TASITOLU, East Timor (AP) — Popes are popular. So much so that nearly half the population of East Timor gathered Tuesday in a seaside park for Pope Francis’ final Mass in the small Southeast Asian country whose people are deeply Catholic.
Other papal Masses have drawn millions of people in more populous countries, such as the Philippines, Brazil and Poland. But the estimated crowd of 600,000 people in East Timor was believed to represent the biggest turnout for a papal event ever in terms of the proportion of the population.
East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, has been overwhelmingly Catholic ever since Portuguese explorers first arrived in the early 1500s and
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