominant,” Barrett Doyle said.

“But none of the cases we have studied has shown such a huge power gap as that between Bello and the victim. When a child is raped in a devoutly Catholic country and the perpetrator is not only a bishop but also a legendary national hero, there is little hope that justice will be served.”

In 2018, rumors swirled about Pastor Daschbach, who admitted in a letter to church authorities that he had abused young girls between at least 1991 and 2012.

“It was impossible for me to even remember many of the faces, let alone the names,” he wrote.

The 87-year-old was stripped of his priesthood by the Vatican and criminally punished He was charged in East Timor, convicted in 2021 and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence.

Despite Daschbach’s confession and victims’ court testimonies detailing abuses, Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, an independence hero, visited Daschbach in prison, hand-fed him cake and wine on his birthday, and said the former priest’s early release was his priority.

For his part, Bello abruptly resigned as leader of the East Timorese Church in 2002, citing health reasons and stress, six years after he and current East Timorese President José Ramos-Horta shared the Nobel Prize.

Soon after his retirement, Bello, now 76, was sent by the Vatican and his Salesian order to serve as a missionary in Mozambique, another former Portuguese colony.

There, he said, he “taught the teachings to children and gave retreats to young people.” Today, he lives in Portugal.

There is suspicion that Bello, like others before him, was allowed to quietly retire rather than face any reckoning because of the damage it would cause to the church’s reputation.

Pope Francis said this was the case in a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, reasoning that this was how such issues had been handled in the past.

“This is a very old thing, and people were not aware of it at the time,” Francis said. “When the East Timorese bishop was exposed, I said, ‘Yes, let this be public.’ … I will not cover it up. But these decisions were made 25 years ago, and people were not aware of it at the time.”

Lingsma said she first heard of the allegations against Bello in 2002, the year East Timor officially gained independence after ending Indonesian occupation in 1999. She said it was not until two decades later that she was able to investigate the case and gather enough evidence to publish her report on Bello.

Her story has attracted international attention and the Vatican has acknowledged the case, but in East Timor she has been met with mostly skepticism and negative reactions. Her 2019 reporting on Daschbach’s case eventually led authorities to bring charges against him, but it also did not spark the outrage she had expected.

“Their response was silence,” she recalled.

East Timorese historian Luciano Valentim da Consejo said that during the struggle for independence, priests, nuns and missionaries took great risks to help people, like “parents trying to save their children,” helping to forge the deep ties between the Church and the people today.

The role of the church is even written into the preamble of the young nation’s constitution, which states that the Catholic Church “is always able to bear with dignity the suffering of all people, to stand by them and to defend their most fundamental rights.”

Because many people remember the important role the church played during those dark days, it has created an atmosphere where victims of abuse find it difficult to speak out for fear of being labeled anti-church, while people like Bello and Daschbach continue to receive support from all sectors of society.

“Pedophilia and sexual violence are common enemies in East Timor and we should not confuse them with the struggle for independence,” said Valentim da Costa Pinto, executive director of the East Timor NGO Forum, an umbrella group for some 270 nongovernmental organizations.

Father Luderio Martins da Silva, rector of the Dili diocese, said today that the cases of Bello and Daschbach fall within the jurisdiction of the Vatican and that most people believe the abuse scandal is a thing of the past.

“We don’t hear many people asking about Bishop Bello because he left the country 20 years ago,” Silva said.

However, Linsma said she knew of “four or five” other priests who had been charged, two of whom had died, and “if I knew about the charges, I would be the last person to know.”

“It also shows that the whole reporting system is simply not working,” she said.

Historian Conseques Shaw said he did not know enough about Dasbach and Bello’s cases to comment, but he was familiar with the role they played in the independence struggle and called them “fearless freedom fighters and priests.”

“The clergy make mistakes,” Conceicao admitted. “But we, the Timorese, must look at the mistakes they made and their contribution to the country, to the freedom of millions of people, which, of course, has a different value.”

Because of this widespread attitude, Barrett Doyle said that “the victims of these two men are some of the most isolated and least supported victims of clergy sex abuse in the world right now”.

So, she said, Francis’ visit to East Timor could become a landmark moment in his papacy if he condemns Daschbach and Bello by name and praises the victims’ courage, sending a message that resonates globally.

“Given the high status of the Catholic Church in East Timor, one can imagine the impact of the pope’s anger against Bello, Daschbach and the currently unknown number of other predatory clergy in the country,” she said.

“Francis could even address the country’s hidden victims, pledge support and urge them to contact him directly about the abuse they have suffered – he could literally save lives.”