Pope Francis will depart Singapore for Rome on Friday. From there he will make the difficult journey through Southeast Asia and Oceania to Rome. During his trip, he urged action on climate change, urged interreligious dialogue and strengthened the Catholic Church’s presence in a region where it is underrepresented.
The Singapore Airlines plane carrying the Catholic pope and his entourage will take off from Singapore at around 12:25 pm (0425GMT) and arrive in Rome on Friday evening after a 12-hour flight across six time zones.
Pope Francis visited Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore in 12 days. The 87-year-old pope, who has struggled with poor health in recent years, was in good shape throughout his trip, with a busy schedule and more than 40 events.
Highlights of the trip include a visit to a settlement of about 12,000 people on the edge of the jungle in Papua New Guinea , where the pope brought hundreds of kilograms of supplies for locals, including medicine, clothing and children’s toys.
The Pope also held a mass in East Timor , which was attended by about 600,000 people, roughly half of the country’s 1.3 million population. It was the largest mass held during the pope’s visit and the largest portion of the country’s population ever attended at one time.
Timor-Leste is 96% Catholic and is the only Catholic-majority country visited by the Pope.
Francis’ 12-day trip is the longest so far in his papacy and one of the longest in papal history. When Francis arrived in Rome, he had traveled nearly 33,000 kilometers (20,500 miles).
The Pope suffers from knee and back pain and used a wheelchair throughout the trip. He kept all his scheduled appointments.
In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, Francis issued a joint statement with the country’s imam calling for global climate action.
In Singapore, he urged the government of one of the world’s leading financial centers to ensure that the country’s more than one million low-paid foreign workers receive fair wages.
Francis has prioritized visits to places no pope has ever visited or where Catholics are in the minority. He is the second pope to visit three of the four countries on his itinerary.
In Papua New Guinea, Francis spoke about how he embraces the task of leading the global Catholic Church of 1.4 billion members and meeting Catholics around the world.
He addressed a group of young people and asked them to pray for him as usual. He then stressed the need for prayer, saying: “This work is not easy.”
