Homes Bulldozed In Timor-Leste Ahead Of Pope's Visit

A Southeast Asian nation has started demolishing homes ahead of a planned visit by Pope Francis, who's set to celebrate an outdoor mass for an estimated 700,000 people next month.

Officials in Timor-Leste, formerly East Timor, have told about 90 residents of Tasitolu, outside the capital of Dili, that they have to make way as the country prepares to host the pontiff, the BBC reported Friday.

Photos posted online by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. show a bulldozer reducing one house to a jumble of metal and rubble, and workers building a wall to hide the view of what the ABC described as a poor area of Tasitolu.

"I'm very sad," Ana Bela da Cruz told the ABC as her house was torn down. "They gave us such short notice, and now they've come in a destroyed our homes."

A government official told the BBC that the homes were built illegally by squatters who were told about the demolition plan a year ago.

"It is time for the state to take back its property," said Germano Santa Brites Dias, secretary of state for toponymy and urban organization. "Last year, we spoke heart-to-heart with the community, and now they must leave and go back to their villages."

A spokesperson for the residents said that 11 families would lose their homes before Francis' scheduled Sept. 9 arrival, and that they were being paid between $4,700 and $6,800 each.

"The amount is not enough for each household to meet its needs," Venancio Ximenes told the BBC. "The next phase of evictions will come after Pope Francis leaves and that will involve more than 1,300 families."

Resident Zerita Correia said her family's belongings were destroyed along with their house.

"Now we have to rent nearby because my children are still in school in this area," she said.

More than 97% of Timor-Leste's 1.3 million population is Catholic and more than 40% live in poverty, prompting some complaints about the $12 million being spent on the three-day papal visit.

That includes $1 million for a custom-built, Vatican-designed altar on a 57-acre site in Tasitolu.

Mariano Fereira, a researcher at the Timor-Leste Institute for Development Monitoring and Analysis, told the Union of Catholic Asian News website that the annual budget to increase local food production was only $4.7 million.

Fereira said the spending on the pope's visit would "hardly do any good to increase the sustainability of food production and development" of farming.

The pope's trip to Timor-Leste will mark the first papal visit since Pope John Paul II's in 1989, when the former Portuguese colony was still occupied by Indonesia.

It's part of an 11-day itinerary that also includes stops in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Singapore, according to the Catholic News Agency.