Pope ordains East Timor bishop

Pope ordains East Timor bishop

VATICAN CITY (AFP): Pope John Paul II ordained 12 bishops yesterday including a second bishop for Indonesia's province of East Timor.

Monsignor Basilio do Nascimento, former assistant to 1996 Nobel peace prize laureate Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, becomes the bishop of the newly created Baucau diocese in East Timor located east of the capital Dili.

Do Nascimento told the Lisbon daily Diario de Noticias that dialog is "the only way" to resolve the problems of the Catholic majority population in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony which integrated into Indonesia in 1976.

Dili remains the principal East Timor diocese, with 500,000 Catholics, while the Baucau diocese, created late last month by the Vatican, counts 200, 000.

The other new bishops ordained on Monday included five Italians, one Indian, one Togolese, one Polish, one Albanian, one Swiss and one Romanian.