Southeast Asia: Pope Ahead of Longest Foreign Trip of His Papacy

With his stop in Papua New Guinea, the pope is visiting a country in Oceania for the first time. He is the current head of the Church’s 45th overseas trip. In addition, Francis has completed some 30 pastoral trips to Italy and numerous pastoral visits in his diocese of Rome.

In all, Pope Francis has visited 64 countries around the world since 2013, including the next four. That’s despite the fact that his papacy, 2020 and pandemic restrictions, marked the first year without a papal trip since 1978. At least the planned trip to Belgium and Luxembourg remains on the papal travel itinerary through the end of the year. People in Francis’s native Argentina are still hoping for a visit soon, which would be his first since he was elected pope in 2013.

Preferably “peripheral states”.

The current visit to Southeast Asia is in line with the Pope’s ideas about his travel destinations. Shortly after the start of his papacy, Francis stressed in an interview that his preferred destinations were “peripheral” countries and those he wanted to help overcome existing conflicts or problems.

Pope Francis's first trip as pope was to Lampedusa in the summer of 2013. At the time, the Mediterranean island had become a symbol of the misery of refugees at the gates of Europe.

Nearly half of the trips abroad were to Europe. The targets here were not countries such as Germany, France and Spain. In the major European countries, with the exception of Poland, Francis visited only Strasbourg in Alsace to deliver two speeches to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe and the French city of Marseille on the Mediterranean. Instead, the papal plane landed in Tirana, Albania, or in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, or in Bosnia, North Macedonia and Malta.

Historical visits

The visits to the United Arab Emirates (2019) and Bahrain (2022) are historic. They were the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula. In early 2015, Francis traveled to the Philippines and celebrated Mass in Manila with an audience of between six and seven million people, according to official figures. It will be the largest Catholic service ever.

Francis made impressive peace gestures in the Holy Land in 2014, for example by praying at Israel’s separation barrier and symbolically embracing the three world religions at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. The following year, the pope reiterated his message of reconciliation to former enemy states Cuba and the United States. In 2019, he condemned any “use of nuclear energy for warlike purposes” in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Several times in Africa

The Pope has also visited the African continent several times. Francis has stopped in Kenya, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Mozambique, among other places, as well as in Egypt and Morocco.

While Argentina, the home of the first South American pope, still awaits Francis’s visit, there are four places in the world outside Rome and Italy where the pope has visited twice: In 2016 and again in 2021, Francis traveled to refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesbos, thus drawing global public attention to the plight of boat migrants in the Mediterranean.

The pope landed in Havana airport in 2016, a few months after his first visit to Cuba, to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. Francis visited Budapest in 2021 for the International Eucharistic Congress and in 2023 for a three-day pastoral visit. Francis was a guest at the Portuguese Marian shrine of Fatima in 2017 and 2023.