The Shepherd’s Journey

 

I remember September 5, 2024, the way you remember the day before something terrible happens—with perfect, crystalline clarity. The kind that only comes in hindsight, when you’re trying to pinpoint exactly when the world shifted on its axis.

For Catholics across Indonesia, it was the day the Pope came to town. Not just any Pope, mind you, but Francis himself, the man who’d been making waves since they put him in those white robes back in 2013. The way folks talked about it reminded me of how the people in some dusty Midwestern town used to whisper about the circus coming—a mixture of reverence and barely contained excitement that bordered on hysteria.

I come from Catholic stock. The kind that hangs crucifixes in every room and says grace before meals even when it’s just a goddamn TV dinner. So when the Holy Father announced he was bringing his road show to Jakarta, my phone lit up like the scoreboard at a Red Sox game. Text messages from cousins I hadn’t heard from since Aunt Marie’s funeral. Second cousins planning pilgrimages to the Gelora Bung Karno Stadium like it was the last chopper out of Saigon.

“You going?” my cousin Eddie asked. Eddie who hadn’t set foot in a church since his confirmation except for Christmas and Easter. Eddie who still crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

“Nah,” I told him. “Probably watch it on TV.”

That was my first mistake.

Social media became a goddamn shrine to the man. Friends posting videos of his motorcade like teenage girls at a rock concert. Some volunteered for the mass. Others joined the choir. My buddy Rahmat—a Muslim, for Christ’s sake—even got tickets.

“Just wanna see what all the fuss is about,” he said with a shrug that didn’t quite hide his curiosity. That’s how it is with truly powerful men. They draw you in regardless of whether you share their convictions.

I’m not what you’d call devout. My relationship with God is like my relationship with my old man—complicated, distant, but impossible to fully escape. Still, every Sunday for months, the priest had been asking us to pray for the Pope’s “apostolic journey” to our corner of the world. The way he said it—“apostolic journey”—made it sound like something out of the Bible, like Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus wandering the desert for forty days and forty nights.

The Pope’s trip was ambitious as hell, especially for a guy pushing ninety with a medical chart thicker than the Boston phone book. Four countries in ten days. More than 32,000 kilometers from the Vatican. The itinerary read like some kind of religious Amazing Race—Indonesia with the largest Muslim population in the world; Papua New Guinea with more languages than a UN conference; Catholic-heavy Timor Leste; and Singapore, where every religion under the sun seems to have staked a claim.

Vatican News called Indonesia “a model of tolerance and coexistence.” That’s the kind of shit people write when they’ve never had to live through the religious tensions that simmer just beneath the surface here, like the hot magma under Yellowstone that could blow at any moment.

This was only the third time a Pope had set foot on Indonesian soil. Paul VI came in 1970, and John Paul II in ‘89. Thirty-five years is a long time to wait for anything, especially if you believe the guy is God’s representative on Earth.

With 8.6 million Catholics in Indonesia and only 86,000 seats at the stadium, getting a ticket was about as likely as winning the Powerball while being struck by lightning. One percent odds. So I didn’t even try. Instead, I watched his arrival on a television set that had seen better days, nursing a lukewarm Bintang and wondering what it would be like to believe in something so completely.

The Pope touched down at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport at 11:19 AM, stepping off a commercial ITA Airways flight like any other traveler, except for the white cassock that seemed to glow unnaturally bright under the Indonesian sun. No private jet. No armored limousine. Just an old man in white climbing into a Toyota Kijang Innova Zenix—a car my neighbor Budi drives his five kids around in.

He refused the luxury hotel, too, opting instead for the Vatican Embassy. It’s that kind of simplicity that first drew me to him twelve years ago, when I was going through my rebellious phase—the kind where you question everything you’ve been taught and look for heroes in unlikely places.

Francis was different. A Jesuit. The first Latin American pope. The first non-European since the 8th century. A man who seemed to give more of a shit about poverty and inequality than about damning people to hell for using condoms.

I’d gone to a Jesuit school back in the day, where they hammered the 4Cs into our adolescent skulls—competence, conscience, compassion, and commitment. Francis embodied at least two of those, which is two more than most religious leaders I’ve encountered.

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires back in ‘36, he came from Italian immigrant stock—the kind of people who know what it’s like to be outsiders. When he became Pope, he skipped right past all the usual bullshit about abortion and gay marriage and went straight for the jugular of real problems—the environment, poverty, the yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots.

There’s a story about him during Argentina’s military dictatorship—hiding dissidents, helping them escape across borders while General Videla’s death squads combed the streets. The kind of bravery you read about but rarely witness.

Francis didn’t just talk the talk. He walked it in worn-out shoes. Called out hypocritical capitalists like a biblical prophet. Said if you’re screwing your workers, running shady businesses, or laundering cash, you might as well stop calling yourself Catholic and admit you’re an atheist. At least then you wouldn’t be a goddamn liar on top of everything else.

What really got me, though, was Gaza. Every night at 7 PM Vatican time, without fail, he’d call Father Gabriel Romanelli at the Holy Family Church—the only Catholic church in that hellhole. Started October 9, 2023, two days after the attack that lit the fuse on that powder keg. While world leaders were playing political chess, the Pope was checking on his people like a shepherd counting his flock.

On Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, he appeared at the Basilica Balcony after a long hospital stay. Looking frailer than ever, like a strong wind might blow him back to his Maker, he still had the strength to deliver the Urbi et Orbi message.

“I express my sympathy for the suffering of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the people of Israel and Palestine,” he said, his voice carrying across St. Peter’s Square like a whisper that somehow reached every ear. “I appeal to the warring parties: call for a ceasefire, release the hostages, and help the starving people who long for a peaceful future!”

His final speech to the world—because that’s what it turned out to be—was quintessential Francis. No fire and brimstone. No threats of eternal damnation. Just a plea for humanity, for freedom, for respect.

“There will be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and respect for others’ views,” he said.

Words to live by, I guess. Or words to die by. Either way, they stick with you like a splinter under your skin that you can’t quite dig out.

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d gotten off my ass and tried for one of those tickets to see him at the stadium. Whether being in the presence of such a man might have changed something in me. Made me believe again, maybe.

But that’s the thing about faith—it doesn’t announce itself with trumpets and fanfare. It creeps in through the cracks when you’re not looking, like a cat in the night or a shadow at dusk. And sometimes, just sometimes, it wears the face of an old man in white, riding in a Toyota through the streets of Jakarta, carrying the weight of the world’s hopes on shoulders too frail for the burden.